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For many years I have suffered at the hands of the standard UK power plug. Bulky and unweildy, it makes a mockery of any attempt to travel light. I have yet to find a notebook case that copes well with the size and shape of it. As laptops become slimmer its design failings only become more obvious. Enter the 'folding plug'; an ingenious space saving concept that us Brits can only hope becomes reality.

Following the end of O2's exclusivity deal with Apple for UK distribution of the iPhone, the company has begun to offer an unlocking service to customers. 

• Customers tied into pay monthly contracts with O2 can unlock at any time free of charge. However, they are still obliged to continue paying the monthly tariff until their contract expires.
• Customers with pay-as-you-go accounts are able to get their iPhones unlocked after owning the phone for 12 months and upon payment of a GBP £15 unlocking fee. 

The unlocking procedure is said to take up to a fortnight. Confirmation that unlock has been successful is sent to the customers phone by SMS message. 

MakeUseOf.com has published 15 free e-books on the following subjects...

• Twitter: Best Practices & Tips
• A Computer Geek’s Smart Productivity Guide
• Building a Media Center for your Home
• The Big Book of BitTorrent
• A Newbie’s Getting Started Guide to Linux
• The Only Easy Guide To Computer Networks
• Internet Guide for the Movie Addict
• Internet Guidebook for An Audiophile
• The Incredible Free Manual for Every Mac User
• The Underground Guide to the iPhone
• The Ultimate Guide to your Windows Mobile Phone
• The Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop
• The Big Book of iTunes
• The Idiot’s Guide to Building Your Own PC
• Laptop Buying Guide for 2009
• PSP Up- and Downgrading Guide

Enjoy!

(via makeuseof.com)

A while ago I wrote about 'Multiclutch', an add-on that allowed users to customise and add to the built in multitouch gestures on Apple notebooks. But there were a few limitations. Firstly, it only worked within Cocoa apps. This ruled out commonly used software like iTunes and Photoshop. Secondly, Multiclutch relied on 'input managers' to work its magic. Apple took a disliking to input managers when developing Snow Leopard and locked them out of 64 bit apps (which kills off support for input managers within nearly all applications shipping with 10.6).

Stepping into the gap is a application called Jitouch. Taking a slightly different approach, Jitouch adds a number of new gestures but doesn't allow customisation of existing ones. Its icon sits in the menu bar rather than the dock, allowing for the program to be activated/deactivated and for access to its preference pane. It currently supports seven new gestures of varying complexity.

I have been running the app on my MacBook Pro for the last week or so. Several of the gestures have become second nature (particularly those used to control tabs within the browser). The others I am finding less useful mainly because I find them particularly tricky to pull off. All are demonstrated on the Jitouch page. More gestures are promised in the future. Indeed the Jitouch web site already details a new gesture used to navigate multiple spaces that will be available as part of the next point release.

Lefties take note. Make sure you opt for left handed gestures using the apps preference pane. Not doing so can cause unexpected results!

Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts on Jitouch. I am particularly interested to hear whether others also struggle pulling off some of the gestures.