You will no doubt notice a slightly new site design. The top banner is courtesy of R-Fly who has also made a promotional banner and various other things. If you would like to link to me and would like to swap promotional banners please mail me. Over the coming weeks more and more subtle changes will be made to improve the general appearance of the site.  Read the rest of this entry →

Recently I posted about the installation of applications rendering the iPhone a brick. I thought the interim solution was probably found in that post until today when I had downloaded the “Movies” app from the app store. I was installing via iTunes sync when the phone just went into what looked like a reboot to confront me with that well known screen:

So, yet another reset required. This time I will not be installing any applications until at least version 2.02 of the software which we hope is due in September.

It appears I am not the only one having to carry out multiple resets! R-Fly from Razorian Fly has commented:

it’s not just you - I’m counting - 15 restores since July 12th.

Let’s hope Apple does address this issue in the next update.

I know, the title is a little strange but it’s a play on a rather lame article about a guy, called Guy and his iPhone posted on TUAW. Yesterday I submitted the news about the iMac and Macbook Pro not waking from sleep to them, needless to say I think they are not interested. I had a brief scout through their site and I can see why they didn’t like it, it was real and slightly serious news!

So I read the ‘Guy‘ article and decided to see just how great Guy is with his iPhone, and found out he is really rather below par. So Guy, TUAW, here is my iPhone usage page. 3G is on 100% of the time, WiFi has been on but is normally disabled, GPS has been on but is usually disabled, PUSH on for Mobile Me calendars, contacts and bookmarks. I have the other two mail accounts set to check every 15 minutes and have over 15 apps installed, mainly games. The usage you see is mainly through games and Omnifocus usage.

So it would appear I beat Guy by 11hrs standby time, 34 minutes usage time and 15mins call time and still actually having the functionally my phone was shipped with!

Note: This screen shot was taken with 10% still left in the battery, I will update with the final figures at battery death.

No doubt most people that land on this page are here because they are suffering the same issue, well I thought I would share my letter to Steve with you about it (dated 26/08/08). I will update this post or create new ones to let you know what happens, if you too are suffering from this issue please leave a comment as I will be referring Apple to this post when the time comes.  

Steve,

First, I hope your well.

I am having a consistent issue with my girlfriends iMac that is frankly getting beyond a joke. Her iMac is the first of the 24″ aluminium iMacs, it was bought on launch day. It started off fine but rapidly the issue appeared, if put to sleep for an extended amount of time (ie overnight) the machine will not wake from sleep. This carried on for a few weeks before i submitted a bug via the developer connection bug reporter with my ADC account. The engineers requested I send them the logs, which i did, they didn’t show anything. No sleep or wake event was in the logs when this issue occurred. They then asked me to SSH into the iMac via my laptop set up several lines of terminal commands sleep the iMac and then wake it up taking a snapshot of any data. Nothing happened, when this issue occurs there appears to be no bus power, the keyboard is rendered useless so how would the firewire port be any better!?

I tried in vain for weeks to get this to work and nothing, in the end I had to tell them that I couldn’t get it to work and the bug was closed! Despite the issue not being resolved! Anyway, I tried all matter of things, PRAM and SMC resets, changing the sleep modes, clean installs…. the list goes on…… making her follow procedures of ‘unplug this’ and ‘do it in this order before sleeping it’. Not surprisingly that was all to much for her. She isn’t tech savvy, she switched from windows and got a mac because she wanted it to ‘Just Work’. However the few days where she had followed my advice at this point seemed to pay off. It was waking from sleep again! This lasted a month or so before it started again.

Just 2 weeks ago I was staying at hers watching TV with EyeTV on her mac and boom, the machine powered off and rebooted. There was no proper shutdown procedure it just clicked off and rebooted. It did this twice in as many hours before we shut it down for the night. The next morning she was using it whilst i was out at University and the machine died, this time it would not power on. Upon hearing this i presumed the logic board had died. I booked us and appointment at the local genius bar and in we went. It was accepted straight away for repair no problem and out 7 days later with a new logic board and a new 24″ screen!! (The screen was fine before). In total, off the top of my head) I think the repairs came to £750-850! That’s fine as you picked up the tab thanks to the 3 year warranty.

