First things first, apologies for this blog suddenly sounding like a tech blog.  But, Apple users like me are used to upgrades and the like being really simple.  This is true for the move to IOS 5 but only if you follow these steps and have the confidence to do so.  It will take a while (maybe more than two hours) but you will have time to do other things while you wait.  Also, this will be the last time you will need to tether your phone!

Unlike most upgrades, however, this one will actually wipe your phone so if you don’t want to lose your data make sure that you do the following:

1. Update your Mac Software by clicking on the Apple at the top of your screen then-software update.
2. Connect your computer to your iPhone and iTunes should open.  If asked to update your iOS say “NO” at first.
3. Right click on the iPhone in iTunes and click “Transfer purchases”
4. Click on Apps and make sure they are synced NOTE if you have done step 3 correctly many people more techie than I assure me that you will NOT lose data even if you are warned that you might.
5. Sync and back up your phone
6. NOW, tell it to update your iOS and follow the directions
7. When your iPhone boots with iOS 5 and has no music, photos or apps do not panic, your job is NOT done yet
8. Allow your iPhone to restore itself from the back up and resync your iPhone and then apps.  You can begin to use it during this process but should not unplug it.
9. Ensure that all your devices have been upgraded to Lion or iOS 5
10. Visit http://me.com/move and upgrade to iCloud
11. When your iPhone has finally finished synching its apps, photos and music, in iTunes on your computer adjust the settings there and tell it to “back up to iCloud”

One feature that could perhaps confuse precisely because it is so easy is the new messaging system.  Once you have signed in with your existing iTunes account, you will automatically begin using Apple’s new messaging system within your normal texting app when you can.  You can totally disable SMS but that is not the best idea. Instead, as and when your friends who have iPhones update to iOS 5, when you try and send them a text message, your iPhone will intelligently route that message via their new system.  No PINs to give out, no need to login, nothing.  If you allow read receipts when setting it up your friends will even be able to see when you have read their message.

For months, UK iTunes users have wondered if Apple’s new service which allows you to re-download your purchased music to any device you own would launch in the UK.  Well, I can tell you that I just downloaded the latest version of iTunes here in London and it has now added this service to my Mac.  It doesn’t work for films yet, and I hope it will at some point, but this is major news for anyone with a UK iTunes account.  Chances are you have bought stuff maybe even years ago and deleted it by accident.  This new service shows you all the files that you have paid for that are not on your computer.

Now, we are all just waiting for the release of IOS 5 later today which will, among other things, back up your entire iPhone or iPod through the internet.   No more loosing your photos and video if you loose your phone, for example.

It is sad that a true desire for excellence seems to be very rare today. We would do well to look at what we can learn from the most successful company of our era: Apple.  Here are some comparisons between the values Apple embodies, and those of  many companies today:

 

Be passionate	Be rational
Lead, don’t follow	Be cautious
Aim to surprise	Aim to satisfy
Be unreasonable	Be practical
Innovate incessantly	Innovate when necessary
Sweat the details	Get it mostly right
Think like an engineer and feel like an artist	Think like an engineer and feel like an accountant

The bottom line: Apple’s unique success is a product of its unique values–which are uniquely innovation-friendly and customer-centric. . . Imagine if Apple’s passions were the norm rather than the exception. What if the world’s leading insurance company or publisher or bank or airline or hotel chain was driven by these ideals? What if you encountered them every time you talked to someone at the Internal Revenue Service or had to apply for a building permit? OK, now I’m hallucinating. But I still can’t help but dream of a world in which Apple has become a lot less exceptional because its core values have become a lot less exceptional. Apple may have patented a lot of things, but it hasn’t patented the values that made it, for a time at least, the world’s most successful company. Apple is proof positive that innovation matters now!

via What Makes Apple Apple | Management Innovation eXchange.

I am very grateful to God for the numbers of you that faithfully keep coming back to this blog and reading. Till now, unless you are on Twitter there has been no easy way to allow you a voice. Now that Facebook have introduced a new commenting system, I have decided to trial this for a while and see how it goes. One thing I like about this system is that commentators are risking their online Facebook reputation by what they say, and as a result I trust will be wise in what they say. The anonymous comments that can bedevil other systems should hopefully be less of a problem! Anyway, I am a little nervous about this, but we will see how it goes, I can always pull the plug.

So, to make use of this first comments box, why don’t you take the opportunity to introduce yourself, say where in the world you are from, and what kind of church you attend if you do?

