There have been numerous reports on Apple’s discussion forums of users iPhones becoming bricks whilst installing an app on their iPhones, 3G or not. I ran into this issue last night. I was installing an app and the phone started hanging, stuttering on music and then all of a sudden, boom, it went black and the Apple logo appeared. No amount of hard resets or hours waiting would resolve this issue. First of all I want to give you all the solution to fix this, as I was all set to visit the Apple store. Essentially you need to enter the phone into Recovery Mode.

1. Unplug iPhone from the computer (by taking the sync cable out of the computer but keeping the cable connected to your phone) and turn it off. If stuck at reboot screen hold home & power together until it is shut down.
2. Hold down the Home button and plug the USB cable back into the computer
3. iTunes will see an iPhone in recovery mode and allow you to restore it.

Now to the probable cause of this issue, every time apps update they don’t replace the existing file but they get added sequentially to it. In essence I believe these are filling up the phones memory and causing crashing. You can check it out for yourself! Go to:

1. Music
2. iTunes
3. Mobile Applications

You will notice your apps there and if you have updated you will no doubt see sequential numbering (1, 2, 3…..) after the file name. To correct this your going to need to delete the duplicates keeping the file with the highest file number as this should be the latest version. If you have (iPhoneapp 2.ipa) left over after deleting (iPhoneapp.ipa) and (iPhoneapp 1.ipa) then you need to rename it to (iPhoneapp.ipa). Now for the next step you can either restore the phone and start again if you have had the issue OR you can connect the phone, cancel the sync, then in sync settings uncheck all the apps which means iTunes will remove the apps and it’s duplicates from your phone. You can then reselect them and it will sync the single files from your computer to the phone. There have been numerous reports of this method giving real results for iPhone stability. 
EDIT: There has been some discussion regarding the contents of this post. It has been noted, as i already knew, that updates do not seem to take up more room on the phone. Whilst this is the case the above solution certainly does work, whether it’s an iTunes bug which is invoked by the multiple file copies screwing the sync up or maybe there is a sync xml file on the phone that is buggy (I don’t know I am not a software engineer). Regardless there appears to be an issue for many people when they have many apps installed or few apps with many revisions and at the moment this solution appears to be the only workable one in the interim of Apple acknowledging it and fixing it.
Some Credit due to B1indSide from the Apple Discussion forums

I decided to write this post due to a rather large issue I have just had with Orbicule’s Undercover software after I had an iMac go in for repair recently. The iMac died suddenly and was to have it’s logic board replaced. Upon collection of the Mac at the Apple store the genius powered the unit on. We logged into the account and boom

HELP HELP, I AM A STOLEN MAC   

cried the iMac!! It appears that the logic board replacement had tricked the software into thinking it hadn’t been online for 2 months and the software automatically switches to plan B according to the software’s developer. According to the message on the iMac screen connecting the unit to the internet and completing a reboot would resolve the issue. But if your net connection is supplied dependent on your mac address how do you plan on connecting to the net after a logic board replacement!? The machine has a new mac address and there is no way of accessing it as the orbicule software essentially locks up the mac.  In fact it also will proceed to dim your screen to make the “thief” take it in for repair or try to sell it on. Maybe a reason why Apple replaced the 24″ screen which had nothing wrong with it for £382!!Anyway I detract, the way to get round this issue if your unable to connect to the internet is as follows: 

1. Restart the Mac and hold down the Command + s keys in order to boot into single user mode.
2. Once booted enter the following command (Don’t type it wrong and get the spaces right this is critical) /sbin/mount -uw /
3. This command mounts your hard drive
4. Now enter rm /Library/Launchdaemons/com.orbicule.uc.plist to remove orbicule
5. There should be no message in return, if you see one you have typed something wrong. Repeat again if you get a message.
6. You should also carry out the following command rm /Library/Preferences/connected.plist
7. Type exit to reboot your mac.

The above list will have now uninstalled Undercover so you must reinstall it by downloading it and installing it from the Orbicule website. Though, thankfully, there should be much relief after following these steps as your Mac should now be usable! 

