The O2 store down at the Horsefair end of Broadmead had some in stock the other day, so I went and waited in a line of 3 people for over half an hour: the purchasing procedure has been made a lot more complicated since the original iPhone came out. Still, I passed the time chatting […]

Incremental backups on unix systems are annoying. For a start, you have to do a “full snapshot” fairly regularly, otherwise it takes rather a lot of time/effort/disk-usage to restore to, say, yesterday (which is the most likely place you want to restore to). You can’t delete older backups willy nilly. You also can’t compress older […]

A quick piece of advice for anyone thinking of purchasing a Netgear GS748T - don’t even think about it until they’ve brought out newer firmware than 1.0.3_10.
We’ve been using Netgears as our access and distribution layer switches for years now, and never had a problem with them. Reliable, easy to use (especially the old-style telnet […]

Hoorah - O2 is upping the limits on the number of minutes and txts included each month. Basically, the base tariff goes from 200 mins & txts to 600 mins and 500 txts a month. Existing users get transferred onto the new levels automatically.
The only thing I did notice was that on O2’s page for […]

It’s been a little while since I last posted - I thought it’d be more useful just to use the iPhone for a bit and see if features I thought were great turn out to be gimmicks that wear off.
The feature that’s faded most for me is the keyboard. While I still think it’s fairly […]

Since changing to Dovecot as the server, IMAP email now works beautifully on the iPhone. At least, once I’d deleted the account and re-typed in all the details (that non-standard IMAP port bug totally screws your account, it just hangs when you change settings even when you change the port back to 993).
I can now […]

IMAP is a great way of getting at email. All your email stays on the server, and you can access it from multiple devices (and all devices see the same email). This is in contrast to POP, where email is generally deleted from a server, and it’s all but impossible to get a syncronised view […]

Now here’s something odd.
I’m changing to new IMAP server software at Watershed (more on that later), and so during the testing phase I’ve got the old server listening on the standard port of 993, and the new one listening on 10993. And I thought I ought to test the new server, Dovecot, on different mail […]

Lying in bed, not feeling well at all (took the afternoon off work), woke from my dozy slumber and decided to check my email using the iPhone, to see if any major disasters had happened without moving.
No problem - launched the Mail app and got it to connect. I think then a series of circumstances […]

A phone keyboard is not just about the key size and layout. How easy is it to get at the symbols? How easy is it to go back a few characters and correct a mistake? How easy is it to touch type?
The qwerty keyboards I’ve had on phones are:

Treo 270
Treo 600
XDA Exec
iPhone

The two Treos were […]