My home office is a tip. There’s certainly no clear desk policy around here… although I really do like the idea of working in a clear space and I am trying to take advantage of a rare dip in my workload to clear it up.  Consequently there are a few posts that might appear over the coming days/months based on scraps of paper with half-written notes that I’m now trying to decipher and get onto the blog…

This post will concentrate on some of the various iOS-related snippets.

I recently bought myself a second-hand iPhone 5S (about half the price of an iPhone 6) to replace my 4S that took a bath in the washing up a year or so back. After some time in a bag of rice in the airing cupboard, the 4S soldiered on but it’s been showing some signs of damage (the speakers might or might not work, ditto the headphone socket) and was constantly full (it’s only a 16GB model) so in need of an upgrade.

Moving to the 5S means I’ve also upgraded to iOS 8, after a long time with the 4S on 7.0.4 because that was the version I applied a jailbreak to (and therefore where I was stuck).  Looking back, the reasons I jailbroke that phone seem to have gone away but basically it was to:

• Change the operator logo with Fake Carrier. I use giffgaff but unfortunately the carrier list is set within iOS and my iPhone would only show the network name as O2 (giffgaff is an O2 MVNO). With Fake Carrier I could set the carrier name to show as giffgaff – although since iOS 7.1.1 that is enabled natively.
• Enable tethering with TetherMe. Although iOS 7 includes a Personal Hotspot, it wouldn’t work on giffgaff… until I tethered.  Again, that issue has since been fixed (from iOS 7.1.1).

So, I no longer need to jailbreak my phone – that’s a result – but there is still one particularly annoying issue with iOS: despite all of my apps being up-to-date, the App Store icon insists that I have 50-odd updates to apply.  It appears that this is because there are different versions of apps in the App Store for different iOS versions.  My iPad, which is forever stuck on iOS 6 because of Apple’s built-in obsolescence (they decreed there would be no more updates for the first generation iPad when it was just 2 years old) and my wife’s iPhone are effectively creating this problem because all of my devices are using the same Apple ID.  In future, I hope to be able to use Family Sharing but that needs iOS 8 or later.  Updating all the apps on my iOS 8 device seems to have fixed things for now…

One last tweak: if you suffer from a poor signal, try field test mode (on iOS or Android) to see just how strong it is in dB.  Unfortunately I haven’t found a Windows Phone equivalent to see just how bad the EE network (or “nothing nowhere” as I tend to refer to it) is that we use at work…