Just a quick post if only to make a note of this for myself. For years the method of clearing the DNS cache on a Mac has been
dscacheutil -flushcache
This command runs OK on OSX 10.8+ but doesn’t actually seem to clear the DNS cache. On OSX 10.8+ the command you need is:
sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder
I’ve had a few people now ask me about this problem. It seems to affect almost all models of iPhone and iPod. The problem is basically that while you are listening to music or an audiobook the iPhone randomly and without warning jumps into voice control.
I’m 99.99% certain that this isn’t a software problem and as far as I can tell it only happens when you are moving with the iPhone – if the iPhone or iPod is stationary on a desk or table I’ve never seen it happen.
The problem therefore seems to be to do with the electrical connection between the headphones and the iPhone. There are a couple of things to try:
1. Try a brand new pair of headphones and see if the problem stops. With wear and tear the cable can develop small cracks in the conducting circuit which as they momentarily break and reconnect are enough to trigger voice control.
2. As a last resort try cleaning the headphone socket on the iPhone. You do this at your own risk and you need to take care not to cause any damage! When I do it I get a small cotton-wool bud and gently use it to wipe the inside of the socket. Dust from your pocket and bags can build up and be enough to stop a strong electrical connection.
Good luck and I hope one of these suggestions fixes your iPhone and stops the random voice control activation.
If you are like me when you got Apples new iOS6 maps on your phone the first thing you check is have they got your own business or the place you work listed in their database. As reported in the press several locations are missing and Apple are expecting to crowdsource corrections and additions. That means they actively want us to report suggested changes.
I’d read that Apple want us to report problems with maps but it wasn’t exactly obvious how you go about it. I’ve now worked it out and thought I’d share it with you in this blog.
All you need to do to add your business or a missing location to Apple Maps is:
1. Find the location on the map.
2. Tap the page corner in the bottom right of the map display.
3. The map page will then flip back as shown below to reveal the options screen.
4. Now look really carefully. Just above the print button in grey text on a grey background there’s a well hidden link for “Report a Problem”. It’s so well hidden that until you know it’s there I bet you couldn’t even see it.
5. Press this link and you’ll then see a list of the various types of problems you can report. Half way down the list you’ll find “Location is missing”. Select this option and then click Next.
6. They then display the map and ask you to position a pin where your business is located. Do that and then click Next.
7. You then get a screen which lets you enter the name of the business, address, phone number, opening hours, URL website address and the category of business.
8. When you have done all of that press Send and the details will be sent through to Apple.
I’ve now reported a couple of missing local businesses and will be tracking how long it takes Apple to approve the changes and commit them to their database. As soon as I see them I’ll update this blog with how long it takes.
When Apple released iOS6 I was away on business. I was able to download and apply iOS6 over the hotel wifi without any problems and it all looked great until the next day when someone tried to phone me in the car. The iOS6 update had stopped the speaker and on closer inspection the external GPS receiver in the TomTom Car Kit from working.
I tried deleting the TomTom app and reinstalling but that didn’t do any good. In the end I tracked it down to what must have been a corrupted permission setting.
To get the TomTom Car Kit working again after installing the iOS6 update this is what I had to do:
1. Make sure TomTom isn’t running as an active app.
2. Launch Settings and then select the Privacy option
3. Now select Reset Location & Privacy
This will erase all the permissions you have granted to apps that try and access location services on your iPhone. The first time you use each app after doing this it will ask you again if you want to allow it to sense where you are currently located. When you next launch the TomTom app make sure you say yes and that will fix the car kit.
I’m not sure why this worked as the audio on the car kit isn’t really connected with location services but I guess when this isn’t enabled the iPhone doesn’t send the right electrical signals into the car kits dock connector to activate it.
Hope this works for you. Please leave a comment to let me know either way.
I had a strange problem on a WordPress blog site today that I haven’t seen before. The image resize and thumbnail generation wasn’t working. Normally when you upload an image to WordPress it creates 3 versions of the image at different sizes but this wasn’t happening and I was just left with the large original file.
When I went to insert the image into a post the resize options were disabled (or greyed out).
WordPress resize disabled
At first I thought it might have been caused by a problem with the Theme I was using but the problem continued after switching back to one of the standard themes. Then I checked the directory permissions incase the WordPress install didn’t have authority to write the resized images back to the file system, but again that was all fine.
It turns out that WordPress uses the Apache PHP5-GD library to do it’s resizing and for some reason on the build of Ubuntu Linux on the server I was using this wasn’t installed by default. To check this I just put a phpinfo(); into a small dummy php file and ran it from the browser. What you should see is something like this:
If you don’t see this then it’s simple to install with
sudo apt-get install php5-gd
and then restart Apache and you’re done.
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