Michael Henley

As soon as I got my iPhone I set up iMessage and FaceTime. This results in the telephone number of the device being paired with your account and is not something that the user is free to change any more. When I changed my number by PAC request I found that this did not update on my phone. After some playing around I have found a method that worked well for me:

1. Disable both iMessage and FaceTime in Settings
2. Reset Network Settings in General -> Reset
3. Check in Settings -> Phone that the number has updated to the new one
4. Turn iMessage back on and check that the new number is listed. Verification seems to take a little time
5. Turn FaceTime back on and check that the new number is listed. I found that even when iMessage updated FaceTime did not.
6. If either has not updated, turn it off and then reset network settings again

It has taken a few resets for me but I now have both services using the restored number.

I have discovered that a potential bug in iMessage is that once you change the ‘Caller ID’ from the number to an email address it will not switch back. It will freely change between email addresses, but refuses to take up the number. Replies to iMessages sent to the number appear to come from the number, but new messages some from the email address. Between this and the Location Services battery bugs it seems there are a few issues to work out in iOS5.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up an iPhone 4S on a 24 month One Plan contract with Three. I have used them for the last 10 months as my data provider for my iPad and generally have had a good experience with them coverage-wise. I have had one or two difficulties with support, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary. I can’t suggest that my experience this time is anything other than an anomaly but it was an interesting insight into the workings of it all.

Unfortunately, this time was a little different; admittedly much of the problem was caused by a slip of the finger on my part. When I submitted my number transfer request on the Three website I entered the temporary number as ‘…9714′ rather than ‘….9174′. This resulted in my old number being transferred to a PAYG mobile broadband account with which I have no connection. I find it quite extraordinary that it is possible for me to have transferred a number to an account that I have no administration over, but I am told by Three that this is what happened. The lack of authentication such as requesting the SIM ID on their form must have made this possible. As an aside perhaps this opens up the door to an interesting prank: Provided you know the details of a Three customer it would seem to be perfectly possible to change their phone number. This seems like a fairly large security hole.

A few calls later, I found myself calling early on the 27th October only to discover that the notes on my issue didn’t seem to exist. I was informed that the internal transfer request to have my number moved from this mobile broadband account to my One Plan account had been made again on the wrong account. I have learnt that everything with Three seems to be quoted as taking 48 hours. Again I was told that the request had now been submitted, escalated, and would take 48 hours with an assurance that it would be effected by the end of the week.

36 hours later nothing had happened and it was now heading into the weekend. I called up again and was told that it had again been escalated but would take 48 hours. However, after a long-ish exchange I was told that because it was already the weekend where the Customer Support Agent was located it was likely that my request would take even longer (I find it interesting that customer support hours are quoted as being 8am until 10pm (UK Time) with no suggestion that support will work on different times). Given I had spoken to several people by this point I asked to speak with a Supervisor. Frankly, I felt that I was being lied to by Three. I have little doubt that the people I was dealing with were making their best efforts but it seems that one department can only request things from others with little ability to rush things through. In the end I believe emails were sent directly from Support to the team that deals with number transfers.

Within 24 hours of my most recent call my number was transferred. I am expecting a call on Monday (31/10/11) to confirm that things have been sorted. It is unfortunate that this was my experience, but I am left with the impression that the only way to ensure something happens is to get a bit unreasonable, or at least to stop being understanding. Throughout the process I was dealt with courteously and politely by a team that made all the right noises to suggest that things were happening efficiently, but the reality did not reflect this. A ‘mood graph’ of @mjdh‘s tweets mentioning Three over the last two weeks would be interesting and, I suspect, sinusoidal.

All this being said, I have far better coverage with Three than I ever have with O2 in both OX1 and OX11, and am on a very generous plan. Considering how often I expect to need to contact a Support team I can live with the trade-off. I guess that the moral is to triple check everything you submit on forms.

I was considering what would be the implication of iCloud syncing for those that share an iTunes account (e.g my parents have the same iTunes account on both of their phones). Turns out (via MacWorld) that you can change the account used for iTunes after setting up iCloud

But what if I share my Apple ID? If multiple people use your Apple ID (say, if you have one central account for your, your spouse’s, and your children’s purchases), you can still use this ID among you for purchases, but each person will have to create a separate iCloud account for syncing and backup.

