IPhone Battery Life : now with a tiny update

When Apple updated their stuff (all at the same time... what could POSSIBLY go wrong?).  There was a sudden battery life issue for many iphone users. 

It seemed to be random. Some people had issues others didn't.  Why? What could have caused it? 

I think I found the answer. (although only the few peeps who read my blog will ever know - you'll be cutting edge - ha!).

I did not do all the upgrades at once.  The first thing I did was upgrade my iphone 4 to iOS 5.  That's it.  No other changes.  No iCloud, no Lion on my Mac... just  iOS 5.  And my battery life went into a tailspin. 

I did all the little tricks that have been posted and I mostly got a better battery life, but it wasn't great.  I mean smartphones already have sucky battery life it doesn't help if one upgrades and it's suddenly worse. 

I waited around for a few months.  I let masses of Apple fans upgrade immediately and fail on all aspects.  They moaned and complained and lost stuff.  I waited longer still.  I had Mobile Me and I had until June. 

In another post I talked about the next upgrade. Lion went smoothly but iCloud was a huge annoyance.  I finally got the account straight. Thank heaven!  But my iphone battery life went straight down the toilet... again. 

This time I knew it had to be something to do with iCloud or there was a slim possibility it had to do with my gmail account being on my iphone. 

First of all I deleted my gmail account and added it back.  It's all imap and no mail actually sits on my phone thus it was simple.  No change though.  One down. On to the next.

Then I went into the iCloud settings.  I turned off everything except Mail... the others are (contacts, calendars, reminders, bookmarks, notes, photostream, documents and find my iphone).  Rebooted.  Battery life - phenominal!

Next I started turning things back on one at a time.  I never have Notes or documents to sync, so those remain off. If I want to sync a note I use Evernote. Since I wouldn't even be able to see a document on my iphone, there's no point in bringing those in.

First I turned on contacts, then calendars.  No problems. Then I turned on Reminders. Still no problems. Then Find my iphone.  Still okay.

Then Bookmark sync... OMG battery life started draining at a rate of about 10% (on further though I should make this 10-20%) per hour!!!  Holy crap!!!  Bookmarks? I vaguely remember getting a periodic message on my Mac telling me that Bookmarks were not syncing properly... I should have paid more attention. I always ignored it because I don't  use Safari. There is no reason for me to sync bookmarks  I just wanted to test it. I was absolutely blown away.  Bookmark sync must run continuously in the background.  If I had the battery charged to 100% it was dead by morning.  Completely dead. No life at all.

So Bookmark sync is off.  I even have photostream back on and the battery life continues in the phenomenal range.  How weird is that.  I have not heard a thing from anyone else anywhere with similar findings. 

If you know someone with an iphone and they are having battery issues... they might want to check for bookmark sync on either Mobile Me or iCloud. 

Geeze.  I'm still stunned.

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Tiny update: I do have a couple of apps like Omnifocus and a couple of calendar apps that tend to make my battery drain too fast for my liking.  If I turn those off in the background I'm much happier.  Thought I should throw that out there.

I should also be clear - I had the notes feature off on Mobile Me  (documents was not available and was not on by default) so neither of these could have been draining battery life.

Posted by: Teresa in WebTech at 11:01 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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A Couple of Random Thoughts

There are a couple of headlines on the Mac Rumors site I just couldn't pass up.

Apple Retail Stores Coming to India?

Will they have American help desk people serving them? 

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'Absinthe A5' Brings First Untethered Jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2

What will your device remember afterward?

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Have a great weekend!

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Awesomeness

Looks like yesterday's animated GIF from The Oatmeal has garnered him far more attention than he ever thought possible.  Really cool indeed!  Go read the post protest fun.

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SOPA and PIPA - Let's Try and Stop Them Before They Stop Us: Now Updated

Go here read this.

Thank you.

*****
UPDATE: This just in: a NSFW explanation of SOPA and PIPA by the Oatmeal.  I think this covers it.

I drew a Goat...

Posted by: Teresa in Current Affairs at 09:32 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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The Internet... Clinging to Life by a Thread

Before the SOPA and PIPA bills shut down the internet for good... hurry up and check this out.

