Yummy Wakame

I had a bit of a scare tonight with a jammed iPhone that would not boot and being miles away from an Apple store I was out of options. After doing the whopping big update to v 2.01 late tonight the wifi router with remote hard drive went down, along with it my connected iTunes library causing iTunes to crash, right at the golden moment while the phone was updating and rebooting. Oh noooo! Even after I struggled with cables in tight spaces and resurrected the network by plugging directly into the router to get iTunes up again, the phone wasn’t even unrecognisable. The best my laptop could offer was that my shiny phone was an “unrecogniseable USB hub that may be malfunctioning”. iTunes had even folded up its usual iPhone parking space as if its own child had never played in its yard. A reboot of the laptop yielded no change. Plugging the iPhone into the power outlet didnt help either. The frozen Apple logo wouldn’t go away. I wondered if the battery could last long enough to drive down to an Apple store in the RV some time this week. It seemed unlikely. I was tired, defeated and sadder than I was the second day of school.

Then a simple search into Google, namely “iphone frozen unrecognizable won’t restart” yielded a wonderful surprise:
Restart a Frozen iPod or iPhone and
My iPod / iPhone won’t mount or update. Bingo!
(Note there are sadly some adult ads on the side that may offend some)

Lots of super simple advice to follow. And after my iphone rebooted a few times and was plugged in and out a few times it finally remembered who it was and what to do next.

Finally I can go to sleep without worrying about having lost a quarter of my brain. Good night all!

Wi-Fi Straitjacket

Found by ken-le-pen

If you want an affordable wireless speaker solution for your home and like me you have a lot of restricted audio formats that won’t play in iTunes (or if iTunes just bugs the nipples off you) there is great news!
Remote Speakers Output Plug-In will send streams to your Airport Express speakers through Winamp! No iTunes installation required. It will even allow you to control the volume through Winamp and works with the remote control.

I just purchased it today for next to nothing through PayPal and it works beautifully! Eric, the creator, was very helpful and responded quickly when I had problems getting it to work at first. You can test it out for 2 weeks for free too.
Here’s the Winamp Plugin page with reviews.

Play Any Song From Any Room Anywhere

Wirelessly stream digital music and Internet radio, all over your house—in up to 32 rooms.

This is how it works…

Coffee Shop Websites: “In this interview, we discuss the joys and downsides of freelancing, outsourcing tasks and web design issues, like content management systems and using Dreamweaver as a glorified text editor.”

This might be the best article I’ve read on the freelance life. I envy Nathan, and I look forward to the day when I can work from the coffee shop every day.

~ Craig Campbell

“While WiFi devices measure their range in feet, making them useful for homes, coffee shops, and bakeries, WiMAX measures its range in miles. Many miles. 30 or so, to be more precise. That makes WiMAX a potentially genuine competitor to cable and DSL.” - ArsTechnica.com

Read more about WiMAX.

Here’s the Belkin WiFi Skype Phone, which purportedly has the ability to connect to Skype independently of your PC being turned on and logged in. That means that this phone would be able to work anywhere you can find a WiFi connection. With more and more local cities and towns providing widespread WiFi access, this could soon be a major competitor for local-only cell providers like Cricket and maybe even a rival for the larger providers one day.