Wayne Priestley

The story of how I got a new iPhone.

So I’ve been having a few battery issues lately with my iPhone, nothing to serious but I wasn’t getting the life out of it i needed to comfortably see me through the day without thinking I was going to run out of power.

So my options.

Buy some sort of juice pack.
Buy an extra charger to keep at work.
Buy a car charger.
Replace battery in iPhone.

A replacement battery seemed the best option, I am using my iPhone a lot and to keep charging it up could be a pain.
A form of juice pack or external battery in a case was the first thought I had but I want to pass this iPhone on to my son and get a new one in the summer and despite all the rumours saying the v.4 iPhone will be the same form factor I don’t want to take the chance.

So I decided on a new battery, I had read lots about taking it in an Apple would replace the battery while you wait when I stood for hours in the Que to buy my 1st gen iPhone so i was expecting maybe an hour wait and a £50 bill.

So I arrived at our new local Apple store and looked around for a bit then approached on of the guys and asked how much and how long it would take, he wasn’t sure so we had a chat with a genius and this is the bit that I thought I had just miss heard the while conversation.
I was told that I would make an appointment and that the iPhone would be checked for me, then he mentioned something about ordering and then phoning me when it arrived and then replacing it.
When he mentioned about giving me another iPhone I presumed he meant a replacement while mine was being fixed so I was ok with that and said I would have a think and decide then.

I decided to go ahead and book the appointment.

I had a 10 minute wait before I was sitting talking to a genius and he plugged my iPhone in, ran a diagnostic program and said my battery wasn’t actually that bad.
We had a bit of a chat and I explained about wanting a new battery put in as I was going to pass it on to my son in the summer.
My iPhone was about 20 months old so i new the battery would be way past its best.
He asked if I had a backup and I said yes from last night and he said ok this may take a little while, Oh I said I wasn’t expecting you to Replace it now after I was told you would have to order one in.
We have one left in stock he said but it could take me a while to find it.
At this point I was still thinking he was talking about a battery, then he pulled out a brown box, opened it and took out a iPhone.
I thought you were going to replace the battery now I said, no we don’t replace the battery came his reply we give you a new iPhone.

So I sat and talked while my sim was put in the new iPhone and it was activated, he erased my old one in front of me and we parted company.

I thought to myself ok lets get out of hear before he realises he made a mistake and asks for the phone back.
Hehehehehe

Joking aside I was amazed by the outcome of it, I never expected it for one second that my old scratched iPhone would be replaced when all i wanted was a battery putting in.

So im a happy man today.

.

On Tuesday February the 16th 2010 @ 10:30am we will eventually have a Apple store in Newcastle Upon Tyne…

I’ve already planned to take the day off and be there for doors opening.

The first 1500 people through the door will all receive the converted Apple T-Shirt.

If your going to be there let me know and we’ll meet up.

Just a quick post to let you in on a discount code for Mac app’s, not sure how long its going to run for so be quick.

Using the code “OneFingerDiscount” you can get 20% off loads of Mac apps like Mars Edit and Textexpander or PDF Pen

Here’s the link to the story behind it and Here is the the page to see the rest of the developers taking part.

Enjoy

Today I found a excellent site that helped me in a bit of trouble shooting on my network.

The problem was connection speed to the internet, lately it’s been rather slow and phoning my ISP ment I had to be connected via their supplied router in order to get tech support.

After sorting out the spaghetti that is the many many different cables and changing over routers I went to Speedtest.net to test out my line speed where I came across a link to PingTest.net. The side is still in beta at the minute but as you will see it helped me a while lot more than a simple speedtest did.

What is Pingtest.net?

Use Pingtest.net to determine the quality of your broadband Internet connection. Streaming media, voice, video communications, and online gaming require more than just raw speed. Test your connection now to get your Pingtest.net rating and share the result with others!

So what do they test?

Packet Loss

Much as it sounds, if you have anything less than complete success in transmitting and receiving “packets” of data then you are experiencing this problem with your Internet connection. It can mean much slower download and upload speeds, poor quality VoIP audio, pauses with streaming media and what seems like time warping in games — your connection may even come to a total standstill! Packet loss is a metric where anything greater than 0% should cause concern.

Ping

This measurement tells how long it takes a “packet” of data to travel from your computer to a server on the Internet and back. Whenever you experience delayed responses in Internet applications – this would be due to a higher than desired ping. Similar to packet loss, lower is better when it comes to ping. A result below 100 ms should be expected from any decent broadband connection.

Jitter

Once you understand ping, jitter should also make sense. Jitter is merely the variance in measuring successive ping tests. Zero jitter means the results were exactly the same every time, and anything above zero is the amount by which they varied. Like the other quality measurements, a lower jitter value is better. And while some jitter should be expected over the Internet, having it be a small fraction of the ping result is ideal.

I’ve not had much of a chance to get online lately as my Macbook Pro has been away being fixed or so I thought.

In June I started to notice problems with the connection speed between my MBP and Time Capsule.
In the beginning I thought the problem was to do with my Time Capsule, so after a bit of trouble shooting involving formatting and changing of settings without any change I did a bit of a comparison on speeds with @PatMahon.