I plan on blogging about some of the tech tools that can help churches. To begin, I thought I would share this video from The City which is an interview with two pastors on how tech has helped them. It is a long flowing conversation, and should give you a good idea of how things like The City can help.

I am delighted to announce that we have launched a new version of our church’s website: http://jubileechurchlondon.org. The site will allow you easy access to video and audio sermons from our site, as well as video trailers about our church and some of our events. I hope you enjoy browsing it.

For the techie people among you it is a WordPress site (though some say it deoesn’t look much like it). It utilizes the fantastic Thesis theme, as well as Total Cache, a CDN, and the Meteor Slides plugin, which allows the slideshows to work on iPads. I am very proud of my wife’s design ability which lies behind the new look. I may be biased but I really feel she is developing into a skilled designer! I hope you will agree if you take a look.

We simply cannot afford to neglect the medium of the Internet as Christians.  It truly does represent a revolution in human communication as far-reaching as the book itself. The following article states that approximately a third of the worlds population will be online in just a couple of months:

By the end of 2010, 71% of the population in developed countries will be online, compared to only 21% of people in developing countries. Regionally, 65% of the population is online in Europe, 55% in the Americas, 21.9% in the Asia/Pacific regions, while a mere 9.6% of the population is online in Africa.

via Internet to Surpass 2 Billion Users This Year.

Just a quick note to say that one of our email accounts was hacked this morning. We are not in Spain and do not need help getting home! It seems that the password was too easy to guess. You might want to think about changing your own password right now as right now  someone else has all those personal emails that gmail kindly stores (and we don’t as they kindly deleted them!)   I do hope no one sent this crook any money!

Apple marketing, and Apple users like me, have a tendency to almost gloat that “it just works.” The vast majority of time that claim is true, to be honest. Owning an Apple product really does mean not having to worry about viruses or spy ware, not having to reinstall the operating system to speed it up again, and not worrying about drivers or programs being incompatible. It means eagerly installing upgrades to operating systems the day they come out. It really is a joy. Before today, I had almost forgotten how frustrating computers can sometimes be.

But, one thing that is not often admitted is that there are times when things don’t go quite so smoothly, even with Apple products. I think one reason we don’t talk much about this is quite simply what happens when things do go wrong. Apple customer care and technical support is of better quality even than their products. If I had to choose between giving up my Apple equipment and giving up my Apple support, I would struggle.

Take today, for example. I have been noticing a significant slow-down on my laptop recently, and wondered if it was due to the fact that somehow or other I had severely messed up my contacts list. Thanks to a not-so-smart decision to synchronize my address book with Google Contacts, years of neglect, and some chaos somehow caused, my computer was desperately trying to index and sync 20,000 contacts! Most of these were “No names” and/or duplicates.

I successfully pruned out all the rubbish (it took a while!) but then found that I simply couldn’t get the new data to synchronize properly with the Mobileme server. Stumped I turned to the website. After exhausting a couple of fantastically clear and helpful articles (Apple support articles are the best!) I was still stuck. So I called for help, in this case, an online chat support agent. My problem being somewhat messy, it took a while for us to fix it, but the guy was pleasant, knew what he was doing, and even chatted a bit with me while we were waiting for various tasks. End result? A very satisfied customer and a much more reasonable 249 contacts successfully syncing between all my Apple devices!

After that, all I had to do was set up my existing iPhone to give to my wife, putting it on a ridiculously cheap O2 “simplicity” tariff. This massive sacrifice is not as big as it sounds. I had decided to give it to her a few days before getting my own upgrade to the new iPhone 4.0. A wise move. She gets to enjoy the phone knowing that at least until I get hold of the latest gadget I will be using her old non-smart handset. And boy is it non-smart! I tried to figure out how to set up caller divert or access voicemail on it, and I can’t work out either. I will soldier on, as at least I can use it to answer calls, and hopefully Andree will become very attached to my old phone as HER iPhone pretty quickly. When the iPhone 5 comes out, we might even give that iPhone 3 to one of our children! If you are thinking of upgrading, don’t throw out your old iPhone, you have probably forgotten by now just how much of a joy it could be to someone still struggling with a Noikia or something. If you really can’t find a home for it, I do have five children, though most of them are too young for any mobile phone at all. In fact, come to think of it, don’t even throw out that old normal phone either, they can be recycled and what we take for granted or are bored with could be a lifeline to someone else.

