Wednesday, 29th July 2009
iPhone Restored From The Brink of Death
Fi’s annual leave ended today and so she had to get up before 07:00 to get ready for work. Even though I’m not back to work until Friday (nights = rubbish) I decided to get up early as I wanted to go to the house to finish building the wardrobes and to carry on touching up the edges of the paintwork as well as clearcoating the radiators. When I got up though, I grabbed my iPhone only for it to tell me to plug it into iTunes and would only give me emergency calls. No big deal I figured – I’m still running the iPhone betas (as of this morning, OS 3.1 b2) and they tend to expire every few weeks. All it means is that I have to download the newest beta every few weeks and restore my phone from a backup. Instead of doing this though I decided to try to see if I could ‘ditch’ running beta operating systems and just get back to the ‘official’ ones. In a nutshell – you can’t.
Please take note of this as it took me four hours to figure out. Despite much praise – the Pwnage tool didn’t work. All’s well that ends well though. I managed to revive the phone and setup USB and Bluetooth tethering on both my Mac and Fi’s. Why bother? Well, I need to setup a new BT phone line at the house (along with a £122 connection charge!) and that is happening this coming Friday. BT don’t allow you to have two active phone lines at two properties in one name so I am having to lose the line at the flat we are currently in. That in itself is not a big deal as I rarely use the landline for calls. What I do use it for though is broadband. Sadly, my ISP can’t move my broadband to the house until the new phone line has been connected and even then it won’t be for about 6-10 days. The bottom line is that Fi and I are going to be without broadband for a couple of weeks. At least now I have tethering on my iPhone (£15 per month for a 3GB allowance) we won’t be left completely high and dry.
Today wasn’t a total waste though. I was going to play Harry at squash but I couldn’t book a court at short notice so I just went round to his place and played on the PS3 (I really am rather shit at most games it would seem, especially Pro Evo Soccer). I managed to build a bedside cabinet and the builders are still tanking along with the demolition work (there is now no boiler). We had some rather excellent news from our Australian accountant – it seems I should be getting around AUD$6000 in the form of a tax return. Woot! Looks like I may be able to afford the slightly better speakers after all…