So you’re ready to go and you’re frantically hitting update on your iPhone, iPad or iPod. You may find you’re getting the following error;
Unable to Check for Update
An error occurred while checking for a software update.
This is sadly because of the demand being placed on the Apple update servers. You can keep hitting Try Again, or plug your phone in to the latest version of iTunes and update via that. Make sure you have a backup before you get started!
Somehow, I saved the world this week. Yes that is all bollocks but in a roundabout way I’m claiming that. If you don’t make claims like that you’ll get nowhere.
The just of it? A virus was discovered at work this week and I had the wonderful job of looking into it and trying to get rid of it. I don’t rate Symantec at all, and as that’s what my workplace use it was no surprise to me that scanning the infected file showed no results at all. Despite online ‘upload to scan’ stuff detecting it.
So I got in touch with Symantec and told them I wanted to send them the file. Cue one of the longest ‘submit a virus’ processes known to the current world. Eventually though the file was submitted and the next day I was told it had been detected as an Infostealer and would be added to the latest definitions.
I’d saved the world. So I decided to make some egotistical tweet about it, and Symantec replied.
I felt like a superhero.
@kevatkinson That’s great! We appreciate your help! 🙂 -Vineeth
— Norton Support (@NortonSupport) July 19, 2013
I just thought I’d share a piece of software I use daily now, which I’d be lost without.
At home, I have my email/internet/messing around PC on the left (PC1) and my music/production/radio PC on the right (PC2) – as it’s two seperate keyboards I used to have 2x mice and 2x keyboards taking up deskspace. This wasn’t ideal so I wanted a solution where I could use the one keyboard and mouse on both machines – but I didn’t want a KVM.
A bit of searching let me to Synergy+ a free, open source programme that ‘shares’ your mouse and keyboard from one PC and the others can pick up on it.
You can then setup the application with hotkeys. So for example if you’re on PC1 and want your mouse and keyboard to work on PC2 you can press 2, to go back to PC1 you’d press 1. So it switches immediately. You can also set it so it works like an extended desktop. So moving your mouse to the far right of PC1 immediately moves it to the far left of PC2 with keyboard inputs moving with whatever screen the mouse is on. You should use obscure keys you never use, as you can’t type them once the application is running.
It still has some progress to be made, they openly admit the sharing methods are less then secure but if you’re on a firewalled home LAN you’re OK. It also works on Mac/Linux etc… so you can move between Windows/Mac if needbe!
Let me know if you use it!