The first time the repaired machine was put to sleep it wouldn’t wake from sleep again! So here we are now with me writing this email. I am writing you this email before I waste my time and money getting this machine to a genius bar to be told they won’t accept the machine as nothing shows as an issue in the logs, and i’ll be honest, despite the fact it happens every single time I know they will turn around and say it cannot be reproduced! You only have to look at the iMac and Macbook Pro discussion forums to see this, hundreds of people are suffering from this issue Steve, and I saw loads of them in the Apple store being told to go away (in a polite way) when they told the genius their macbook pro or iMac is not waking from sleep. The genius looked in the logs and said ‘there is no events in there there is nothing wrong’!! That is so not true! This issue does not for some reason show up as a sleep wake event or as anything else in the logs! My Macbook Pro has this issue! There is nothing in the logs, and funnily enough I saw most of these people when I was at the genius bar trying to convince the genius to give me a new battery since mine was clearly faulty, I had to sit there for 2.5hrs whilst my battery ran down to 30% full and powered off in front of him and then let him test it in another machine before he would believe me! Anyway, I digress….

I am writing to you because I want this issue resolved. I want my girlfriends iMac to work as it should, she paid enough for it and she is wanting to buy one of your notebooks and an iPhone, though is hanging fire on the notebook due to this issue. It costs us a lot of time and money to take the mac into one of your stores Steve (its not easy to carry either), I appreciate that these things happen, its the nature of technology. However, this machine was already meant to be fixed once, its clearly not the case, it has the same issue (though not dead yet!) and we can’t keep expending time and money going round in circles either being told the problem doesn’t exist, it can’t be reproduced or getting replacement parts after replacement parts and having to keep taking it in. I’ve seen the attitude of the geniuses in our local store and I know this is how it is going to pan out.

I’d appreciate a response from you or one of your staff regarding this issue. Given the contact i have with macs both with the machines themselves and the number of others i know that have contact with them I think this is a fairly serious widespread issue. I am tending towards faulty SMC’s but I can’t be sure and I don’t want to play a guessing game. The best outcome for us would be a direct instruction from above for the apple store to carry out a thorough (not an ‘it doesn’t exist’ or ‘it can’t be reproduced’) investigation and a replacement of the relevant parts (Probably logic board and PSU) OR a better solution is a complete replacement machine and you take this one and send it to your engineering department so they can play with it to their hearts content to find the issue and try and find a fix for the hundreds or thousands of others that have it. The later option would also cost you less as replacement of all the parts again is going to cost almost the same as a replacement machine!

Regardless, I want to work with you on this one to get a resolution for us, but also maybe to help you find out what is causing it. What i don’t want is to be fobbed off by Apple geniuses and have to commute with the machine backwards and forwards multiple times. It costs us over £30 per trip so you can understand why having just had it repaired we are not thrilled at the prospect of another round trip to the Apple store!

Kind Regards,

There have been numerous reports on Apple’s discussion forums of users iPhones becoming bricks whilst installing an app on their iPhones, 3G or not. I ran into this issue last night. I was installing an app and the phone started hanging, stuttering on music and then all of a sudden, boom, it went black and the Apple logo appeared. No amount of hard resets or hours waiting would resolve this issue. First of all I want to give you all the solution to fix this, as I was all set to visit the Apple store. Essentially you need to enter the phone into Recovery Mode.

1. Unplug iPhone from the computer (by taking the sync cable out of the computer but keeping the cable connected to your phone) and turn it off. If stuck at reboot screen hold home & power together until it is shut down.
2. Hold down the Home button and plug the USB cable back into the computer
3. iTunes will see an iPhone in recovery mode and allow you to restore it.