For example, if you have an Apple ID (or MobileMe account) you use between you, your significant other, and your daughter for purchases, but they’d like to take advantage of iCloud’s sync and storage features, you’ll want to do the following: Have each family member sign up for an iCloud account for their backups, mail, etc; then, after setting up iCloud on their iOS devices, go to the Store preference pane within the Settings app, sign out of the iCloud account (which will populate there automatically after you sign up), then sign into the original Apple ID you use for purchases.

This is something I will be putting in to practice in a few weeks when I sort out their phones and move them over to iOS5

Whilst abroad I am watching my background network usage pretty closely with Hands Off!, defining a new set of rules for use here. Mostly they block things like autoupdate programs from running. I noticed that Safari was making outgoing connections whilst not actually being running in the Dock. Is this something new in Lion, a random bug or something old I don’t know about? Unfortunately I didn’t have the presence of mind to check where it was connecting to before heading to Activity Monitor and killing the process.

Upgraded to Lion this morning and it has resulted in something weird. My computer can not make outgoing connections on port 80 unless I connect to a VPN. Other connections (ICMP, SSH, etc.) work normally but browsers, DropBox, apps in general can not connect and simply times out. Thoughts on what might cause this? Googling has turned up nothing and conveniently my Apple support has expired. I would rather not pay £35 for something that might not result in a solution…

UPDATE: Some further searching yielded this Apple Support discussion which gave me something to go on. Basically Avast breaks the internet under Lion. Should probably have run that compatibility check… Uninstalling Avast fixes the problem. Curious that a VPN connection allowed it to work. Guess it circumvents whatever magic Avast put in place for the web shield to work.

Today Apple announced what would happen at the WWDC keynote. The unusual nature of this announcement aside, I wonder whether we are thinking a little too small with this. At the moment everyone is thinking that it will basically be a music locker, perhaps stretching to a DropBox killer. My question is whether there is a greater significance to the announcement coming with iOS 5 and OS X Lion: Is this more of a push to take the whole home folder/user profile into the iCloud ie providing you have connection, you can ‘log in’ and access some extent of your own profile like preferences or favourites. Likewise with the iDevices. That kind of freedom from the physical device is something that I might consider paying for.

Been playing with my iPhone in Italian. Partly I just felt like using a language I don’t speak very often and have forgotten a lot of. Trying out VoiceControl I found that it really struggles with the English pronunciation of Artists/Tracks/Albums and often plays the wrong thing or simply returns no results. The solution… to employ the most outrageous Italian accent I can muster:

Following on from my post here I have just spent the past week using the Gomadic pack as my main source of power for the iPhone and I have to say that the experience has been overwhelmingly positive. When fresh batteries are used it can charge the phone back to full in a matter of hours. I would say that it is almost as effective as a wall charger for charging and you can even continue to use it while it charges – I am listening to music and writing this and the battery is still charging from it. I have barely connected the phone to the wall all week instead preferring to keep it in bed to use as an alarm (I was on the top bunk away from power). Every night it has charged the phone. I would guess that a set of batteries (4 AAs) lasts for maybe 1.5 full charges.

One thing which had me puzzled for a while was that sometimes the phone would tell me that the accessory was not compatible for charging. I think I have discovered that this happens when the batteries are running low and need to be replaced but I can’t be 100% sure. Also, sometimes the phone will stop responding when it is connected. Pulling the dock connector makes the phone start responding again and you can then reconnect it. Weird. Not sure why it is causing this behaviour but it doesn’t seem to be a permanent problem.

Overall a pretty good investment which has made this week must more enjoyable not to mention the ~16 hour journeys each way. Be aware that there may be the odd problem with it being recognised but despite this I would recommend it.

3 of 5 stars

I have been thinking about how I should write this post for a few days now, and also been waiting for an (as yet unreplied to) support ticket to go through.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that shortly after installing Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro I made a big mistake. After seeing that the Snow Leopard drivers allowed me to read and write to my internal HFS+ volume I plugged in my two WD MyBook Studio external drives to see if I could also read them. They didn’t mount so I popped into Disk Management and was asked what partition table they were using. ‘Simple’, I thought. They are GUID so I selected this and clicked ok. Then things went wrong. The drives came online but disk management showed them both as being unformatted. This was when I started to panic. Still hoping that this was Windows being silly I rebooted into OS X, only to be presented with two dialogs, one for each drive, saying that they were unrecognized and asking if I wanted to initialize, ignore, or eject. Now I start to panic. Disk Utility shows them as two partitionless drives.

Backups?

