Real World Computing

My iPhone has been driving me crazy these last few weeks. The power has been draining so fast that I need to recharge by lunch time if I still want a phone (and not a brick) by the afternoon. I'd been blaming my iPhone for being old but as it turns out, the problem was much simpler than that - It was location settings.  When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. After all, you have to assume that if your phone is going to communicate with the satellites (and other receivers), it's probably going to need a bit of power to get up there. Then of course you factor in the number of apps which are using location services (it's exploded since I last looked in there).... and of course, many of the apps use location services "always". Yep, that's right... even when you're not using the phone. So, how do you turn these things off? First, you need to get to Location Services. The easiest way is via these three icons; Settings Privacy Location ...

There has been a lot of pressure on Apple lately with the US government pushing for access to their systems and lots of public pressure as people react to the “Error 53” scandal. To many people’s surprise, Apple has dug their heels in on these issues and as the pressure mounts, is showing no signs of relenting. Normally I would be up on my soapbox denouncing this seemingly anti-competitive behaviour but this time I think that Apple is right to make a stand. In the past, some of the things Apple did seemed to be mean spirited. For example; changing from the 30 pin plugs to lightning cable, and then blocking third party cables unless they were “Apple approved” (ie: paying royalties and super-expensive). I know that they had their reasons for those changes, particularly safety, usability, size and speed but for people with stereo equipment that has 30 pin plugs, it still hurts - and no, adapters aren't a good solution. Apple was mostly wrong then but despite the fact that ...

One of the things that the company I work for (and most others) do on a regular basis is send meeting invites to people at other companies and on various other systems.  Notes meeting handling isn't perfect and we've had trouble with Blackberry and Google calendars in the past, but nothing like the trouble we've had this week. It seems that when we send a meeting invite out and one of our recipients cancels, they take over the meeting as chair and cancel it for the remaining participants too - even if they've already accepted. It's taken us a while to get our head around the problem, particularly as it happened with several different meetings and multiple outside sources.  Naturally, you presume that several systems out there can't be wrong and it must be a problem at our end - even if we haven't changed anything.  Right? Wrong! As it turns out, the recently released Apple iOS 6 has a flaw which trips up Microsoft Exchange systems not configured acco...