Now to the probable cause of this issue, every time apps update they don’t replace the existing file but they get added sequentially to it. In essence I believe these are filling up the phones memory and causing crashing. You can check it out for yourself! Go to:

1. Music
2. iTunes
3. Mobile Applications

You will notice your apps there and if you have updated you will no doubt see sequential numbering (1, 2, 3…..) after the file name. To correct this your going to need to delete the duplicates keeping the file with the highest file number as this should be the latest version. If you have (iPhoneapp 2.ipa) left over after deleting (iPhoneapp.ipa) and (iPhoneapp 1.ipa) then you need to rename it to (iPhoneapp.ipa). Now for the next step you can either restore the phone and start again if you have had the issue OR you can connect the phone, cancel the sync, then in sync settings uncheck all the apps which means iTunes will remove the apps and it’s duplicates from your phone. You can then reselect them and it will sync the single files from your computer to the phone. There have been numerous reports of this method giving real results for iPhone stability. 
EDIT: There has been some discussion regarding the contents of this post. It has been noted, as i already knew, that updates do not seem to take up more room on the phone. Whilst this is the case the above solution certainly does work, whether it’s an iTunes bug which is invoked by the multiple file copies screwing the sync up or maybe there is a sync xml file on the phone that is buggy (I don’t know I am not a software engineer). Regardless there appears to be an issue for many people when they have many apps installed or few apps with many revisions and at the moment this solution appears to be the only workable one in the interim of Apple acknowledging it and fixing it.
Some Credit due to B1indSide from the Apple Discussion forums

I decided to write this post due to a rather large issue I have just had with Orbicule’s Undercover software after I had an iMac go in for repair recently. The iMac died suddenly and was to have it’s logic board replaced. Upon collection of the Mac at the Apple store the genius powered the unit on. We logged into the account and boom

HELP HELP, I AM A STOLEN MAC   

cried the iMac!! It appears that the logic board replacement had tricked the software into thinking it hadn’t been online for 2 months and the software automatically switches to plan B according to the software’s developer. According to the message on the iMac screen connecting the unit to the internet and completing a reboot would resolve the issue. But if your net connection is supplied dependent on your mac address how do you plan on connecting to the net after a logic board replacement!? The machine has a new mac address and there is no way of accessing it as the orbicule software essentially locks up the mac.  In fact it also will proceed to dim your screen to make the “thief” take it in for repair or try to sell it on. Maybe a reason why Apple replaced the 24″ screen which had nothing wrong with it for £382!!Anyway I detract, the way to get round this issue if your unable to connect to the internet is as follows: 

1. Restart the Mac and hold down the Command + s keys in order to boot into single user mode.
2. Once booted enter the following command (Don’t type it wrong and get the spaces right this is critical) /sbin/mount -uw /
3. This command mounts your hard drive
4. Now enter rm /Library/Launchdaemons/com.orbicule.uc.plist to remove orbicule
5. There should be no message in return, if you see one you have typed something wrong. Repeat again if you get a message.
6. You should also carry out the following command rm /Library/Preferences/connected.plist
7. Type exit to reboot your mac.

The above list will have now uninstalled Undercover so you must reinstall it by downloading it and installing it from the Orbicule website. Though, thankfully, there should be much relief after following these steps as your Mac should now be usable! 

Oh and on a final note, to all of us that use Undercover. Don’t for one second think that if your Mac is stolen and it does end up at Apple for repair that they will call Orbicule to verify. Despite reporting to them it was a stolen mac and asking them to call a recovery line they just didn’t bother and didn’t even ask for ID on collection to verify that we were the machine owners compared to our registration in their database…. well done Apple! 