Ok, so I try to be pretty sensible about my backup policy. My MacBook Pro’s internal drive mirrors to a partition on one of the effected drive each night with SuperDuper!. Due to size issues however I keep my Aperture library on one of the external drives, with a vault on the other. My theory went that with this in place, and the most likely failures being a physical one on only one of the drives, my most important things kept on these would be safe. I admit that I never planned for both drives dying at the same time. Very very foolish on my part I know but I simply can’t afford to buy another set of 1TB and 500GB drives to image the external ones to. This seemed like the best solution.

Getting some data back:

I have to admit that I was pretty bummed out by the prospect of losing my largeish collection of photos from Aperture, many of which I haven’t put on Flickr for quite a while. There was also a collection of install images which generally come in quite useful along with some other bits and pieces. Basically I wanted/needed to get a lot of this back. Working on the principle that it was just the file tables which had been nuked I set to work trying out a couple of file recovery solutions. After scouring some blogs and support forums I found Boomerang Data Recovery Solutions. I ran the trial version of BoomDRS on the 500GB and was pretty damn happy to see it reporting the three partitions on the drive and detailing file sizes and names along with complete directory structure. I smiled for the first time in a few days. I knew that two of the partitions didn’t need recovering as one was an image of my internal drive which I could remake and the other was a copy of the OS X install DVD expanded to a partition which again I could remake.

Boomerang charge based on the amount you want to recover. This is where my problems with them began but I didn’t know it yet. I paid my £99 for a 1TB allowance (which I couldn’t really afford, but I digress…) and waited. Paying via paypal means you have to send your payment through a third-party called 2checkout. They take your money and then do fraud checks. After you have used paypal. This holds up the whole process for a day or so while they waste time. Once they finally release the order to Boomerang you get your activation code. I proceeded to begin the recovery to a third volume I labelled ‘Lifeboat’. My files began to reappear including the Aperture vault. To say I was happy would be an understatement.

After running for a few hours the folders I selected from the 500GB drive were all back. Boomerang were my new most favourite software company. Once I had repartitioned the 500GB drive and it was restored to its former glory I turned my attention to the 1TB drive. However every time I ran the scans from the Boomerang application on this drive it would crash. This happened regardless of the type of scan I tried to run. The support ticket I submitted including the crash report has not been responded to whilst they promise a response within 72 hours.

So I am sat here with ~850GB of unused recovery, a drive which I can’t use, and data still missing. Admittedly this data isn’t mission-critical. Mainly DVD ripped movies and TV shows along with the virtual hard drive for a Win 7 RC1 VirtualBox installation I had set up. I would rather not lose it but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

So I am torn. I have the most important data back thanks to the boomerang software and for that I am really happy and wouldn’t mind recommending them, but they have treated me as a customer pretty badly. I have extra usage which I can’t use thanks to their application crashing and no response to my support enquiry. I think if as a company you are taking this much money off people then you owe them a degree of support especially if it is due to a consistent crash.

So what have I learnt from this experience?

Firstly I think this shows just how much we need a unified file system standard. MS, Apple, the open-source community along with other interested parties need to get together and sort this. Waging their war on consumers machines is not a good way to go. If I as a fairly savvy user can make this kind of mistake with relatively little effort then you can imagine how easy it would be for someone less knowledgeable. Secondly I need to have an even more robust backup solution. I thought what I had was pretty good but evidently not. I also need to be a lot more careful but I do have a habit of blindly running into these things believing I can fix it if I mess up. Thirdly I need to make sure I put even more effort into checking software recommendations. I would love to recommend Boomerang for the work their software did on my smaller drive but the whole experience is marred by buggy software and lacking support. There are other solutions such as Prosoft’s offering which is highly rated but I am reluctant to spend a further £50+ on the hope they are any better. Once bitten, twice shy I guess.

As an aside, I have written this whole thing on my iPhone over a coffee in Nero. I am still pretty impressed with how easy it is to type on this thing. Why it consistently thinks I am trying to type ‘Whig’ instead of ‘which’ I am not sure but on the whole it works well. Aside from slightly aching thumb joints this is easy. I might actually be touch-typing better on this than on a desktop.

This likely only applies to the ~2008 MacBook Pro:

Recently my MacBook Pro has been rejecting burnable media. When I put those discs into the drive, it would make some noises a few times but never even spin up, and the after a little while would just eject the disc. The computer would simply state that it was waiting for the SuperDrive. While considering booking in (yet again!) to the Genius Bar at Regent St, I read somewhere that the suggestion was the try blowing some air into drive. I can only recommend using canned air for this, but after a few blasts the drive has started recognising the discs and is burning again.