Grrrrr, Fking Fring

So, I installed Fring on my iPhone on Friday. Fring is a Skype type application for mobile devices. On Saturday I noticed that my iPhone battery was quite low so I left in on charge overnight. By Sunday lunchtime it was down to 10% battery life remaining and I had to leave it at home to charge again.

I took it off charge in the evening to listen to a podcast for half an hour and by the morning it was totally flat again.

By now it was obvious to me that Fring was causing an excessive battery drain so I removed it and had to charge by iPhone battery for the third time in three days.

Googling "Fring" and "battery" seems to show that it's a known issue with Fring

Fridge / Frozen

So, our fridge freezer seems to have packed in. It probably happened a couple of days ago, but we've only just noticed that it isn't cold inside any more. I popped home at lunchtime to get my beer fridge out of the garden shed and put in in the kitchen until we sorted a replacement fridge freezer.

While out in the garden I checked on our frog spawn, as I'd previously noticed the top layer had been damaged in the sub zero temperatures we'd had recently. The whole area of the pond was covered in ice, but I was surprised to see that there was now more frog spawn than before.

After a bit of a struggle I manager to get my beer fridge out of the shed and into the kitchen, where I filled it with the more important and costly items out of the broken fridge. This would tide us over to the weekend when we could get a new fridge freezer and dispose of the old one.

Footnote 1: The old fridge seems to have started working again later this evening.

Footnote 2: It packed up again a few days later so we had to buy an new one

Grrrrr, TomTom

A few days ago, in preparation for a long weekend in the UK, I decided to dig out our latest TomTom GPS and make sure it was all up to date with the software and map corrections.

After the update I was stuck with what seems to be known as the "TomTom Red X" and a GPS that no longer worked.

I'd had a couple of tries to fix it myself but to no avail so this evening I settled down with a glass of wine and Googled for the problem. It seemed to be quite widespread and had affected a lot of users of different TomTom models.

I had tried clearing the flash memory several times but I still didn't have a functioning GPS so I eventually bit the bullet and after backing up all of the files on the GPS I wiped it. By this time I was well through the bottle of wine and while I wouldn't advocate alcohol while trying to fix technology it did make it a bit easier.

Instead of hovering over the "are you sure you really want to wipe the device?" option for ages I said a quick "Hell, yes!" and it was wiped clean in no time at all.

After reinstalling the data, removing and reinstalling the applications folder, and wiping the flash memory yet again I eventually had a working GPS again.

All it took was 3.5 hours out of my evening and a bottle of wine.

I'm just so glad that I hadn't decided to update the GPS the night before our trip.

Missing Manual

I phoned Jessops regarding the items missing from my Canon 5D MkII package and they're going to chase them up from Canon

Munich to Isle of Man

Saturday 3 January

We took the subway and train to the airport for our flight home. Because of the low temperatures and snow the plane had to be de-iced before we could take off.

Because of this delay we arrived at Gatwick about one hour late and even though we rushed like mad we missed our connecting flight home. And there were no more flights to the Isle of Man that day As we were still "in transit" with British Airways they flew us to Manchester where we caught a flight to the Isle of Man