iPhone black screen of death

So your iPhone is stuck with a white Apple logo stuck on a black background. You've searched the Internet and somehow ended up here...

I've found that if you try the following you can get it restart again ok:

1) Put the device into restore mode 

2) Hold down the power button till it reboots

3) Once it starts rebooting try clicking the power button and/or home button for a few seconds at a time

4) It either restarts normally, or try again - go back to step 1/2

I know it seems a bit random but it can work if nothing else does. Though it probably indicates there's a hardware problem with your device if this keeps happening even after you do a full restore or two...

Update (Oct22): If you're seeing a black screen on a newer iPhone (e.g. 10+ onwards) with only three buttons (i.e. power, volume up and down) then you can try the hard reset sequence:

1) Tap on volume up

2) Tap on volume down

3) Hold down on the power button until it reboots

cat: -: No such file or directory

A weird error that took me a while to track down. I came across it in the iproute2 configure script which was setting the TMPDIR environment variable before using a cat heredoc statement (e.g. when you include some data in a shell script which demarked using markers - in this case 'EOF'):

TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d config.XXXXXX)
cat >test.c <<EOF
stuff and more stuff
EOF 

The problem is that the TMPDIR variable is used by the cat command. And in this case the TMPDIR is set to the output of mktemp which creates a temporary directory in the current working directory, but this is not usable by the cat command and results in the above error - it seems that cat command will only accept a TMPDIR if it is in /tmp and fails if it is set to another base directory?! According the man page mktemp is supposed to default to using /tmp but it's not working on Linux - It works fine on MacOS. Anyway so one just need to make the following change:

TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d /tmp/config.XXXXXX)

Freeing up 'Other' space on the iPhone

Recently I'd noticed my iPhone was getting full without me adding anything much to it. In iTunes I noticed that it was half full 'Other' stuff - WTF?! I realise with a few hundred apps I was pushing things a bit but not that far. I looked around and found this article on cleaning up the 'Other' stuff on an iPhone - I tried its suggestions to no end. But it led me to exploring my phone further...

I noticed that the 'Voice memos' section was loaded up with duplicated audio files some of which were quite large. There's clearly a bug somewhere leading to this (I'd seen this kind of duplication bug in iTunes for music tracks before but it seems to be fixed now - but not so for Voice memos).

So the way to get rid of them and clear out the 'Other' category is to use the iExplorer (or similar - Ubuntu etc can mount an iPhone so you can see these things) software and navigate to Media/Recordings and delete all the duplicates recordings. The problem is that it seems the bug persists... so to really clear it up you need to make sure you've got copies of the memos you want (they should be in iTunes but make sure before the next step - if they're not then use iExplorer to export them out or failing that obtain them from a backup with a backup explorer - iExplorer crashed when I tried to export them). Now delete ALL the memos from Media/Recordings using iExplorer. Then go to your phone and tap on the Voice Memo's app and then tap on the bottom right button to ensure that they're all gone (if necessary you may need to quit the app and restart it). This should sort out the Voice Memos database for future use, and also seems to put iTunes straight.

Now sync with iTunes and you should see most  of that 'Other' space reclaimed (some is legitimately used by certain apps for internal storage) and available once again...

Stop Windows [re]installing [dodgy] drivers

If you have the issue where an 'official' driver that comes down with Windows Update is basically broken then you need to disable the update mechanisms for that device. In Windows (Vista, and probably WinXP, Win7) you can stop Windows from updating drivers for specific hardware by using Windows' Local Group Policy Editor:

• Start Device Manager by going to 'Start' button and typing devmgmt.msc and hitting return
• Locate your dodgy device and click on Properties
• Copy the 'Hardware ID' from Properties->Details->Hardware ids
• Right click on device and select uninstall
• Start Policy Editor by going to 'Start' button and typing gpedit.msc and hitting return
• Edit the following key(s): Local Computer Policy->Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->System->Device Installation->Device Installation Restrictions->Prevent installation of devices that match any of these IDs.
• Paste in previously copied dodgy Hardware Ids. e.g:
  PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0042&SUBSYS_97511462&REV_A1
  PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0042&SUBSYS_97511462
  PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0042&CC_030000
  PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0042&CC_0300
  
  
• Reboot

In my case the dodgy driver in question is for an oldish NVidia card - Vista thinks it is an GeForce 6800 LE (whilst Linux thinks it's a Quadro NVS 280 SD - where it actually works ok) and the latest drivers (11 Jan 10) still result in total system crashes (machine just freezes - no 'screen of death') when I do mundane things like bringing a PDF document up in Adobe Acroreader or clicking on the 'office button' in Office 2007?!

Karmic IPv6 Global address problems

If you're running IPv6 on Ubuntu 9.10 with multiple interfaces and you're not seeing any global IPv6 addresses assigned to your interfaces, and you're seeing this kind message in /var/log/messages:

Nov 13 10:10:10 my_machine kernel: [ 1000.101010] eth0: IPv6 duplicate address detected!

Then it's obviously Friday 13th and you should put it down to ....Yeah maybe but yesterday it was the same last week....

It seems there's a kernel (2.6.31-15) bug which means IPv6 Duplicate Address Detection (DAD - see RFC4862) is generating false-positives and subsequently not permitting your global address to be assigned to an interface.

To work around this bug do (change eth0 to your iface name):

sudo sysctl net.ipv6.conf.eth0.accept_dad=0

Our Solar system (planets) broken on Google Earth/Sky

I was trying to see the planets (our solar system) on google earth recently but there seems to be a problem/bug - they do not display - both in the dedicated app and on the google sky website. When you click on the planets in the app (with error reporting on) you get:
http://mw1.google.com/mw-earth-vectordb/sky/sky0/solarsearch/mars-en-currenthour.kmz 404 not found
...and for all the others (maybe it's something else but they're not working on either right now).

Wonder when it'll be fixed?!

I posted a question on the help forums but no response....