“The miracle of birth” is all very well; but it’s just biology. Given enough years, evolution can come up with just about anything; apart from the telephone.
It must have been sometime in my youth when I was amazed by the fact that my mother could talk for hours to her friends via a bakelite device which was joined to the wall by a couple of wires. It was the wires in the wall that really got to me, even more than my mother’s ability to talk endlessly; and I am still astonished that a bit of crappy wire is all you need to connect to the outside world. Of course, nowadays, that same bit of wire will connect you into the wide wide world of web and, apart from making phones calls, you can browse stuff, and download illegal music, movies and hard core porn (not that I do, it’s just an example).
The sense of techno-wonder has not left me and I have spent much of my life being enthralled by gadgets, and indeed my home is a shrine to many mini-wonders which have been acquired, played with, and later discarded or broken, or both.
One gadget that had never really interested me was the mobile phone. Where were the wires for God’s sake? Transmitting conversations through the air somehow seemed less clever than ramming them through a length of wire. Eventually I succumbed and purchased a mobile phone, mainly so I could call for help if I found myself dying in a Bangkok traffic jam, but it was a basic model and the last one I owned had been in my possession for five years. But then my gadget world changed last birthday when my wife handed me a small box in which nestled an iPhone.
You can stick your Nokias where the sun don’t shine, the iPhone is a work of design genius. But the business model for selling them may be less so from a consumer standpoint, especially when it means you can’t buy them officially in Thailand. But that didn’t stop the enterprising Thais. Within weeks of release, iPhones were flooding into the country, being hacked so they would work with local service providers, and being sold at a handsome premium.
Apart from being a phone, which is of little interest to me because I don’t like talking to people and have no friends, the iPhone plugs into my car stereo and provides me with music on the move. I transfer downloaded movies and UK TV programs onto it and watch them when I am stuck somewhere with no entertainment (in the middle of a supermarket pushing a trolley, for example). And, free from the need to find a wifi point, I can check my mails and browse the web anywhere there is a phone signal, and at speeds that beat many of the wireless services available in Thailand. As someone who needs to be constantly entertained, even when entertainment is not normally available (see supermarket reference above), the iPhone has been a boon.
An advantage of having a hacked iPhone is that you are free to add the hundreds of add-on programs that have been developed for it. This week I discovered one which, although essentially useless, re-awakened my techno-wonder for a while. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Tune Wiki.
Add this little program to your iPhone or Touch and, when you play your music, it will go somewhere and find the lyrics, and display them to you in sync with the music. Want to sing along to the likes of R.E.M.. but have no idea what Mr. Stipe is on about? Just sing along using Tune Wiki.
In the above case I am deciphering Radiohead, and from the photo, realising that my iPhone needs a clean.
OK, it may not do much, but how the hell does it sync it time with the music? And of course, if you are accessing their servers to get to the lyrics, they can locate you on a map and allow other people to view who is listening to what, and where, at any moment in time. Which means I can call in an airstrike on the the idiot in Bangkok who is destroying his/her ears by listening to James Blunt.
