Eshin Direct

Apple OS4 – This did change everything

Unfortunately, not in a good way.

For some inexplicable reason that only the Apple marketing team can probably explain to me, I was in a rush to install the new OS4 that promises to be the first step in making my phone obsolete. Don’t even get me started on the fact that it is just barely a year old. To be fair, iTunes happily tells me that it will take about an hour or so to download and update, so I leave it to do its thing overnight.

Again, the Apple marketing boys and girls have some explaining to do as I happily I bounce out of bed like its bloody Christmas. I can’t wait to get my eager hands on the goods only to be told that…. iTunes was unable to restore my iPhone.

Errr, okay (nervous sweat beginning to appear). Breathe, I’ll just do a restore… Apple wouldn’t let me down… I’ll just restore to a last restore point. Crap, no.. it’s an error telling me that the actual restore doesn’t work. (nervous sweat begins to turn cold as I realise that all my stuff on the iPhone has just disappeared into the ether).

To be truthful, it didn’t worry me as much as that since most of my stuff is in the much vaunted cloud. At worst, it meant that I would lose a few hours restoring my old apps and setting up my phone to be just right. Of course, I would have lost most of my SMS which I hate.

But needless to say I was pissed. I tried to restore again and again, each time failing as surely as the previous times I tried to restore. Interesting, Apple had now but me in an endless loop of recovery, denial, recovery, denial.

My solution, and this is what made me irked to the point of posting, is that the solution wasn’t found in a number of complicated fixes that explore the fun side of manual resets and by-passes, but it lies in the Apple Universal Dock. Error 2001 refers to third party USB peripherals mucking about on your Mac, so Apple recommends disconnecting them all. I had none except for my iPhone and its nifty new Universal Dock. So I tried disconnecting the USB cable from the dock and plugging it directly into the iPhone and voila¹, the iPhone resumes its recovery process.

You would think that Apple products play nicer together since the company is run by a bunch of control freaks. Evidently not. Did OS4 change everything? I can’t tell you since I’m still sat here waiting for it to complete the restoration. But maybe I’m being harsh, it did change plenty – my perception of Apple shifts a little further to the big evil empire feeling and as of writing, I have a very beautiful brick of a tech piece on my desk.

1. a nod to my embarrassed French friends at the recent World Cup knock out [↩]

iPhone Addiction

Over dinner tonight I spotted a father who had an ingenious way to keep his baby daughter amused while he ate quietly – he sat her down in front of his iPod and played cartoons on it. It seemed to work quite well as the kid seemed to have that same plugged in look that I have had since I got my iPhone. The one where I am caught wandering around, iPhone in hand twitching for the latest shot of information. I was remarking to the better half that I wasn’t sure if plugging in a kid at that early age was a good thing or not.

On the one hand, I think the child needs time to just sit and explore the world, be restless, push the boundaries and well, cry and laugh as he or she tries, fails and succeeds to engage with things around it. It sort of feels like a much too simple way of child rearing to be entirely wholesome. Of course, not having kids myself, I might feel otherwise when I’m trying to grab a few minutes of quiet without a kid trying my patience. Still…

Facebook Lite

One wonders whether Mark Zuckerberg is a little concerned about Facebook’s plans for world domination when we see reports of a Facebook Lite (via Mashable). Who would have thought Twitter would be the FB killer? Then again, it shouldn’t be a surprise. Facebook’s usefulness for me has been condensed into the iPhone app which is a glorified Twitter with photos for me anyway.

I think everyone got tired of Facebook’s greed and attempts to do too many things with their constant design changes.

Flickr releases 3.0

I am a fan of Flickr but one of the nagging gripes I had about the service was that it was a lovely Herculean task to try and upload my photos. I was simply unable to just drop a folder with photos¹ in the Flickr Uploader and let it upload away. It would always fail to upload all the files and it would need constant attention²

With the release of 3.0, I’m quite a happy bunny as I can now upload in fire-and-forget mode and am comforted that I don’t have to wait and supervise the upload of my images to backup. Unfortunately my MacBook fell ill and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to recover two memory card worth of photos. Luckily I have the high quality JPEGs but it is still upsetting to lose the RAW files.

Now, I no longer have to wonder about whether the 300-400 photos, constituting approximately 1 GB made it to Flickr. And, I’m up to date now as I have all my photos on Flickr³.

1. Approximately 3-4 MB in size each [↩]
2. To be fair, it could have been my Macs but both being unable to sustain an upload? I don’t think so. [↩]
3. Yes, yes, I will make some more public eventually. [↩]

Singapore Seeds Weather for F1

In a country that can and has changed the actual timezone it exists in to make it more competitive with its Asian neighbors, I have often joked that Singapore’s next big project should be to control the weather. If you can control the time, why not bend the forces of nature to your will. There are indeed rumours circulating that the Singapore government has seeded the weather to ensure that today and tomorrow are not spoiled by a petulant Mother Nature spitting out some rain on F1 payday.

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