When I ordered my iphone I ordered it from the USA via the site www.international-orders.com.While the actual delivery was speedy, the follow-up was not. When I ordered it I didn’t want to take any chances with customs and taxes, so I payed to have it shipped out to me including prepaid taxes and customs duties for the additional amount of 157,49 dollars extra.
However, 2 weeks after receiving my iphone, I received an additional invoice from fedex, asking me to pay another 27,99 euros. This turned out to be the invoice that was supposed to have been prepaid by International Orders. However, it was not prepaid. The Fedexbill clearly showed the tick marks that the recipient was to pay for the customs fee.
So I asked them to refund me the 157,49 dollars I had already payed. That’s 109 euros I paid them to pay a bill of 27,99 euros. Clearly they have a serious profit margin on pre-paid customs and duties…
At first they apologized, then they hemmed and hawed, and then only wanted to pay the additional bill and no refund IF I could show them proof of payment ! I wonder how I, a Belgian, can convince an American that yes, this piece of paper in Flemish that I sent to you is indeed proof of payment…
Really ! First you get a customer who pays you to send it prepaid, then by making a mistake you make him pay more and potentially a fine ( the iphone was undervalued on the form), and then you want to reimburse him only for the additional cost and then only if he has shown you proof of payment !
My advise : be careful when dealing with internet shops, and be especially careful with International Orders !
In case you have the following problem scenario on your iPhone, here’s a quick tip :
Then you need to plug in-and-out your headphones. Go on, have some iPhone intercourse !
Do that about 3 to 6 times and normally it’ll start working again. I noticed that my audio output started working again when suddenly my ipod screen came up.
I just found out that I can no longer sync my photos from the iphone camera to my mac. Grrr. I’ll need to look into this.
More on this when I’ve found a solution.
Update : it worked once when I removed the sync lock file from the iPhone. I noticed that a lock file was present in the current Media directory of the iPhone, while iTunes wasn’t even open. Removing this file worked once, I could sync my camera roll again, but afterwards I had the same problem.
Seems that the official unlocked iPhones you can buy in France are actually only unlocked for the other French carriers.
Beware, oh Ebay buyers !!!!!
Seems that it is possible.
Seems that there is some confusing over this, so for the newb iphone users :
Moving your Applications directory to your /private/var/root partition (aka your MEDIA partition) is all well and good, but when you install python on your iphone, it’s installed in both /usr/bin where the main executable resides and the library modules are installed in /usr/lib/Python2.5 .
So they still consume a lot of space on your root partition. In fact, I finally checked my hard disk space on the root partition of the iphone, and there was a pityfull 4.2 Megabytes left over.
So I moved python over to the media partition using the following commands : I first created a python directory on my MEDIA partition, then I moved the python library directory over there and finally I created a symbolic link from there to where it is expected to be.
mkdir /private/var/root/python
mv /usr/lib/Python2.5 /private/var/root/python
ln -s /private/var/root/python/Python2.5 /usr/lib/Python2.5
After that, ‘df -h’ gave the message that 27 Megabyte was free on the root partition !
Excellent 🙂
At last, I just knew that somebody had to have done something about this lack of scummvm on the new platform. Even one of the original creators of Monkey Island was waiting for it…
In case you are younger than 25 or so, scummvm is a game engine emulator for the very first point-n-click adventures like ‘The Secret of Monkey Island‘ and other such ones which were hugely popular in my youth. Their 16 bit colour version would seem quaint to you now, but squashed on a small mobile phone screen this and other games are a thing of beauty you can while your time away with while travelling !
Check out the instructions on the scummvm wiki here to get some Scummy goodness on your iphone. Don’t forget to place the games on your Media space !
I previously wrote about moving your /Applications folder to your media partition, and suggested that you could probably move individual application to your /var/root instead of the whole kaboodle.
But I’ve just experimented some, and it’s a fairly big hassle to do this for each application you want to do this for. Plus what happens when an update is available ? My guess is the whole directory is replaced, possibly destroying the symlink and installing it once more into your original Applications directory. I didn’t try to find out, though. I only had 3 megs left on my root partition, time to take action.
So I finally moved the whole directory to /var/root, the biiiig partition where you get lots of diskspace. I did try a variation though, by leaving a vestigial, thoroughly cleaned out /Applications directory instead of deleting it, but the symbolic link creation failed because the file already existed. I figured if ever anything went wrong with the moved /Applications folder, I would have still had the original one. But this does not work, so I’ve followed the original instructions, removed my /Applications directory and created the symbolic link to the new one in one go. Everything works fine after a reboot !
I was hoping for what I did when I was using Gentoo, but that was actually more playing around with mounting partitions. When working with partitions, you can have a folder with content in it, and then you can mount another partition using the folder as link point. When the partition is mounted, the original folder contents are no longer accessible. But when you unmount the partition, the original folder contents become accessible again !
So I just took a look at my traffic stats – since the beginning of this week, they’ve more than doubled ! From 62 unique visits to 128 !!
The search string most used to come here is apparantly “iphone” and “iphone out of diskspace” closely followed by “iphone sms crash”.
Well, I hope the information here helps you, drop me a comment here on one of the iphone entries if there is anything you want to talk about.