Oh and on a final note, to all of us that use Undercover. Don’t for one second think that if your Mac is stolen and it does end up at Apple for repair that they will call Orbicule to verify. Despite reporting to them it was a stolen mac and asking them to call a recovery line they just didn’t bother and didn’t even ask for ID on collection to verify that we were the machine owners compared to our registration in their database…. well done Apple! 

I haven’t posted for a while but thought I would post a ‘How-To’ on how to increase your browsing speed when using Firefox thanks to ‘Pipelining‘. An HTTP pipelining enabled web browser uses server keepalive signals to create an open socket so that it can receive an uninterrupted stream of packets. Without pipelining, the browser must communicate back and forth with the server to determine whether the last item was received successfully and uses more TCP packets to do so.

To enable pipelining in Firefox is easy:

1. Type ‘about:config’ in the URL bar
2. In the search box type ‘pip’,  ‘network.http.pipelining’ should appear in the list.
3. Hold shift and click on it until it’s value reads ‘true’

Job done! Enjoy the increased speed

I found myself in a particularly nasty place yesterday. I had followed advice given to me by an Apple engineer and either what they told me to enter in terminal was wrong, OR, I mistyped. Either way the result was a iMac that would not boot and gave a kernel panic at every grey boot screen. I tried resetting the PRAM/NVRAM via command-option-P-R, I tried booting from single user mode, booting to safe mode and booting from the DVD to bypass the HDD. None of these worked and all resulted in the kernel panic.

So i call Apple care and the guy there was fantastic and he determines a fried logic board and happily gives me a case number to have it repaired under warranty. Now I have been a Mac user for long enough to know that you don’t (Most of the time) go from working fine to rebooting and having a fried logic board. So I racked my brain and spent hours on Google and I am happy to say I fixed it, and I will share with you what the issue was and how I fixed it in the hope it may help many others in the future.

Now for reasons I won’t delve into I have an EFI Firmware password set on my Mac. I presume if your reading this article your the same. The EFI firmware password essentially stops you doing any of the important key combinations at boot, resetting PRAM/NVRAM, single user mode the whole shebang.  Now this is useful in many many circumstances except when your screwed like I was. Essentially when I thought I was resetting my PRAM and NVRAM I was doing absolutely nothing. If your as screwed as I was and cannot get to a DVD to boot OR you have forgotten your password there is only one way around it.

1. Add or remove a stick of ram. Obviously if you have one stick in, add one and if you have two in remove one.
2. Power on the mac and immediately press and hold command-option-P-R.
3. The system will restart with the ‘bong noise’, allow it to do this 3 times. On the third ‘bong’ you can let go of the keys.
4. The machine will now boot with a cleared password and reset PRAM/NVRAM.
5. You can shut down the machine and replace the original ram configuration.

I hope this helps anyone that was in as much hot water as me! Good luck

I finally had enough of Windows on my office machine and decided to go to Linux to make life less stressful. Ubuntu was my natural choice as I am familiar with it and that it is a dam good distro for the masses with plenty of support. I thought, cautiously, that the installation would go without a problem. Given how tight the people were that gave me the budget for the machine I should have been clever enough to know it would have the cheap SIS chipset in.

Normally with Linux distros you want a mainstream chipset, Intel or NVidia for example.Anyway to get to the point! If you have a SIS onboard graphics chip, your likely to be having issues! I know this work around works for the Mirage 1 (SIS662), though not ideal it will at least make your machine usable whilst you look into the second suggestion I have here. Open up your terminal and run xorg: 

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

This will start the xorg configuration process. In the first question you can choose the option ‘VESA’, do it! Follow the rest of the steps answering to the best of your knowledge and then you need to reboot. Upon reboot you are likely to be free of the vertical horizontal lines that were probably plaguing your screen like they were mine!The second suggestion I had is at Dr. Thomas Winischhofers website. I have not yet had time to work through this, though I have read reports of people having success with it. I will report more if I get any success.