Since the 2.1 update for the iPhone, mines been doing some strange things.

• The most annoying thing is the 3G reception/drop out problem. You start a phone call, it rings, the person picks up, you say your first words, then the call drops out and you have to call them back once the iPhone has finished spazzing out over the reception.
• I have an odd battery problem. Occasionally the battery meter doesn’t update itself. So after two days use it still says I have a full battery. That’s a blatant lie!

The iPhone still needs a lot of improvement, but it’s fairly functional despite its issues.

When I go to the cinema I generally try and book tickets online before I go, that way I’m guaranteed the seats to the movie I wish to see. When we go to an Odeon, I use their website, which works even though it’s a little clunky.
Normally however, we go to the show case cinema at Bluewater as they have loads of screens and show films very late, which works for us night time people. The only problem is that they use movietickets.com as their chosen form of accepting online payment for tickets.

Every encounter I have with that website is a bad one.

• It constantly asks me to login even when I logged in on the page before
• It rejects my card details even though they’re identical to that on my card!
• They use the Natwest card validation procedure which requires me to type in an online banking password for my Natwest card. Even when I type that in to prove to Natwest it is me using my card, it still rejects my card
• When I go back to try again (because my card has been rejected) the seats I originally selected are now taken because there’s someone “still trying to book them”. That person would be me but you rejected my card!

This happens every time I encounter that website. I emailed their support department twice, but heard nothing back. I’m loathed to use that website because of the bad experience I get every time. And don’t get me started about the service charge for “ticket handling”!

A little while back I had an issue when trying to sync my iPhone with my mac. Any calendar entries made inside iCal would sync across fine to the iPhone, but when done the other way the new entries wouldn’t appear in iCal.

I went through various solutions last time and the only way to make it work again was to reset the iPhone and re-sync everything. This morning I had the exact same problem and didn’t particularly fancy having to reset my phone again and go through the rigours of setting it up how I liked it again.

I came across many posts detailing different fixes but none of them seemed to work for me. I tried resetting the sync history using the button in iSync preferences, but a restart later and I still had the problem. Looking at the Apple support document for resetting the SyncServices folder showed another way to reset the information. Open terminal, copy and paste and then hit enter:

/System/Library/Frameworks/SyncServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/resetsync.pl full

When re-opening iTunes and the iPhone plugged in you’ll initially see no calendars, no email accounts and no address book groups. Select the options you want to sync again then click sync and that information should re-appear.

I have no idea why the calendars stopped syncing correctly, but I did notice that some old calendars that have been deleted still showed under the sync list. They weren’t being synced, but could have been a contributor to the problems I’ve had.

Since moving to Safari for most of my web browsing needs I’ve been using a replacement for the brilliant AdBlock Plus called PithHelmet.

PithHelmets default setup is fairly functional although some customisation is required to get it working with various websites that I use daily. There is however one default setting that annoys the hell out of me as it doesn’t seem to remember the last state.

Enabling plug-ins for every site is something I really want to maintain on by default. I only block plug-ins based on the website I’m visiting and if they annoy me or are in some way dangerous, although that’s very few as I use OpenDNS to keep the nasty stuff out!

If I toggle the Enable plug-ins option to on, PithHelmet remembers this until I close Safari and then it defaults back to being off. This can be a little annoying when reopening Safari after a reboot or when I’ve quit the application accidently.

Asides from that annoyance, PithHelmet is definitely worth getting if you use Safari.

I’ve found a massive flaw with the iPhone. It doesn’t sync email certificates held in the Mac OS X keychain to the iPhone.

Whilst this isn’t initially a problem if you just use it to sign emails as being from you, it poses a problem if someone else also uses an email certificate enabling you to encrypt emails.
The email ends up encrypted and the iPhone has no way to decrypt it because it doesn’t possess any of the certificates that Mail does. I’ve filed an enhancement request with Apple, let’s hope someone picks up on it.