Still no joy so it was time to give Apple a call and get some use from my Applecare policy.
After going over a few details of my issue with them we decided it was not a Time capsule issue as first thought but it was in fact a problem with my MBP, specifically the Airport card.

Getting to this conclusion was now quick or easy by any means, apart from the obvious ping tests and testing on a clean user account etc I did a archive and install of the OS, then a complete clean install…

Still no improvement.

So off my MBP went to Apple to be fixed, all boxed up and off it went.
A few days later I received a phone call from Group 8 (the company carrying out the repairs) they asked me a few questions and decided to replace the Airport card.

I happened to be on holiday so I had a bit of a wait until I got the MBP back.

Unfortunately once I had reinstalled my account from my backup I noticed that it was not in fact fixed, it was to tell the truth now worse than before.

Back on the phone to Applecare and I explained the situation was now worse than before, I had one more test to do…

Boot from the instal DVD and ping test, this confirmed once more that it was not a software issue.
I was sent a program by Apple that gathered some info and this was sent to Apple for the engineers to take a look at.

So here I am waiting for a reply from them to find out what is to happen next, I imagine that my MBP will be returned and ill be back to using my iPhone for a while.

If like me you experienced the double Contacts and Calendar entries after upgrading to the iPhone 3.0 software update don’t worry there is a easy fix available courtesy of TUAW.

Double Contacts and Calendar Entries
After setting up Mobileme and syncing my phone the first time, I found that all my contacts and calendar entries had been duplicated so that there were two identical entries of everything. Our own Chris Rawson set me straight on fixing this. If you disable calendar and contact syncing from the iPhone, all the information brought in from Mobileme will vanish. Next, re-enable them and you will be asked if you want to merge the contact and calendar information of what’s on the iPhone which was brought in by iTunes. You do. And in doing so, the problem will vanish. This tip is not just for iPhone 3G S owners, it’s also happened to previous iPhone users who updated to system 3.0.

It’s a easy fix and sorted the problem for me straight away, but typically I had tried a few other things including a full restore before this fix popped up in my RSS feed.

There are a few other tips and tricks included in the article so click away and read the full story from TUAW.

I’d like to invite you all to a Tweetup (meet up of Twitter users) that’s been arranged for 19th December 09.

If your interested or just want to know a little more about it check out LiverpoolTweetup.co.uk for all the details and a list of people who are coming along.

A few of us are making it a all day event so we’re staying over for the night, there is a link to local hotels in the area on the Tweetup site so check it out if you’d like to join us.

Thank you and I hope to see you there…

For a few weeks now I’ve been using an application called Notebook from Circus Ponies.

It’s an application I’ve tried a few times in the past but never really found a reason to buy after the free trial.

After the update to version 3.0 I decided to give it another go and try to see if I could use it to consolidate information on my Mac and clean up some folders.

So upon looking into my folder’s I found there were a few candidates for that could do will a little better organisation.

• I had all my PDF web receipts in one folder.

• I had all my e-mail copies of software licences in PDF’s in folders.

• User guides for applications in another folder.

• And lots of similar things stored in folders all over the place.

So I set about reorganising things once I downloaded NoteBook V3.0 and soon had a everything in one place in a easily searchable notebook.

The searching and organisation is what makes NoteBook special.

With NoteBook, you organize your information naturally, using a familiar notebook interface, complete with pages and tabs, sections and subsections. Add notes and other text.
Drag in files and folders. Even “clip” web research, mail messages and other content into your Notebooks without leaving the application you’re working in.
Annotate your information with diagrams and sketches, highlighting and keywords.
Take voice-annotated notes that you can download to your iPod. And protect private thoughts with passwords, covers, and encryption.

My folder system is now a lot cleaner thanks to Circus Ponies NoteBook.

After a week of using the previous shortcuts I’ve mentioned so far, I have to say that it’s working out okay.

I think a week is long enough to get familiar with the shortcut and to allow your hands to get used to using them.

This weeks shortcuts are:

CMD + DELETE, ⌘ ⌫
CMD Delete moves the selected item to trash.

SHIFT + CMD + A, ⇧ ⌘ A
Shift CMD and the letter A opens your Applications folder.

I’ve decided to make more use of keyboard shortcuts on my Mac.

My reasons for this are two fold.

To speed up my workflow and more importantly these days, to reduce the risk of RSA from the constant use of my mouse.
I have already replaced my old mouse with the more comfortable VX Revolution, this had made some difference but getting away from using the mouse as often as I do is the main aim.

I’m planning on trying to master a few different shortcuts during the course of a week as a way of trying to remember them.

This weeks shortcuts are:

CMD TAB, ⌘ ⇥

The CMD TAB key is the application switcher shortcut, used to easily switch between running applications on the Mac these keys bring up a bar like view showing all applications running, allowing selection from left to right, using the SHIFT key ⇧ along with CMD TAB allows application switching from right to left.




The second shortcut is:

CMD H, ⌘ H
CMD H will hide any open application on the Mac, thus allowing the application to be opened again using the CMD TAB shortcut.
If an open application is closed by clicking the red button in the top left corner, then the CMD TAB shortcut will not re-open the app.

Next is:

SHIFT CMD H, ⇧ ⌘ H when in Safari.
An application specific shortcut, SHIFT CMD H takes you back to your Homepage, Google in my case.