Monumental Paper Architecture

or these

Incredible Photographs of Jellyfish

Cool stuff.  I found these on Flipboard for iPad which is really quite amazing.  They find some of the most awesome photos.  Of course this brings home to me exactly how uninspired my own forays into photography have been.  Oh well. 

So, go read them now before you can't any more.  Soon apps like flipboard, not to mention social networking of every kind, may be shut down with a single complaint.  What a sucky way for such a tremendous thing like the internet to slowly lurch to a halt. *sigh*

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Upgrade

Over the weekend I upgraded my Mac from the Snow Leopard OS to Lion.  Then upgraded Mobile Me to iCloud. 

The only reason I did this is because Mobile Me is going away in June.  I didn't want to make the move until the initial uproar had died down, but didn't want to wait until the stragglers were doing a last minute switch.  I figured the middle of January would be a good time.

Luckily Don McAllister of Screencasts Online made a couple of tutorials to make things smoother for the rest of us.  I made 3 backups of my system, downloaded the Lion app from the App store. Made a copy of that and saved it to a separate drive, then installed. 

It all went so well I've been rather dazed.  Not only that, but my machine is behaving much better under Lion.  I think all the applications, with the "Lion ready" updates, didn't work so well in Snow Leopard anymore.

Of course the downside was the upgrade to iCloud.  It sucked.  Apple tells you to sign in with your Appleid.  This is okay if you are new to Apple and have no Mobile Me stuff.

If you have Mobile Me already DO NOT DO IT!  DO NOT!!!  Sign in using your Mobile Me account - trust me you will be very glad you did!

That was my big mistake.  My appleid and my mobile-meid were two different things.  I had to sit through about 3 hours of chat with an Apple Mobile-Me person to get it straight.  They knew what they were doing, but OMG it all takes forever on chat!  I got the 2 id's combined and it's all working finally! 

I have yet to see if Lion will continue to play nice... iCloud too for that matter.  I had no documents on Mobile Me so I think that works greatly in my favor. Many people had issues with disappearing documents. 

So I've now gone through the painful process. It's nearly as bad as when a computer dies and you have to get a new one.  It's why I wait as long as I think I can before doing anything. 

Let's hope that's it for a while. Whew!

Posted by: Teresa in Ummmmm at 03:26 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Patch It Up

Yesterday was patch Tuesday for Windows machines.  If this is your OS, get the patches done please.

Also, you may remember my post from December about the Zero Day exploits for Adobe.  If you must use Adobe Reader and/or Acrobat, they now have the patches available. 

That is all.

Posted by: Teresa in WebTech at 11:56 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Are We Past the Holidays?

I think all the Christmas commercials are finally finished. I've never understood why car companies play them into the ground through the beginning of January... we're already sick of them by November 1.  No it won't make me buy someone a car for Christmas. Geeze.

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Heard that some girl bungee jumped and the chord broke. Someone explain to me why one jumps off a perfectly good bridge.

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The sports world is in meltdown because Tim Tebow played a competent game and has moved his team along in the finals. Here's a tip for everyone who is having issues with this... stop listening to sports talk while this is going on. If you don't listen you don't have to hear Tim talk about his religion. I'm pretty sure the Patriots will take out Denver this coming weekend. We'll see.

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Headline of the day:

Extinct Giant Tortoise May Still Be Alive in Galapagos

Ummm... so is it extinct or alive... it can't be both.  They need a new headline writer. Let me do the job an editor should have done:

Galapagos Giant Tortoise May Not Be Extinct

How's that?

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Last of all, if you exercise, please pay attention to what your body is telling you.  Although they specifically pick on yoga this time, this could be any type of exercise.  Unless you are an Olympic athlete, it's not a contest... really it's not.  So stop trying to outdo everyone around you and pay attention.

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Okay that's it for now. 

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Map It

One man, two years... an award winning map.

The Greatest Paper Map of the United States You’ll Ever See

I think I'll have to order one of these.  It's very cool! 

Thanks to Instapundit for the link.

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My Current Favorite Commercial

I'm not sure if they play these commercials other than during hockey games.  So if you aren't a hockey fan, you might not have seen Tim Thomas in his acting debut trying to get "Peggy" to help him with his credit card.



