iPhone 3.0

released at 17:25 GMT 230.1MB

17:28 GMT still downloading ...

17:45 GMT up and running—it feels faster

Apple don't make it easy to find the instructions for using new features.

You can test MMS by sending a picture to yourself (the interface in messages, which was SMS, lets you take and send a picture, or send one from your photo album). If MMS doesn't work, prompt O2 to direct your MMS messages to your phone (instead of to a web page as before) by texting the message "MMS" to 1010.

To see Google StreetView on maps, drop a pin on the street you want to view. The StreetView icon appears on the pin label; click it. (This isn't new to 3.0, but it's new to me.)

MacBook Air freeze: reset SMC

Daily, I take my MBA to work, and connect it to my 30" cinema display. At the end of the day I disconnect and take it home. Once back home, I plug into the 24" LED display and keep on working. The MBA sleeps while I'm cycling to and fro — and wakes up when I plug it in.

Today, I got home, plugged in, and found a blank screen. I waited; nothing happened. I waited some more. Eventually I gave up waiting and did a forced shut-down, by pressing and holding the power button.

To restart, I pressed the power button. The chimes, and the apple came up just as usual; then the little wheel thing came up, but it didn't move. I waited — nothing. I plugged in, unplugged, opened. closed, shut-down (again) etc. I tried all of this again, and again, in various permutations, and with plenty of waiting — nothing. Frozen as a dead parrot!

So, I reset the System Management Controller — that worked :-)

To reset the SMC: Shutdown; plug in to mains power; hold down shift-ctrl-alt (alt is aka option) on the left side of the keyboard, and press the power key once; then release the keys, wait 5 seconds, and press the power key to restart. Effective magic!

The SMC includes the Power Management Unit (PMU) you may be familiar with from other devices.

Pipex > Tiscali >TalkTalk

I've been with Pipex for years. Tiscali took over in March. A couple of weeks ago my internet service went crazy.

Some sites worked: for example, Google seemed OK.

Some sites didn't: Facebook wouldn't load.

Others were erratic. The Guardian front page loaded fine — but none of the links. FirstDirect almost worked — I could look at my balances, and set up a transfer, but the final step of confirmation would hang, and hang, and never complete.

The solution: the MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) on my Speedtouch 510 was set to 1500. Tiscali (or maybe its already TalkTalk) don't do 1500 — they do 1492 (familiar as the year Columbus set sail).

My configuration file now says (in ip.ini)

ifconfig intf=loop mtu=1492 group=local
ifconfig intf=eth0 mtu=1492 group=lan
ifconfig intf=pppoa mtu=16384 group=wan

and everything appears to be back in working order.

There's a lot of discussion of different values on the web. The 16384 above is 16K, the actual MTU used by the pppoa interface (which links me to my ISP) is negotiated down from this value by the Speedtouch 510. The ip iflist command (use this via the telnet interface to the Speedtouch 510) tells you this negotiated MTU value for the pppoa interface (and also the values you have specified for the loop and eth0 interfaces). The MTU for loop and eth0 should be set to the same value as is negotiated for pppoa.

=>ip iflist
Interface       GRP MTU   RX        TX        TX-DROP  STATUS
0  loop         1   1492  2147      0         0        UP   
1  eth0         2   1492  12453866  234402217 0        UP   
2  pppoa        0   1492  234257958 12256628  0        UP