Symptoms: The homepage icons don’t go into edit or wobble mode when they are held down. It works fine on mine but try as I might holding any of those icons down does nothing!

Problem: It means she can’t easily edit the icon order on the home pages or perhaps more importantly, can’t move things into the folders that the recent update provides.

If anyone knows the answer I’d be very pleased to hear from them.

iTunes sync made the whole operation pretty straightforward, if longwinded. After about 20mins-half an hour of data thrashing between the phone and the Mac, I was able to use a few of the new features – folders and email consolidation being the two most useful to me. Unfortunately the update also slowed the phone to a crawl for some apps.

After a lot of Googling I seem to have found a solution which gets back at least some of the speed – simply reset the phone a couple or three times!
By reset, I mean hold down the ON/OFF button and the Home button for about 15 seconds, that means past the “slide to power off” screen until a silver apple logo appears, you can then release the buttons. The phone will display the logo while it resets itself and after about another 30-40 seconds it displays the home screen and your all set to go. It took three goes to speed up anything on mine but it has worked – results may vary!

Of course you’d be daft to try this without having an up-to-date backup of all your settings – but you’ve already got one of those haven’t you ?

My trusty MX1000 cordless mouse has developed the same fault as before. Unfortunately that model is no longer made so I gave them a call to ask about suitable replacements. Turns out they are are happy to consider the mouse I have as “under warranty”,  offered me a replacement, and have immediately arranged to ship it today!

The original MX1000 wasn’t cheap at about £80 all those years ago but it’s proved to be a great buy as Logitech want to keep me as a happy customer – they’ve certainly done that!

If you are in the market for a new mouse I highly recommend spending a little more and buying something made by Logitech – my experiences with them suggests you won’t be disappointed.

Anyhow, this time, she had discovered a very odd link to me with another member of her tree. The surname of this person was “EberSpacher” which, at least to my ear, is not a common name and certainly not one I have in my tree. The link she discovered was in an archive of a newspaper and it was posted as part of a will/probate search for relatives, the strange part? well, it turns out that before going into a nursing home on the IOW for the last few year of her life, this lady lived in the house that Sue and I have now!

When we took on this place, the building society used by the previous occupants contacted us and asked if we would like a pile of historical documents about the property, its previous owners and the original builders etc. Of course I grabbed the pile quickly and following the recent email was able to use it to confirm that the “Eberspacher” mentioned was in fact the sister of a lady who had married one of our house  builders, and that I could also confirm that she had been left the house in a will as I have a copy of the probate document in the pile of stuff I was given.

I was able to fill in a load of holes for the emailer and I’m sure I have some more stuff for her somewhere (might even be a few photo’s of the people involved). She was over the moon with it all and I now have a lot more interest in the history of our house as well as completing a very odd circle of ownership via unknown relatives in the outer spiral arm of my family tree…..

Coca-Cola – between £ 7.98 & £ 24.11
Coca-Cola (Diet) – between £ 8.73 & £ 24.11

These prices are for 24x330ml cans but they show such a wide variation that it is obvious the market isn’t price sensitive.

Consumption estimates vary but it’s fairly safe to assume 2-3 million cans are sold in the UK each day and that’s just Coca-Cola!

Assuming CC have about 20% of the UK carbonated drink market we are actually looking at a total market of 10-15 million cans per day!

Add  a tax of 10p per can and suddenly we have £1-1.5 million pounds per day!

Every little helps!…… Anyone like to have a think about chewing gum?

This blog uses built in WordPress tools to ensure that I don’t see any spam posted in the comments but keeping control of my mail client’s filters isn’t quite so easy – I should say wasn’t quite so easy!

All my registered domains have spam filtering on their mail servers but increasingly this doesn’t always catch the latest rubbish, that still makes its way through to my desktop and, in my case, Outlook. The inbuilt Microsoft filter isn’t that bright and for some years now I have relied on a little add-in called SpamBayes which is an Open Source solution to the problem using Baysian filters to “score” each message and filter it accordingly. All fine and dandy then? Well no, not really. Unfortunately updates to SpamBayes have been few and far between over the last 2 or 3 years and the project seems to have stalled. This means that recent updates to Windows and Outlook have started causing proiblems with it.

I have noticed that Outlook often doesn’t fully quit when I shut it down. That means that when I restart it, I actually get two copies, 1 hidden from the previous session and 1 for the latest startup, this causes resource problems by the end of each day as I have seen 5 or 6 Outlook sessions running in Task Manager. There are various add-ons to cure this but so far I haven’t found one without its own problems.

Enter SpamFighter! I came across this when I decided to ditch SpamBayes for something more up-to-date and have been using it for the last few weeks. It works a treat and doesn’t interfere with Outlook at all, so I decided to lash out the £17 for a years subscription to the system. After a very simple download/install, I now have aclean inbox again.

SpamFighter works as an add-in to Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird and for the main part operates as a basic spam filter, putting all bad mail into its own folder and marking it. The clever bit is that it is user supported and anything it misses which makes its way through to the inbox can simply be marked by me as spam and that action is relayed to several million other SpamFighter users who systems will also mark that message in the same way. Of course they do the same for my inbox! In addition to the “community” rules I can also add my own white or blacklist for senders and the software uses those rules to override the community ones if needbe.

There’s a free, fully functional, 30 day trial available at the website. Download SPAMfighter today.

Why? Well take a look here, the list of people with problems after this update is growing by the hour and they are having serious problems. My own machine(s) updated themselves automatically and, thankfully, seem to be working – Matt though has a problem with his laptop which, maybe coincidentally, now refuses to boot.

Matt’s machine failed with the famous BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) and the display reports a problem with the boot section of his internal drive. While I can see no reference (at the link above) to the same thing happening anywhere else, it does seem odd that it happened on the same day as all these other reports.

There are fixes and details of how to apply them at the link – as usual with these things, it’s a good idea to read the most recent thread posts before doing anything which changes your setup….

I guess the other problem may be that you won’t be able to read this if your PC won’t boot! Doh!

I presume I can add photos somehow but I’ll leave that for another day!

Yes, I like Apple products and yes, I did follow the bloggers covering today’s event; but I have a small problem before parting with my hard earned cash. Why? well take a look at the US Apple site (today anyway)… looks good eh?

Well yes it does until you look at the “Environmental Requirements” down at the bottom right….

The first line makes sense but, what the heck does he second mean?  Current temperature here on the IOW is about 2°C, according to the spec published, the iPad wouldn’t be working here….

Yes, of course I know what they mean, but surely they employ people with enough intelligence to avoid this kind of confusion?