It cracks me up because it's so very Boston.  The cabbie is played by a local DJ Alicia Love, here's a bit about her. 

If we have to watch commercials about 1000 times per event, at least they should make us laugh.

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Out With the Old and In With the New

As always I'm ready to move on to a new year.  Not that this particular year was bad, but I like to look ahead and not back.

So Happy New Year to all of you and may 2012 bring you many wonderful things indeed! 

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 11:15 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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News You Can Use

Tim Thomas is the best goalie in the NHL.  He's also a really fantastic guy.  AND he's 37 years old!  I don't endorse athletes as role models, but many kids could benefit from knowing how he got where he is today.  My favorite quote:

"Sometimes it seemed like they would have rather had goalies in the NHL who looked good getting scored on than ones who looked bad stopping the puck,” he remembers.

*****
Stop brain shrink?  Well that's what these people are touting to keep you from losing your memory as you get older.  Does it work?  Who knows.  It's about as good as anything else out there I guess.

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A couple of scientists are proposing SETI be used to look for alien footprints on the moon.  I think they should look for human ones first and if they find them, then go on to the alien type. 

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So there you go.  Have fun. 

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Tweetings That Make me Laugh

One of the things I like about Twitter is the humor factor whether intentional or not.  If you follow the right people you will see some very funny things. 

Unintentionally funny:

DON'T DRIVE DRUNK. From 6pm-6am on New Year's Eve/Day AAA will take your drunk self and your car home for FREE, member or not: 800-222-4357

This was a retweet and I don't follow the original person who posted, but the first thing I thought was "so any other time it's okay to drive drunk... alrighty then".

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Here's another retweet from a person I don't follow but maybe I should....

BROS-DO NOT HIRE A MÖBIUS STRIPPER 4 A BACHELOR PARTY.OURS TOOK OFF ALL HER CLOTHES AND YET END UP FULLY DRESSED.FEELING PERPLEXED+RIPPD OFF

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And here's one from @deathstarPR who I do follow. It's all in how you look at it:

You say, "Force choke", we say, "thoughtful long-distance throat massage". #StarWars

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Do be careful though and don't look at twitter's public timeline - you'll need to bleach your eyes if you do.  Just sayin'...

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 01:42 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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More Meanderings

Saw a headline today that said...

Will Nelson's Exit Cost Dems Senate?

And I thought - I had no idea Willie Nelson was a Senator... um...oh okay... nevermind. heh.

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Apparently someone threw a dead duck onto the ice near the end of the San Jose (Sharks) / Annaheim (Ducks) game. I think that tops the dead squid they throw at the Detroit games.

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The guys at Bagel Tech Foto found Missy MWAC last week on youtube. This week they had her on the show. She is hilarious.

Here's her first vid where you will find out all about "the camera".



It's good, but I have to say her appearance on Bagel Tech Foto was awesomely hilarious.

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Ah lovely, GoDaddy supports SOPA - this makes them even sleazier than I though they could ever be and I thought they were at the bottom of the barrel.

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The security analysis firm Stratfor was hacked. Anonymous got lots of emails and passwords. Long long ago I subscribed to Stratfor. They started out free then went to a paid subscription. They were good, but sadly (in my view) a presidential election came along. They decided they had to make their very own "Presidential endorsement". *sigh* That's when they started touting their own political stance in their newsletters AND that's when I dropped them.

Politics of any stripe tend to make people into idiots of the highest order. Not good at all when you are trying to run an information business. At that point one has to question the quality of the information they are presenting in other areas. Best to not say anything at all.

Still... I wonder if any of my old info was still on their servers. Interesting.

As for the people throwing out innuendo about a security firm being hacked and "how good can they be"... well, it all depends on how they got hacked. Even then it's difficult for me to get too critical. Any web presence can be hacked if the people behind the attack are determined enough. They only need one way in - the site has to try and protect against everything. It's a losing battle.

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That's it for now. Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend and are resting up in preparation for the New Year.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 07:11 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Merry Christmas!

Have a lovely day!  I've been a little bit busy and forgot to post something until now. Ha! 

Hope Santa was good to all of you.

