flop ya mac out

Dysfunctional elections come good. Acquaintances get touchy with the Kindle. Expensive unlocked iPhones for all (Germans). Fake Steve pulling a Bono for a boost? And Santa - no more ho’s in Australia.

Daniel and Jason give the new Amazon Kindle a thorough going over, along with the Queen. Stephen Hawking pays the boys a visit, and this narration changes to the first person. We say the word dick too many times. Or do we!!…?

fymo friends gather ’round! Up the dates galore - what has been, and what should be. Optical drive or no optical drive? Does Steve slap or grab? More questions are asked than answered as per usual in this futuristic episode.

When iTunes 7.5 came out i eagerly downloaded it, as i have so many times before with all other Mac software updates. But for the first time, this one bit me in the arse.

I probably shouldn’t have thrown caution to the wind and updated, simply ’cause i’m running an unlocked, jail-breaked 1.1.1 iPhone as my main phone and organiser.

It turnes out iTunes 7.5 didn’t like to play with my iPhone, as when i connected them together in marriage, i got an error message (pictured) and was not able to access my iPhone - it simply didn’t come up in the side bar of iTunes.

So i searched for a way to downgrade back to iTunes 7.4.2 (which i was able to download), but couldn’t find a definitive guide or an answer to other people asking the same thing in threads.

So i decided to venture into risky territory and fix this via trial and error, as it was getting really irritating not being able to sync up new podcasts or contacts etc..

Firstly i sync-ed my iPhone’s contacts and calendar to my old PowerBook which was thankfully still running 7.4.2, just in case anything went wrong (so i could retain all the new info i’d entered into my iPhone’s calendar!)

I then copied iTunes.app to my desktop, as well as my “iTunes Library” and “iTunes Music Library.xml” so i could stick them back, in case they got written over with new old/new installation.

I then installed the 7.4.2 version and it went totally smoothly and totally worked! Fantastic.

Now i’ve just gotta remember not to update iTunes, as could easily be done via the software update without really realising, if you’re a little absent minded at the time.

But now what for the future? No iTunes updates for me and my hacked iPhone, forever? Perhaps!

Does 7.5 accidentally/on purpose now deny syncing with hacked iPhones, just like 1.1.1 stopped some jail-broken iPhones running at all?

Is this problem i had widespread enough that hackers are working on an iTunes fix?

Something else i wonder is if i was to update to 1.1.2, would iTunes 7.5 play nice with my iPhone?

Let us know your experiences or comments below.

The dealio is this: iPhone only knows how handle numbers of a certain length without an area code, and seeing as most of us are using iPhones with a US firmware, that length is the minimum American phone number length (much longer than that in Australia - 8 digits).

That means that when someone calls your iPhone from a home phone (or mobile) that doesn’t send the area code down the line (9### ####), and you have the number listed in your contacts with an area code (03 9### ####), then iPhone doesn’t quite cotton on to the fact that they’s the same thing.

Too many times I’ve received calls from friends, but iPhone didn’t clue on that they were in my Address Book, so I had to spend the first part of the conversation trying to figure out who they were without sounding like too much of a tool.

So you’ve done your Australian Phone Number Mod, what now?

Som people had reverted to adding both the area code version and the normal version of numbers to their contacts, but a better alternative is at hand! The chaps on the iPhone Dev Team have a workaround, by means of replacing the Springboard app. with a modified one. The modified one whispers sweet nothings into the iPhone’s ear about phone numbers being able to be only 8 numbers long and still cool.

Read up on the mod here.

For me this was an absolutely crippling problem, but there is surprisingly little info on the net about how to fix it.

Help share the love, and donate to the Dev Team if you find it of use!

Just a note to let ya know that fymo 12 will be recorded this Friday, rather than tonight. Jason is fronting up to his best mates sisters life drawing exhibition tonight, and well, ya know what he’s like about porn and the like. If it’s free, even better. We’ll talk soon!

And they’re off! Google backs out another winner. Boom! iTunes radio in your pants? Dev teams - to donate or not to donate? What amount is right? And for music? Does Leo Laporte have a feminine alias? And Steve - black underpants?

After spending a good slab of my life loading the entire state of Victoria into my iPhone’s Google Map cache, iPhone turns around a bitch-slaps me.

Turns out that the cache has a time limit on it that removes the data when it is considered old. Awesome.

There must be a more intelligent way to manage the cache, surely? If I were an iPhone, I’d at least have the courtesy to compare my plethora of pre-loaded map data with the server to see if a more recent version had eclipsed it, rather than pulling it all down again over EDGE.

Well, it looks like we’ll just have to wait until that 3G iPhone hits the streets in 08 and makes caches in this capacity, redundant.

So, if you want to know the easiest way to look like a tool: scan through all available maps at all detail levels in your general area, brag about how youhave done this, then sit back, relax, and wait for iPhone to remove your handywork.

One of Australia’s well known live “tonight” style tv shows, Rove, had a little guest tonight that no other Australian show has yet to have; that little guest being an iPhone!

The iPhone has yet to be released in Australia, so this was a total shock. It was totally random, man.

Rove had just interviewed Jana Wendt, and asked who she would turn gay for as part of his “20 questions for $20″ segment. Jana gave the name of some Italian bird who Rove vaguely knew, so after the following commercial break, he showed the camera a picture of the Italian lady he had supposedly Googled, and right there on an iPhone.

Rove left the iPhone sitting on the “poof” in front of him for the remainder the segment. As they went to another break, Rove picked up the phone and showed it (or the screens contents) to the other guests on the couch and starting chatting the picture or perhaps also, the phone.

Is this the iPhone’s first public appearance on national television in both Australia and New-Zealand? Perhaps not the most exciting news all round, but questions now have to asked - who’s exactly is it? What plan is he/she using with it? How long have they had it and how did they get it? Perhaps he bought it when “Rove” did two shows in the US.

It was just one of the “cool” moments i had to share with y’all.