I had an iPhone that was stuck on a recovery loop. That means it would be in restore/recovery mode, where it would refuse to boot into a usable state, but instead frustratingly display a prompt to connect to iTunes every time it was turned on.

Every blog and forum post recommended a myriad of different fixes: iREB, iRecovery, iPwnage came up most frequently.

None of them worked. Oddly, the simplest fix was to download the latest firmware IPSW file from Apple. It's safe, it's from Apple and it does not jailbreak your phone. (It's what iTunes would have downloaded in the background, but you're getting the file directly now because your copy is probably corrupted, leading to the 1604 error.)

1. Download the right IPSW for your phone. Here's a site which lists a bunch of them.
2. Connect your phone to iTunes and say yes to all the prompts which say you need to restore your phone.
3. When you get to press "restore", hold down alt+restore for Macs (Windows users: hold down shift).
4. Select the IPSW you've downloaded.
5. Pray!

Good luck!

I left my phone alone for 15 minutes and came back to this. Were the developers ready for this sort of load on their servers?

For some reason, USB modem support seems to have broken in 10.04. What worked effortlessly in version 9 now results in perplexing and frustrating non-detection of the device.

It mounts on the desktop as a drive, but refuses to register as a modem.

After two hours of trying everything I could Google up, including using gnome-ppp and making all sorts of amendments to config files and whatnot, usb-modeswitch turned out to be the answer.

Essentially, it stops the dongle from acting like a USB storage stick and kicks it in its modem hind.

Step 1: Fire up Synaptic or a terminal window.
Step 2: Download usb-modeswitch (you may have to get usb-modeswitch-data as well, so check that you did). In the terminal window, simply type sudo apt-get install usb-modeswitch.

That's it! Go forth and be surfy.

Went to the food court at the newly-opened 313 mall across from the office. They outfitted two girls with Segways, on which to peddle drinks. I wonder how many cans of Coke you have to sell to break even on one of those.

However, for all the Segway coolness, they were using some IE-based Web browser (which was pointing to a malformed URL, clearly) at point of sale. Ah well.

(download)

Click here to download:

Tech_at_the_food_court_tag_out.zip (938 KB)

Yesterday, in a fit of annoyance over my unreliable mail forwarding server (which forwards from my main vickiho.com e-mail to Gmail), I decided to migrate everything over to Google Apps once and for all.

The biggest headache was going to be moving all my mail over to the new account, but I found a great tool at Gmail Backup. It's the lazyman's way to transferring everything over via IMAP, which I think most people can do if they fired up and configured a fresh client to do the transfer. But Gmail Backup makes it far less of a hassle, with a simple frontend.

Just download mail from your Gmail account and restore it back to your new Google Apps account. Labels and all stay intact. Nice.

The only thing is, your sent mail doesn't go back into the sent folder, but for some reason just gets archived with no "sent" label. I can live with that.

Sidenote: Moving over to Google Apps takes care of that annoying "mailed by Gmail" tag which accompanies e-mails sent from Gmail and reveals your Gmail address. The other method is to use your own SMTP server, but I trust Google's SMTP servers more than the cheapskate one that came along with my domain.