Let me add... I just saw this post by Charles and of course I had to go find a Topo Gigio vid. Then I saw Señor Wences.  So for all of you who remember Sunday nights with Ed Sullivan... enjoy!

Topo:


Señor:

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Social Media

Saw a tweet today from Chris Selland:

@cselland You know which bloggers are my absolute faves? Those who can take ANY topic and turn it into a post about themselves.

I thought this was the definition of blogging. All else is online media. heh.

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This story from the Telegraph was tweeted out by someone else - I forget who so it was probably a retweet.

Airline offers chance to pick who you sit next to using Facebook

Honestly I think I'd rather take my chances with whoever ends up next to me.  Except in cases of extreme weather and such, I won't have to sit next to the person for longer than a few hours.  The thought of someone looking me up on facebook to decide whether to sit next to me or not creeps me out for some reason.  No idea why, but it does.

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Evernote tells me Skitch for ipad is now available.   I may have to look it up and see if I can play with it.  Didn't have much interest in using it on my desktop mac, but it might be lots of fun on the ipad. We shall see.

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And last of all - this new service being offered by Rhode Island's TF Green airport.  I love this airport.  Really I do. 

That's it for now.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 07:34 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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YooHoo

For some reason I have a ton of emails that I subscribed to voluntarily.  I guess it's easy enough to hit the delete key so I don't really read most of them.  Today's headline caught my eye though and I looked at it for quite a while.

"WSJ TECHNOLOGY ALERT: Microsoft, Nokia Flirted With Idea of Making Joint Bid for RIM"

I'm wondering how companies flirt... Do they send chocolates?  Pen little notes they pass around the board tables beneath the noses of the person running the meeting (oh yes - definitely folded into that cute little football shape)?  Text them late night notes that say "I'm thinking of you..."?   Take them on dates to exclusive restaurants? 

Oh the story itself?  Who cares about that when we can speculate about the sex lives of companies...

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 08:08 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Wandering Stuff

There are headlines all over the net... sometimes 2 or 3 in the same feed telling me that Kim Jong Il is dead.  Okay - I get it already.  He has assumed room temperature.  Can we go onto the next story now?

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Google has an "Easter egg" going. If you go to their search bar and type in "let it snow" it starts to snow on your browser and then frosts up.  Not sure whether this is cool or not, but it got them lots of tweets and even a few headlines.

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Young son is headed this way for Christmas.  I hope the big snow storm which is now causing issues in the SW part of the US doesn't cause problems with his flight out. 

He got straight A's again this semester and I got him a good Christmas present.  It would be pretty much of a let down if he couldn't get here.

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There's a headline on one of my feeds that says something about a "British sprinter" raising money on ebay.  I keep reading it as "British spinster".  heh

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That's all I've got for now. 

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 11:06 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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A Little Dog Christmas

I love Border Collies and Papillons (there was a Papillon in the training class where I trained our dog years ago - small but very smart) also German Shepherds, Aussie Shepherds... well I like dogs. 



Now if only I could get them to decorate my house I'd be set.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 05:39 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Winding Down the Week

Okay so it's been about a week since I posted something.  And then I realized I don't have anything much to say even after a week.

I totally missed some sort of debate last night because really... who wants to voluntarily watch a bunch of idiots blowing hot air? 

I haven't had time to take any pictures lately or even look at those I took a while back.  Then again I have such a low attention threshold I almost never feel like going back and working on photos I took longer ago than last week.

I picked up flipboard for my iphone.  I can't decide if I like it or not. I haven't created an account because they won't let me do it on my big computer and I'm too lazy to try doing it on my iphone with the tiny keyboard.  So I open it and flip through the stories hoping something really interesting will be included.  So far nothing has really grabbed me.  I've seen other people tweeting how much they love it so I must be doing something wrong. heh.

After a conversation I had earlier today I keep thinking I really really need to write a book titled: A Geek's Guide  Do-it-yourself computer security for people who think nothing will ever happen to them. The prospect is daunting though and I don't know where to start.  Oh my.

Okay I need to get back to writing some code. I think I've procrastinated long enough.  Have a nice weekend.

Posted by: Teresa in Ummmmm at 05:09 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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