…Or how to brick your phone with an upgrade, and recover…

Earlier this month, Apple released the fifth beta of their 3.0 firmware for the iPhone. As usual, I raced to the site to download it.

I became very excited by the email that I got saying that submissions to the Apple store have to be compatible with iPhone OS 3.0, which to me means it won’t be long before this is a production OS. With that in mind, I strapped on my crazy cap and decided to upgrade my phone to beta 5.

(more…)

Apple · Diabetic foot · ios · IPhone · iTunes · Mac OS X · Mouse (computing) · Universal Serial Bus

Today I read a blog that was a continuation of the series of ads that Microsoft has about why you should buy a PC instead of a Mac.

The article (see http://tinyurl.com/cncx73) was one of those cutesy marketing ideas that looked at the alleged difference in cost between a Mac and a PC and came up with an imaginary tax rebate based on the savings. The author used this whitepaper as the basis for the comparison. Like all of these comparisons, comparing apples to oranges results in the preferred hardware (in this case the PC) being shown to be a better deal.

I do most of my work on a MacBook Pro, after being a laptop user for more years than I care to count. I switched when it became possible to do so without giving up Windows. With the current crop of Apple machines, you have the option of running Windows directly, setting things up to dual boot (BootCamp), or running Windows in a VM (using Parallels, Fusion, VirtualBox, etc.)

Which once again leads me to ask why would Microsoft bash Apple ? (more…)

Apple · Apple Care · IBM · Mac OS · MacBook · Microsoft · Microsoft Windows · VirtualBox

Recently I downloaded the iPhone beta 3.0 firmware upgrade and decided (without thinking it through) to update my phone to use the new version. In hindsight, Apple makes it pretty clear this is a bad idea, and warns you that you won’t be able to revert to a prior version of the software:

But warnings were meant to be ignored, so I blithely went ahead and updated with the new firmware. Immediately after doing so, I had a d’oh moment when I realized I better not have my business phone running on beta software, so I wanted to revert.

No problem I thought, I’ll just follow the steps to downgrade that I wrote about previously …

(more…)

Apple · Diabetic foot · Firmware · ios · IPhone · Jailbreak iOS · PwnageTool · Software release life cycle

On the first day of 360iDev, I was in a session to learn about programming an iPhone, and somebody mentioned that a friend of theirs had updated their iPod firmware, and couldn’t figure out how to reset it back to the prior version. Since I had recently done this, I thought I could write this walk-through.

(more…)

Apple · Backup · IPad · IPhone · iPod · iTunes · Microsoft Windows · Windows

One more thing I ran into after posting the blog on my Microsoft Office update problem originally. Turns out that the update reassociated all of the “Office” files with the Microsoft programs (even though they don’t exist on my machine), so double-clicking a document for instance tries to open it with Microsoft Word (which of course fails).

(more…)

Microsoft · Microsoft Excel · Microsoft Office · Microsoft Word · Office suite · Open Office · OpenOffice.org · Word processor