Friday, October 16, 2009
Firefox is in the ICU
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
The "iTwinge" iPhone keyboard - explained
A Real Keyboard for the iPhone? - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com
... The keyboard will sell for $30 with $5 shipping to the United States. There are prototypes in beta test now that have rubber keyboards. The final version will be made of hard plastic, said Mr. Nykoluk.I noted it back then in my Google Reader stream. I though it was at best a trick, at worst a scam. There's no iPhone OS support for an external keyboard.
The keyboard is available for pre-order and should become available around November, said Mr. Nykoluk...
Thursday, October 08, 2009
SyncWiz for Outlook Review - how not to do trial software
SyncWiz
... With SyncWiz convert selected or all of your items to vCard, iCard, iCalendar (iCal), or vCalendar file format. This file is so portable and compressible, that you can easily send the whole folder to anyone (4000 contacts in a zipped Vcard file is less than 100Kb)...After installation I tried the VCF export. SyncWiz told me I had more than 5 contacts, so it quit. It didn't export five then stop, it just quit.
MindManager: nasty bug with task roll-up
Mindjet’s MindManager is an exotic organizational/planning mind map app for XP and, to some extent, for OS X. Definitely for corporate use -- it’s expensive, proprietary file format, completely data locked (no data freedom here!) but very pretty.
Pretty matters in the corporate world.
I use it a lot, and today I ran into a nasty bug. I assigned a set of items task/hour info, then used the “roll up” feature to summarize them at a root concept.
The rollup displayed days instead of hours. That’s ok, but MM rounded up the task hours on every item to days – and the act is not reversible.
I lost all my item-specific task data.
I don’t think this always happens – it’s too obvious a bug. I do have a very large and complex map.
Still – be warned. If you’ve found this post because you ran into the bug please leave a comment. If I get a few I’ll rouse myself to file a bug report with MM (though I’m not sure they take bug reports).
Silver Apple of Death: iPhone hangs on startup
My iPhone 3G showed a cheery silver Apple icon this morning.
The same Apple icon it showed last night when I did a routine (hygienic) shutdown and restart. The phone was stuck on startup.
I rebooted and, after rather a long time, it restarted. I then tried running iSystemInfo, which crashed immediately.
A great way to start the day. I didn’t have time to mess around, so I mounted the phone in iTunes. There was 1.85GB free of 16GB, but I deleted a movie anyway to free up even extra space. I then did a shutdown/restart and iSystemInfo ran normally.
I’ve seen similar behavior in the past when OS X desktop runs out of swap file space. I’ve also seen some curious messages lately from Byline, complaining of a lack of memory.
It smells like a software/hardware problem – maybe something wrong with the file system or to the physical storage media.
I didn’t find much searching on “iPhone hangs startup”, but I eventually found the key search phrase “Silver Apple of Death” (SAD) or Apple Logo of Death (ALoDs) or White Apple Logo of Death (WALD) [1]
For example (I’ve rewritten the original post) [3]:
You must restore your iPhone with iTunes ….
Reset it by holding home button until your phone is shut off.
Hold the Home button while you connect your iPhone to a computer running iTunes. Wait until your phone shows the connect USB to computer screen, then release the home button.
Choose restore as a new phone.
Search for restore mode for more details, this is a well know problem and have already been complained thousands times…
I’ve come across several explanations, including problems with “Springboard” on complex iPhones. I suspect there are multiple causes, and the Springboard bug may have been fixed in 3.0. In my case I’m hoping it’s a file system corruption problem or the solid state equivalent of “bad sectors”.
My phone is working for now, but I’ll put some time on my calendar to do a restore [2].
[1] We need some acronym consensus! Note these are of a family: BSOD – Blue Screen of Death (Windows), SPOD – Spinning Pizza of Death (OS X) and SBOD (Spinning Beachball of Death) (OS X – alt). Tradition favors a four letter acronym, all upper case. I’d say WALD or SALD.
[2] If the restore doesn’t work I might try a “wipe” – forcing the OS to write to all sectors and perhaps mark some as unusable.
[3] This is from Apple discussions. There are fewer of these than one would expect. That’s what you see when Apple is deleting posts. Just saying …
Update: If you search on the words in the various names of this syndrome one finds better posts, such as this one and this one. Most do very well with the restore mode, but in some cases the problem recurs and the phone has to be replaced. Looks like a combination of hardware and software. I’ve read recently that RAM and other memory defects are much more common than once thought, I suspect that in older phones this may be due to emerging memory hardware issues. Even then a restore might help, especially if the issue is bad storage that the OS can work around.
Update b: When got home I synced the phone. I ended up doing a wipe first (from iPhone:Settings:Reset). That took about 90 minutes. I then plugged it into iTunes and I was invited to restore from my last backup. After the initial restore you get to restore Applications and Music. With past restores I've had quite a bit of cleanup and credentials re-entry, but this one worked perfectly. Nice improvement, even though a complete restore takes hours.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Web filters - return to OpenDNS
Sunday, October 04, 2009
My standard iPhone configuration
- Check version (lately has been 3.1)
- Turn off auto-ask WiFi
- Picture of business card as wallpaper (so phone can be returned if found)
- Google-phone configuration
- Auto-lock to 2 minutes, show passcode lock
- Mail: Show To/CC label, Signature, Default account (if needed),
- Contacts: Sort and display order, Default account (if needed)
- Calendars: Time Zone support Off, Default Calendar (if needed)
- Demonstrate use of the Search screen
- Mail: Default iPhone Gmail setup (IMAP)
- Google Calendar Configuration including Calendar subscription and sharing
- Calendar and Google Contacts: Exchange Server ActiveSync then Google Sync so phone can display multiple Google Calendars selected from the primary Google Calendar collection (m.google.com and tap on "Sync") [1][2]. Warning: This setup tries HARD to get you to wipe out all other iPhone accounts. Be careful not to do so. In the setups I do people sometimes need to sync with an Outlook desktop calendar, and they almost always need to sync to a desktop Contacts collection. [2]
- Desktop Contact synchronization (this is controlled by iTunes) [2]
- Google Mobile (m.google.com)
- Optional: Appigo Tasks.app sync to Toodledo
- No Google task sync solution
- Google Contacts smell of squashed skunk
- Only one Exchange Server account per phone (CalDAV?)