Whilst I use iCal on my Mac desktop and Me.com to view it online, no one can disagree that Google calendars whips the ass of Me.coms calendar hands down on functions and sharing abilities. So I needed a way in which to sync my iCal to Google cal…..Enter Spanning Sync, not only does it sync all my iCal calendars faultlessly but now it even sync’s my address book contacts to my Google address book as well! How much I hear you cry! $25 per year or $65 for a lifetime license. However, at this time I can offer you $5 off either of these prices with the following link:Click here to save $5 on Spanning Sync!
I hope it is as useful for you as it has been for me, it certainly does a better job than Apple’s sucky latest attempt at trying to integrate the function into iCal and Address book in the 10.5.4 upgrade. 

I haven’t posted for a while but thought I would post a ‘How-To’ on how to increase your browsing speed when using Firefox thanks to ‘Pipelining‘. An HTTP pipelining enabled web browser uses server keepalive signals to create an open socket so that it can receive an uninterrupted stream of packets. Without pipelining, the browser must communicate back and forth with the server to determine whether the last item was received successfully and uses more TCP packets to do so.

To enable pipelining in Firefox is easy:

1. Type ‘about:config’ in the URL bar
2. In the search box type ‘pip’,  ‘network.http.pipelining’ should appear in the list.
3. Hold shift and click on it until it’s value reads ‘true’

Job done! Enjoy the increased speed

I found myself in a particularly nasty place yesterday. I had followed advice given to me by an Apple engineer and either what they told me to enter in terminal was wrong, OR, I mistyped. Either way the result was a iMac that would not boot and gave a kernel panic at every grey boot screen. I tried resetting the PRAM/NVRAM via command-option-P-R, I tried booting from single user mode, booting to safe mode and booting from the DVD to bypass the HDD. None of these worked and all resulted in the kernel panic.

So i call Apple care and the guy there was fantastic and he determines a fried logic board and happily gives me a case number to have it repaired under warranty. Now I have been a Mac user for long enough to know that you don’t (Most of the time) go from working fine to rebooting and having a fried logic board. So I racked my brain and spent hours on Google and I am happy to say I fixed it, and I will share with you what the issue was and how I fixed it in the hope it may help many others in the future.

Now for reasons I won’t delve into I have an EFI Firmware password set on my Mac. I presume if your reading this article your the same. The EFI firmware password essentially stops you doing any of the important key combinations at boot, resetting PRAM/NVRAM, single user mode the whole shebang.  Now this is useful in many many circumstances except when your screwed like I was. Essentially when I thought I was resetting my PRAM and NVRAM I was doing absolutely nothing. If your as screwed as I was and cannot get to a DVD to boot OR you have forgotten your password there is only one way around it.

1. Add or remove a stick of ram. Obviously if you have one stick in, add one and if you have two in remove one.
2. Power on the mac and immediately press and hold command-option-P-R.
3. The system will restart with the ‘bong noise’, allow it to do this 3 times. On the third ‘bong’ you can let go of the keys.
4. The machine will now boot with a cleared password and reset PRAM/NVRAM.
5. You can shut down the machine and replace the original ram configuration.

I hope this helps anyone that was in as much hot water as me! Good luck

Now that it is the new tax year here in the UK, we receive our interest on our cash ISA’s. The Egg Cash ISA is advertised at 6.05% variable. One thing I really missed when I signed up for it was the term ‘variable’. The two things that made me sign up for it was the 6.05% advertised interest and the guarantee to beat the Bank of England base rate for a year. The latter made me instantly think that it would provide me with a decent return, I know better now!

Whilst Egg have not done anything wrong, the point of this article is to be very careful when you sign up for these things and make sure you investigate the interest clearly. Instead of the £181.50 I thought I would get in return (6.05%) I in fact got £126.29 which equates to a 4.21% return. £55.21 less than I thought! You must also remember that if you pay in installments you also won’t see the return you expect, maybe self explanatory but it’s easy to forget in the heat of the moment.

Moral of this story is take your time and read and do calculations, don’t hurry to sign up like I did as for such a small amount of money it can cost you fairly dearly.