The Magazineer - For people who make, and love, magazines.

The Magazineer is a blog about magazine design and print culture, written by people who love, and make, magazines.

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry Wired in a surprisingly detailed overview of the iPhone development.

To ensure the iPhone's tiny antenna could do its job effectively, Apple spent millions buying and assembling special robot-equipped testing rooms. To make sure the iPhone didn't generate too much radiation, Apple built models of human heads — complete with goo to simulate brain density — and measured the effects. To predict the iPhone's performance on a network, Apple engineers bought nearly a dozen server-sized radio-frequency simulators for millions of dollars apiece. Even Apple's experience designing screens for iPods didn't help the company design the iPhone screen, as Jobs discovered while toting a prototype in his pocket: To minimize scratching, the touchscreen needed to be made of glass, not hard plastic like on the iPod. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.

It's this level of dedication that sets Apple apart – now if only they officially released it here in Australia...

Warner Bros. Picks Blu-Ray Over HD-DVD The final nail in the coffin for HD-DVD? See also HD DVD group cancels CES press conference in wake of Warner announcement for a running commentary at the CES conference…

An Apple TV With a Blu-ray Player? NY Times speculates on the release of a new Apple TV with Blu-ray.

Imagine, however, if Apple introduced this product, say for $399: It plays Blu-ray disks. It lets you buy or rent movies and TV programs from the Internet. It automatically downloads and plays free video (and audio) podcasts. And it brings your iTunes music collection to your living room.

I have been considering buying a PS3 for a while now, but as I'm not really into gaming, this might be a strong contender if the price is right (yes, even if I've already forked out the cash for the "first" AppleTV)...

So, here's another new year ushered in and the only resolution is to get myself playing online more. By playing I mean finally updating and getting more serious in regards to this blog (it's been on a 2 year hiatus!) and furthering my interest in photography which again, I haven't really dabbled with in the last few years. So here 'tis — this will be my playground from here on in…

I've also just changed my blogging software from WordPress to Habari (site), mainly for a change, a bit of challenge, and also I had no vested interest / knowledge of the workings of WordPress, so if starting something from scratch, I thought I'd give another platform a go. So far, pretty good. Not even a "1.0" release yet (I'm running 0.4-alpha), but will be interesting to see how it progresses. I recognised a few names on the development team and it sounds like they've got some good ideas for future (and current) development so will be monitoring with interest. Importing from WordPress was simple enough once I'd made the decision to actually move it across.

And as for the photography, I've got thousands of images from previous years including some great photos of my travels through Europe and beyond, but I'll be starting my Flickr account from 2008. If I can be motivated enough and it's easy enough, I may put up a select few, but essentially, it all starts now…

If you live in Melbourne (or New Zealand) and you have a "thing" for magazines as I do, then if you haven't already, you really should go spend a while in Mag Nation (site). I try and browse there once a month or so and end up coming out with a dent in my bank balance and free coffee cards (spend a certain amount equates to free coffees)... they cover just about everything, and if they don't, they'll find it for you.

When they describe the company on their website with the following…

Our mission is to ensure that not a single person in the developed world will ever think of doing number twos without taking a magazine with them.

All the girls who work at mag nation are gorgeous. All the boys have big schlongs.

…you knw you're going to be well looked after. They won’t get cranky when you browse for hours reading their magazines, and cause they're so kind, they offer free wi-fi in the store. No wonder they won the Australian Retailers Association's "Most Innovative Retailer for 2007"!

Here’s a custom PHP function I find I'm using over and over again, so I thought I'd put it here for future prosperity. I use it at work to help monitor broken links across our range of sites — the beauty is, if it can, it’ll tell you where the broken link came from (either internally or from an external site).

function error404() {
  $time = date("D M j Y, H:i:s"); // Tues Jan 25 2005, 16:25:36
  $message = stripslashes(
    "REQUESTED: http://".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].
    "REFERRED FROM: ".$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'].
    "USER AGENT: ".$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'].
    "VIA: ".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']." / ".gethostbyaddr($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']).
    "ON: ".$time);
  $to = "webmaster@disegno.com.au";
  $subject = "Error (404) from ".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];

  mail($to,$subject,$message);
}

To use, just create your custom 404 page as you would normally, then add the following somewhere on the page (I use the header) to call the function:

  <?php error404() ?>

Now you'll be notified whenever there are broken links on your site, and you'll be able to see where they're coming from.