Thursday, January 19, 2012

I ♥ MacBook Air

I just bought a MacBook Air (Model 4,2) and IT ROCKS!!! This is largely thanks to the SSD but the 50% weight reduction from my old MacBook also helps. Boot time is drastically shorter and Photoshop files hundreds of megabytes in size load in mere seconds. My disk space has just been cut in half to 250 Gb but I'm not complaining. The product of the last 10 years of amateur photography will just have to be farmed out to a USB disk (or a 'vagrant' as we call it up here in the arctic) and I'll find a way to live with USB 2.0 until I can afford a Tunderbolt ™ drive. Of course if history is anything to go by, and given my recent strain of catastrophically bad luck, Apple will announce a new MBA with USB 3 ports and a Retina Display tomorrow. Incidentally the Apple Genius who sold it to me my new MBA was wrong, you can upgrade the SSD in the model 4,1 and 4.2 MacBook Airs.

Arrrrgh!

The iPhone audio problem is back. The only thing that seems to help is to reboot the phone which works for a while until, once again, 'phasmatis in machina'. This seems to be a software problem so the only thing to do is wait for iOS 5.1 and hope the apple-farmers got around to fixing this bug.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

iPhone 4S audio source problem

Had some trouble with my iPhone which refused to allow me to change the audio source while a phone call was in progress. Symptoms, with a Bluetooth headset connected:

  1. Trying to change the audio source during a phone call causes the audio to be lost.
  2. For some reason the default audio source was stuck on 'Speaker' whenever a call came in.

To fix this go to Settings->General->Accessibility->Physical & Motor->'Incoming calls' (not exactly the first place anybody would think look for this setting) and change the audio source from 'Default' to 'Headset'. This causes the phone to select the Bluetooth headset as default if it is connected, otherwise the call will default to the phone and switching to speaker works reliably.