In the video below (from Tim Challies on the Kindle vs iPad) you can see how both an Amazon Kindle and an iPad work as e-readers. What a lot of people don’t immediately realise is that the iPad can actually work as a Kindle, allowing you to use Apple’s swanky new device with any e-books you already own, or subsequently purchase from the Amazon store. Thus there are two bookstores on the iPad. Allow Tim to demonstrate:

Watch Kindle vs iPad on Vimeo

Watch on Vimeo (works on iPhone or iPad)

This video says it all. And as a direct result, I bought myself an iPad on a business trip to the Newark area this week!

I would like to invite you to take a survey to help me get to know you more and plan for the future. We are actually hoping to get a redesign up very shortly (possibly even this week), so this will give us a good baseline to look at what people think of the new site after they have had a chance to get used to it. So, please take just a few moments of your time and click here to take the survey.

If you are a Mac and Logos user, you might want to delay installing the Snow Leopard update of Mac Os X by hopefully just a few days or so. Apple’s publicity for this version of its operating system over the last few months can’t seem to decide whether to describe this almost as a minor update or as a whole new operating system. The truth seems to be that while there are not very many new features on this upgrade, the whole code has been rewritten [UPDATE: this is actually not correct, tho the system has been updated significantly to take advantage of 64bit processing]. PC users are used to being very anxious about installing upgrades. Mac users tend to be eager to do it ideally on the first day it is released. 7GB extra hard disk space and a faster leaner operating system with even better video handling and video iChat that will leave PC web chatting even further behind in the dust (full 640×480 video chat without stuttering over even quite a modest broadband speed is what we are being told!). A Mac is worth the purchase for its ability to video chat over the internet alone.

There has however been some reports from the developer community of incompatibilities between Logos Bible software and Snow Leopard. Some have spoken about books causing crashes, and of font problems.

A Logos spokesman said, “The release code for Snow Leopard isn’t available to anyone outside of Apple yet, so we have no way to test it to make sure Logos for Mac will work without incident. However, we have been testing it on beta builds, and it seems that there is one issue with the Charis SIL Italic font that will probably require a version 1.2.1 to fix. Before we fix it, we want to make sure that it’s still a problem in the release code–it is possible Apple may have changed the code that was causing ours to misbehave–and for that matter, that nothing else surfaces. Once we’ve been able to test it on the release version of Snow Leopard, we’ll get a new version out ASAP. The fix should be pretty simple, so we will probably be able to have the update out very shortly after release.”

I am shocked that Mac don’t let developers like Logos have access to the release code early. I would have thought that it would be a no-brainer to help prevent compatibility problems. It does make you wonder about any possible issues with other software, and there is a line on the Snow Leopard website that as part of the install process “Snow Leopard checks your applications to make sure they’re compatible and sets aside any programs known to be incompatible.”

So, speaking personally, you bet I have bought the family pack version of the upgrade and am eagerly awaiting that shiny disk and beautifully designed package. You bet I will be installing it on my wife’s machine immediately. But, I will wait just a little while before doing so on my logos machine. If you do decide to be brave and get access to the release code, sounds like Logos will be eager to receive any bug information. Visit the Logos Bible Software and Snow Leopard thread in their community forum and let them know.

Yes, you read that right! And it has nothing to do with me being a blogger (sometimes I think I should have become a tech blogger- imagine that free samples of the latest gadgets to review!)

I told you at the end of last week that I had a Macbook breakdown. Well, I simply took the laptop into the Apple Store, dropped it off, and the next day I had a phone call. The logic board had died, I was told, and because I had AppleCare and they had previously replaced my logicboard several times already (faulty batch I guess?) they offered to give me a free brand new Macbook Pro instead!

I will miss my blackbook, but the aluminium unibody beckons enticingly!

They even helped me to rescue the file I needed from the hard disk (I stupidly forgot to store it in the area that is automatically backed up to the web!) and when the new machine arrives at the store they will transfer all my data and applications across from the hard disk of my old computer for me.

There is no way on earth that any PC company would do this for me. AppleCare rocks!

I have said it before, and I will say it again. I do not miss my PC-owning days. I have to use a PC regularly for work, and my only regret about jumping ship for my personal stuff is that I sometimes get confused (especially with the latest PC version of Microsoft Office which has changed all the menus around for some obscure reason)

Please pray for me this week for last minute flashes of inspiration for my book as I do the final tweaks of what will be the last major edit of my book in the limited spare time I have. This is also a very busy day-job week for me, and with the children off extra grace is required!

