Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • iPhone 3G: never mind “it just works”; have you tried turning it off and back on again?

    As I mentioned earlier, O2’s 3G network has gone to crap today in my bit of Scotland – but talking to customer services, they were very keen to send me a checklist for 3G problems anyway. “We’ve sent this to a lot of iPhone customers”, the rep told me. Here’s the checklist exactly as it was emailed (hence the crap formatting).

    Turn Airplane Mode on, wait 15 seconds, and then turn Airplane Mode off
    again.  This resets all of iPhone’s wireless connections.

    2.Try restarting iPhone
    To turn it off, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the red
    slider appears. Slide your finger across the slider to turn off iPhone.
    To turn iPhone on, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple
    logo appears.
    Does iPhone appear frozen or stuck?  Try pressing and holding the Home
    button for 6 seconds to close a frozen application. Then try restarting
    iPhone again.

    3.Reset the SIM
    To remove the SIM card, insert the end of a small paper clip into the
    hole on the SIM tray.
    Insert the SIM card using the same method.

    4.Check APN
    Select settings, then general, then network, then cellular data network. Please make sure the following info is there:
    APN – mobile.o2.co.uk
    Username – vertigo
    password – password

    5. Try the sim in another handset
    Remove sim, put into another handset. If you receive 3G or EDGE coverage while doing this, then the issue is with your handset. If your sim still does not work in another handset then your sim card may be faulty.

    6.Try restoring iPhone using iTunes.
    Connect iPhone. When it appears in the Source list, click on Restore in
    the Summary pane.
    Note: This will delete all media and data. All settings will be reset
    as well. If possible, sync iPhone with iTunes before restoring to back
    up your most recent settings.

    If none of the above works, please call 2302 from your iPhone to arrange either a replacement handset or sim

    Hmmm. That O2 has a checklist for iPhone customers suggests that they’ve had a lot of queries from iPhone 3G owners whose 3G isn’t behaving. That’s not good, is it? It’s like coffee machine owners whose kit does everything but make coffee, or hairdryer owners whose hairdryers don’t dry hair. And since when was “try rebooting… if that doesn’t work, try wiping it and restoring it” an everyday way of troubleshooting Apple kit?

  • iPhone 3G connection problems? Might not be your iPhone…

    …or at least, it might not be if you’re in the West of Scotland. O2’s data network has gone tits-up and there’s no red-hot 3G action for anyone round these parts.

    O2 network issues aside, is anyone else following the reports of iPhone problems and getting a flashback to the first Xbox 360 red rings of death?  Just a few isolated problems, nothing serious, definitely not a manufacturing problem or a design flaw…

  • Frankenwriting

    Slate magazine journalist gets a tip that one of his pieces has been plagiarised. It turns out that it’s not just one piece, and it’s not just him.

    with the exception of the local events listings, every single item in the June 3-July 10 Bulletin is suspicious. Indeed, I wonder: In purely statistical terms, do the articles in the Montgomery County Bulletin amount to the greatest plagiarism scandal in the annals of American journalism?

    The publisher and writer respond via the Houston Press.

    It must have taken years of seasoned investigative know-how to push me off my lofty perch. It takes a dogged, intrepid journalist to expose the alleged wrongdoings of a 44-year-old college dropout who drifted from one lousy media job to another for 20 years; it takes courage to debase someone with a mouthful of cut-rate dentures who, up until 2007, lived in his parents’ home for seven years due to near-fatal bouts of clinical depression; it takes a journalist of a certain caliber to torpedo a pathetic hack who has barely squeezed out a living for nearly a decade at seven cents a word.

    [Via MetaFilter]

  • AOL to AOL bloggers: stop blogging (or at least, don’t expect to be paid)

    It seems that AOL’s intrepid army of bloggers has been told to stop posting in order to save money – so some of them are continuing to blog unpaid.

  • Cory Doctorow on the file sharing crackdown

    An interesting and typically inflammatory piece from Mr Doctorow in the Guardian:

    The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter… The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead… [here is] the tried-and-true answer to the problem of copyright-disrupting technology:

    * acknowledge that it’s going to happen;

    * find a place to collect a toll;

    * charge a fee that’s low enough to get buy-in from the majority;

    * ignore the penny-ante fee evaders;

    * sue the blistering crap out of the big-time fee-evaders.

