New Features Coming in iPhone OS 4

A lot of my clients use the Apple  iPhone to collect e-mail from their Microsoft Exchange servers. This is pushed to the phone using ActiveSync, so instead of the phone having to check if new mail has arrived, Exchange server notifies the phone . I often find that new mail will arrive on my phone before it appears in Outlook. However, this feature has a major limitation, it can only sync with one Exchange account. According to news site Ars Technica, this issue is about to be fixed with the next release of the iPhone OS - version 4, which will support multiple Exchange accounts, along with adding a unified Inbox so you can see all your mail from different accounts at once. Other new features include multitasking support which, for example, will allow Skype to run in the background so you can receive calls while listening to music, encryption support and a "social gaming network". Note however that all of the new features will only be available on the current iPhone 3GS, the older 3G model will only get a subset and that does not include multitasking. The new OS is due for release this summer. More details on the

Cisco 7941/7961 IP Phone Factory Reset

I recently purchased a batch of these phones secondhand at an auction selling off the remnants of the Dell Limerick factory. In order to use them with 3CX or Asterisk I needed to change the firmware from Cisco Call Manager (SCCP aka Skinny) to SIP. There is plenty of documentation out there on how to do this, but basically you need a Cisco SmartNet license to download the files (or failing that, Google is your friend...) and host them on your TFTP server. The current version of SIP firmware is 9.0(2)SR1 Feb 18 2010 but this is reported to have some serious bugs so I opted for the previous version, 8.5(4) Jan 8 2010. As these phones were second-hand, I wanted to erase any previous config and passwords with a factory reset and this is where I ran into problems. The Cisco documentation on how to do this is slightly misleading, and it's advice is repeated on most of the sites I visited. I eventually found the correct procedure here. The procedure is to power on the phone while holding down the "#" key. After about 30 seconds, the line lights on the top right-hand side will begin to ...

AVG To The Rescue!

If you have ever had to deal with a malware-infected PC that will not boot or simply grinds to a halt, you know how frustrating it can be to fix. AVG have simplified the repair process with the announcement that their Rescue CD in now available free of charge. This CD contains a bootable Linux distribution with a number of very useful utilities, not least of which is a portable version of AVG Anti-Virus. If the PC is connected to the Internet, it can update itself with the latest virus signatures. Other features include a registry editor, disk and network testing tools and a text editor. There are two versions - one for burning onto a CD and one you can install on a USB memory stick. They both can be downloaded from here. A word of warning if you are using the USB version, it comes with a utility to make the memory stick bootable - makeboot.bat. Copy all the uncompressed files to the memory stick and run makeboot from there, otherwise it will overwrite your MBR (master boot record) and make your PC unbootable. Don't forget that AVG also do a free version of their Anti-Virus software for home ...