This was posted on the Jubilee News/Blog site yesterday:

The embedded video teaches a simple lesson
The internet is a curse and also a blessing

The individual now has a voice;
No longer just the “big boys”

You can complain from your room;
and even bring others doom.

May the Christian never forget;
the internet is a huge asset,

Not to hurt innocent people,
But to propagate the gospel

Tope

Finally an event in online search that introduces something very different to google. But,the very impressiveness of today’s release, Wolfram Alpha is it is not trying to do what google already does.

Who needs a scientific calculator? You can throw yours away today and calculate any mathematical equation online for free. But that is just the beginning. Let’s suppose you don’t remember a formula. Say for example you wanted to know the area of a circle which was 6cm across. A simple English query and you have your result!

But there is more. Data can be recombined in simple ways and thus for example you can compare the UK and the USA or examine details of the USA birth rate or compare the birth rate per head of population of the USA vs India.

The battle lines continue to be clearly drawn despite the best efforts to be “charitable” to both sides by those who try to occupy the middle ground. In an outrageous newspaper article which only cites one Bible verse and even that out of context, Giles Fraser declares “What vicious God would demand Jesus sacrificed for our sins? We should ditch this view of Easter”

I am not surprised by the strong language used by the opponents of the view of the cross generally called “penal substitutionary atonement” but understood by millions of children simply as “Jesus died to be punished for our sin.” If millions of Christians are as wrong as Fraser believes then no wonder he would speak the way he does.

Fraser does not grapple with the issues of the seriousness of sin, of the hundreds of mentions of the wrath of God in Scripture, or of the just requirement that sin should be punished. In short the gospel is removed. As usual the alternative explanation of what happened on the cross is not at all clear. These vague descriptions attempt to remove the very offence of the cross which Paul describes as “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:18)

To be honest this Easter I am not angry at Fraser, nor am I angry with Steve Chalke (see my posts on the Atonement Debate). At least these people are clear about what they believe and understand. No, the people I am angry with this year are the ones in the Evangelical hierarchy who want to brush these debates to one side in the name of “unity.” There can be no real unity between those who believe that to declare Jesus was punished for us is “cosmic child abuse” and those who believe it is the most precious truth of the Bible. One side of this debate has to be wrong, and badly wrong. They cannot both be right; even N.T. Wright cannot perform such theological magic! The minute anyone tries to make this truth a debatable matter over which evangelicals can legitimately disagree is the moment they lose the right to call themselves evangelical at all in my opinion.

One of the joys of last weeks New Word Alive event was that this debate was totally unnecessary there. The main thing that held the speakers together was that they all believed this was the essential center of the gospel. You can read more about this in my Atonement series.

Where do YOU stand?

EOS 5D Mark II Testing Rode Videomic and iMovie from Adrian Warnock on Vimeo.

This is just my third piece of video. For some reason I cant seem to get it to autofocus, and I also cant seem to get it to “freeze” the settings using the star button. So because of that I havent got both of them quite in focus.

But none of that was the real point of the video. I wanted to compare the on board mic and the Rode Mono Videomic. This required stitching the two videos together. I noticed that iMovie hung when trying to import the video from the card, so I used Quicktime player pro to downgrade the two clips to the Vimeo upload resolution (NOT the lower res that iMovie offers as an option). I then imported the clips into iMovie, strung them together, and because my lovely wife hasn’t yet taught me how to do a proper white balance using an “expodisk” I also tried a bit of color correction in iMovie. So, now you know it really does work with iMovie on a Macbook (not pro) provided you downgrade the video first. I have a theory that I may test next time which is that if you transfer the files onto the hard disk manually iMovie may find it easier to cope with them. They are BIG files of course. But compressed to vimeo HD (which is still very nice looking) the files are much more manageable.

2nd EOS 5D Mark II Test Video – George Sleeping from Adrian Warnock on Vimeo.

Well, we figured out how to use a tripod! We also set it onto the green square automatic setting and used a manual focus, honing in on the baby’s eyes before filming. I quite like this effect. But we are of course still learning and this is only the second clip we took.

1st Canon EOS 5D Mark II Video from Adrian Warnock on Vimeo.

This is shot straight out of the box. We just switched it on, took some photos, then enabled the video mode and pressed the button in the middle of the familiar control wheel and this was the result. The video has to have its resolution decreased before uploading, and we used quicktime player pro for this. There is much more we can do better, but this was a lot of fun.