  • Why I’d buy a dedicated e-book reader if somebody invented a good one

    I’ve just received my monthly threat from the newsagent, and it seems that my newspaper habit – that is, my one daily newspaper and two sunday newspapers – is costing £12.55 per week. Given that nine times out of ten the paper doesn’t turn up until I’ve been up and about for an hour or two, I’m spending £652.60 per year to read things I could get for free via RSS. And that doesn’t include the extra newspapers I tend to buy at lunchtimes, or my seriously scary magazine habit. Eek!

  • Four things I learnt on the internet today

    “The success of an anti-piracy campaign is measured in the number of hours it buys before the digital dam breaks” and 38 hours is considered a success. The LA Times on attempts to prevent fanboys watching camcorder copies of The Dark Knight.

    The crackdown on file sharing may be bad news for people who don’t file share. “…service gets worse as you wait in a queue wondering why your broadband has gone down, while the 50 people in front of you all have perfectly functional internet connections but are wondering if a lawyer is going to show up at their door.” Charles Arthur on the possible consequences of anti-P2P letters.

    Apple’s PR strategy is hurting its share price. “Apple, on the other hand, has had stellar financials, huge hit products, and massive growth sales for all its product lines. With those results you would expect Apple to outperform Microsoft.” Comment by Ian Betteridge on Dan Lyons’ post about Apple share prices.

    Caffeine is self-regulating and works almost instantly. “Women generally metabolize caffeine faster than men. Smokers process it twice as quickly as nonsmokers do. Women taking birth-control pills metabolize it at perhaps one-third the rate that women not on the Pill do. Asians may do so more slowly than people of other races.” NY Magazine on the wonders of caffeine (via Metafilter).

  • Think first, publish later

    Ian Betteridge argues that blogs aren’t as self-correcting as yer Scobles like to claim:

    Watching the development and correction of stories, there’s something interesting that I’ve always observed. When someone posts something controversial (and wrong) few of the sites which post about that original post also post a correction.

    And thus begins a classic network effect. Suppose Robert writes something erroneous, which 1,000 blogs pick up on and post about without correcting. If each of those has 100 readers, that’s 100,000 people who believe the original story – and unless Scoble’s readership is so huge that it encompasses all that 100,000 AND they correct their own posts, that’s a lot of misinformation out there on the web.

    I’ve got a column about this very same thing in issue 181 of .net (which isn’t out for a while yet). It’s the old problem of truth versus Internet Facts.

    Tangent: Ian’s blog fell out of my subscriptions list for no good reason a while back. I’d forgotten what a great blog he has.

  • Carphone Warehouse is getting more iPhone 3Gs

    Press release:

    The Carphone Warehouse has today confirmed delivery of a large quantity of the Apple iPhone 3G. The handset will be available in more than 800 stores across the UK, with stock expected to arrive by 14:00hrs on Thursday 24 July. This will be the largest delivery of the iPhone 3G since stores sold out on the 11 July launch, following unprecedented demand. Orders can also now be placed online at www.carphonewarehouse.com/iphone

    The website is showing “Due Friday 25th” on all models.

  • Giles Coren gets angry about sub-editing

    Some writers get rather upset if sub-editors change their copy, as this sweary rant from Giles Coren demonstrates:

    When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion.

    Then again, Roland White has a different view:

    Subeditors are the people who correct our mistakes. All journalism is done in a hurry, so it’s inevitable that mistakes are mad. Subeditors are our safety net. They make sure that copy fits, see that our words make some vague sort of sense and finally they write the headlice.

    They are hot stuff on split infinitives, can advise on the correct way to spell Gadaffi and are virtually the only people outside Burkina Faso who care that it used to be known as Upper Volta. Imagine an English teacher with a flick knife and you’ve got the general idea.

    I’ve had the odd thing butchered in editing (not by anyone I currently work with, I hasten to add). The worst was a piece for the Sunday Mail where the only original word that survived the sub-editing process was “the”; I’ve had subtle gags ruined by unnecessary exclamation marks; and I’ve been the recipient of sub-editing that takes the same approach to fixing copy as Father Ted did to fixing a little dent in a car.

    Generally, though, I’m with A.A. Gill:

    The joy of being a hack is that there is a back room of people far cleverer, more experienced and adept than I working to make me look clever, experienced and adept. If on occasion I fail to do so, naturally it’s their fault.