Well Preserved
Posted: Mon 3 August, 2009 Filed under: Domestic 1 Comment »Here, the weekend turned into a bit of a preserving fest.
On Saturday, another trip to the local “Pick Your Own” fruit place, another four punnets of raspberries – somewhere just north of 6lb of fruit – for a tenner. Going to a PYO place makes you realise just how obscene the profit margins are in supermarkets for fruit etc.
On Sunday, we harvested all the beetroot (both red and white), and cooked and pickled them. So that’s two lots of 1.25 litre bottles, one with white pickled beetroot and one with red.
Following from that, the majority of the raspberries from Saturday’s picking went to be made into jam – where we’ve got around 12lb of jam out of it.
Not bad at all – home-made preserves really can be quite fun.
Migrating Contacts
Posted: Mon 3 August, 2009 Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, iPhone, Stupidity, Technology Leave a comment »As I said yesterday, one of the more interesting challenges with Herself’s new iPhone was getting the contacts to transfer across from her old Samsung G600 phone to the iPhone.
When it comes to contacts and phonebooks, Samsung are – to be polite about it – bloody awful. They don’t support useful standards like SyncML (basically a standard set of markup for addresses, contacts etc.) and instead stick to their own proprietary method. And their phones really don’t like giving up their data. In this case, it wouldn’t even send the information via BlueTooth, or save the details from the phone onto the SIM in order to transfer that across.
In short, a fucking abysmal experience when it comes to transferring away from a Samsung phone to anything else. (If memory serves, even Samsung to Samsung is a pain in the arse, let alone Samsung to anything else)
On my Sony-Ericsson phone, I can regularly sync the phonebook up to an online service called Zyb, who make the entire process pretty painless for phones that support SyncML. It also gives you a backup of the entire contacts database, which can be useful if (for example) you lose your phone, or have it stolen. They’re now owned by Vodafone, but in a fit of surprising sanity, Vodafone haven’t locked out non-Vodafone users from the service.
Through Zyb, when I upgraded my phone at the end of last year, importing the contacts etc. took ten minutes, and was one of the smoothest examples of that procedure I’ve ever done.
Anyway, on checking, it turns out the Zyb supports the iPhone – so that seemed to be the way to go.
After that, the process was fairly simple.
- Sign up Herself with an account at Zyb
- Install the iPhone app for Zyb (they even provide a link to it in the sign-up process, so it includes all the information necessary)
- Type in all the contacts from Herself’s Samsung, setting it up with correct addresses, merging mobile/contact/home/work numbers into one contact where necessary
- When done (about an hours work) sync the Zyb contacts onto the iPhone
- Job done.
Of course, if Samsung supported SyncML (or any other decent service) then it would’ve been a max of ten minutes to sort out. As it was, it took an hour. It could’ve been worse – far, far worse – if we’d been trying to do it via SIM or BlueTooth and then had to reorganise everything on the iPhone.
iPhone Replaced
Posted: Sun 2 August, 2009 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, iPhone 3 Comments »The actual exchange of the iPhone went fine in the end – went in to Norwich to the Carphone Warehouse (where Herself had got the first one) and explained the situation, and we got a replacement phone straight away.
The replacement version has worked out well so far.
It’s been updated to the 3.0.1 OS, and all is still well. I’ve got it all fixed up now with the connection details for our wireless network, Herself’s email account and so on.
The only downside at the moment is the fact that transferring the contacts and phone numbers from Herself’s phone to the iPhone may be a pig – Samsung phones are utter shit when it comes to transferring the phonebook to anything else.
iPhone Hassles
Posted: Sat 1 August, 2009 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, iPhone, Reviews(ish) 1 Comment »Yesterday, Herself went out and got an Apple iPhone from Carphone Warehouse.
Initially I was fairly impressed with it, there’s some nice interactions and stuff going on.
However, today we (OK, I) updated it to the latest version of the operating system, version 3.0.1. And since then the new iPhone has been a nightmare.
Firstly, Herself always has a lockcode set on the phone, so when you turn it on, you enter a four-digit PIN. Normally, no problem. However, as part of the upgrade to 3.0.1, the iPhone needs to connect back to iTunes, and iTunes can’t do that with a lock code set. Oh, and the iPhone wouldn’t do anything except say “connect me to iTunes”. Nothing else, no way to enter the lock code.
Cue a call to O2 to find out what needs doing, and then one to Apple. Which resulted in…
Factory Reset Number One. Yep, roll it all the way back to how we got it, loss of any settings we’d sorted. Square One. And an OS upgraded to 3.0.1.
And all was well. Um, except for not having any access to wi-fi settings (as in “Not installed” rather than “Not available”) or Bluetooth®. Totally greyed out, nothing there at all.
So a few resets, and another call to Apple.
Half an hour later, Factory Reset Number Two – and still no improvement.
So tomorrow we’re off to Carphone Warehouse, armed with an Issue Number from Apple, to get a replacement iPhone.
Let’s hope that one works better.
I’m not slagging off the iPhone per se – however, my experience with it so far has emphatically not been the most positive one. We’ll see how things go with the second one before I write up a valid review of it…