a CHANGE has come to the White House

March 20, 2009 in humor with 3 Comments
Tags: humor, obama, white house

or so says a couple of images

Before …

After …

{via e-mail, by a canadian friend of mine }

iPhone: no Wi-Fi network – RESOLVED

March 14, 2009 in Apple, hardware, iPhone with 1 Comment
Tags: Apple, hardware, iPhone, support

Finally I have a couple of minutes to summon up the recent events regarding my iPhone 3G.

In a week time after my call at the Apple’s Official Support “free” number an UPS has come to my office, taken the damaged iPhone to Netherlands, then a techician stated it’s permanent damage and sent me back a brand new iPhone, in a slightly lesser elegant package than this one:

So now I have a brand new 16gig’s 3G iPhone, after having buyed a new one for a ridiculous price.

I’ll take it for a sign of a superior force to me, to have an iPhone

Some more photos of the packages that Apple sent me for the AppleCare Service restitution are visible with the support tag on my iPhone IPERNITY album.

pleasant, unexpected surprise from IPERNITY

March 3, 2009 in on the Web with Leave a Comment
Tags: community, ipernity, photo sharing, social networking

Last night I got home later and more tired than usual when in the letterbox I found a little package:

Sender are the boys at IPERNITY, the on-line service to publish and share with your family and your friends photos, audio files, video and documents … service which I got subscribed to after my odissey with Flickr …

On the rear an hand written laconical, but moving Thank You“:

Maybe it’s because last year I paid in advance for a 2-year PRO account after just a week of use as a “regular” user?

Maybe it’s because I’ve started to helping them with the FAQ and content translations in italian ?

Or maybe it’s because this year they were the winners of the 2nd edition of the Mashable’s Open Web Awards in the Photo Sharing category ???

Whatever!!! In any case I got some nice stuff, starting with four lovely pins …

a key holder and a nice “necklace” to add to the collection started a couple of years ago participating to various BarCamp here in Italy !!!

And the first pin is now proudly shown everday wherever I go on my notebook’s Belkin bag:

iPhone: no Wi-Fi network – update

March 2, 2009 in Apple, hardware with Leave a Comment
Tags: Apple, hardware, iPhone, wi-fi, wireless

Just a quick update on the problem I’ve told you about in my latest post …

After having tried also the tip that my friend Cataldo gave to me on Twitter without success this morning I’ve decided to call the Apple Support and … as I feared … I got the confirmation of an hardware failure so, in a couple of days, I’ll have an UPS-guy at the door to send it back and get it repaired …

After all the test, the definitive screenshot that claims the white flag is this one below:

iPhone: No wi-fi network

March 1, 2009 in Apple with 1 Comment
Tags: Apple, hardware, how-to, iPhone, wi-fi

First of all sorry for the screenshot, which is in Italian … I hope you’ll understand where the Wi-Fi control panel it’s located anyway

It’s been a frantic end of the week and only in the last couple of days I’ve become aware that my iPhone 3G isn’t Wi-Fi capable anymore …. iPhone which has been bought used a twenty days ago and has been working smootly since then.

Problem is that it can’t see available wireless networks around it AND the entire Wi-Fi menu isn’t accessible anymore, as you can see in the screenshot … Even if I follow the Settings / General / Network menu path the Wi-Fi menu is greyed out

As a premise I have to say that the test I did were taken in 3 previously used placed, with different and working networks.

Until now this is what I’ve tried without success:

1. entered in Fly mode and tried activating the Wi-Fi;
2. disabled the support to the 3G cell-network, in case the device would prefer it for a more fast connection than the one provided via the available wireless network, giving it a higher priority
3. tried to connect without the SIM of the actual phone line;
4. tried everything above with a different SIM from one of the official cell network provider of the iPhone, previously used in it;
5. reset all the networking options via the Setting / General Restore menu;
6. restored the iPhone via iTunes, then tried connecting the Wi-Fi befor and after backing up all the previous content.

Obviously I do have the lastest official firmware installed and never ever tried a jailbreak or unlock or anything similar.

I’m out of ideas, can you suggest me something more to try ?

ma.gnolia had a bad stop, will it restart? and we will care about?

February 21, 2009 in on the Web with 2 Comments
Tags: ma.gnolia, recovery, social bookmarking, web2.0

I don’t know how many of my readers are habitual users of one or more of the many social bookmarking services available out there … I am one of those and until a couple of weeks ago I’ve used del.icio.us (sorry, I’m a fan of the old “spelling”) and ma.gnolia.

For long time, in the dashboard of this blog and it’s italian brother I’ve had a couple of draft regarding the latter, which I’ve enjoyed using and also made a series of screenshots to explain the differences between ma.gnolia and del.icious regarding the community aspect of social bookmarking … some of those images are available on my Ipernity profile.

In any case now that is history since at the beginning of this february the ma.gnolia staff witnessed a massive data loss/corruption, one that – if my memory doesn’t fail me – hasn’t ever been recorded in this social, or web2.0, web era …

We users lost all of our bookmarks AND all the time spent, and the subsequent richness, of our tags and relations build between users and groups.

Since the announcement of this failure, at a regular pace, Larry Halff on the home page of http://ma.gnolia.com and in it’s GetSatisfaction section (of which probably I’ll spend a couple of words in a future post) has published a log of the recovery and a list of possible ways for the user to recovers all his data … coming to a couple of days ago when he announced that ma.gnolia itself isn’t able to provide back that data and so, if you used the service and did not share your bookmarks you do not have any way to recover them.

Personally in the last couple of years I’ve always tried to keep in sync my del.icio.us and ma.gnolia collection and I do have a weekly backup of the first on my hard-drives so I can’t tell you if the ma.gnolia’s proposed retrieval methods works and how much information can you have back aside the “clean” bookmark which, I’m repeating myself, isn’t the true value of what’s lost!

For sure the ma.gnolia service as we knew it is dead.

Larry has done also a video interview {that I still have to watch} in which he talks about the hardware problem behind this failure and of the future of this project. But how much credibility can he count on? Does he really think that users will pay him money to keep their data while he’s just lost a lot of them ?

I wish him all the best, and advice to carefully think on what kind of service he will offer in the future and to plan wisely a growth path.

Also we will have in this year 2009 to watch more closely at our data, from a privacy point of view as usual, and on how this on-line services are going to deal with them … availability, backup and so on.

Now, provided that I use happily del.icio.us, have FoxMarks installed everywhere on my PCs, are there other social bookmarking sites worth of being used ?

Keep the name’s coming in the comments, thanks!