The solution that eventually worked for me was to configure voicemail in the “old-fashioned” (”non-visual”?) manner by dialling 901 and then following the tedious voice prompts. Once this had completed, I retried the iPhone visual voicemail setup using the same PIN as I configured at the voice prompts, and it worked first time.

But is it any good as a phone? The answer is undoubtedly yes, but it’s not “great”… yet, a few more software updates ought to fix that. Missing features that, upon reflection, I never used on my old phone include voice dialling (I’m sure voice recognition systems are not tested on west country accents!) and video calling. The one feature that is sorely missing is a character counter in the SMS application, a horrendous omission now there are call plans without unlimited text messaging. The other feature that people talk about is the keyboard which is a joy to use—last week’s Heathrow Express post was written and edited entirely on the iPhone.

According to the web, it seems the most common cause of this is connecting the iPhone via a USB hub instead of directly to the computer, but I had no USB hub. Also, most people were experiencing this as a transient fault after regularly and successfully synchronising their iPhone for some months, while mine was a new connection—all very perplexing.

Fortunately, OS X is really UNIX in disguise, and so while the user interface tries to only display friendly messages, the technical details are being logged in the same way as any other UNIX system, hence I checked /var/log/system.log:

Jul 16 12:45:05 yvaine [0x0-0x10010].com.apple.iTunesHelper[136]: MobileDevice:
AMDevicePair: Could not mkdir /Users/ned21/Library/Lockdown: Permission denied
Jul 16 12:45:05 yvaine [0x0-0x10010].com.apple.iTunesHelper[136]: MobileDevice:
store_dict_osx: Could not create /Users/ned21/Library/Lockdown/
6b90d8c839e8ec9e74d2dffce9a2e111daf84f7b.plist: No such file or directory
Jul 16 12:45:05 yvaine [0x0-0x10010].com.apple.iTunesHelper[136]: MobileDevice:
AMDevicePair: Could not store pairing record at
/Users/ned21/Library/Lockdown/6b90d8c839e8ec9e74d2dffce9a2e111daf84f7b.plist

Aha!—a simple case of “permission denied”. (Which, lets be honest, to a non-techie person would be no less cryptic than the message that the GUI actually displays.) This did present another mystery though since permissions on ~/Library look normal:

yvaine:~ ned21$ ls -ld Library/
drwx------+ 42 ned21  ned21  1428 22 Jun 10:34 Library/

except for that little + sign at the end of the permissions string. A quick check on another mac indicates that this is in fact not normal, and means that the directory has an extended ACL (this is the same convention as in Linux) but unlike Linux, OS X does not have getfacl(1) and setfacl(1) commands for viewing and manipulating ACLs—use “ls -le” instead.

yvaine:~ ned21$ ls -lde Library/
drwx------+ 42 ned21  ned21  1428 22 Jun 10:34 Library/
 0: group:everyone deny add_file,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,writeattr,writeextattr,chown
 1: group:everyone deny delete

I have no idea how these ACLs were added to my directory, but let’s wipe them out:

yvaine:~ ned21$ chmod -a# 1 Library/
yvaine:~ ned21$ chmod -a# 0 Library/
yvaine:~ ned21$ ls -lde Library/
drwx------  42 ned21  ned21  1428 22 Jun 10:34 Library/

And my iPhone worked like a charm.

1. The website indicates that rail cards are valid, but cannot be used with tickets bought online. Every other rail company manages it so why can’t you?

2. Rail cards can also not be used applied against tickets bought from the automatic ticket machines, one must join the long queue at the ticket office.

3. You finally board your train, and head to the front to have a quick exit at Paddington when you realise that hideous Muzak is piped into every carriage not designated “quiet”, thus all carriages are deserted except the quiet carriages which are full of noisy people.

Just as I was finishing my cappuccino (Budapest has excellent coffee), the singing turned to shouting, followed by banging, and then suddenly the people who had been idling in the middle of the square were running, like a tide heading for the beach, towards the same corner past the policemen who were buckling on their helmets and making their way in the opposite direction.

With the trouble at the other end of the square, no one on the café’s idyllic terrace looked perturbed so we continued to enjoy our lunch. There were some more bangs from the centre of the square, and then another wave of people, this time in uniform black t-shirts, ran past our café towards the same exit to the square as the original wave of bystanders—it looked like the police had broken things up. Thinking the incident over, we were about to return to our previous conversation when the people in front of us started to hold their noses, seconds later we could also smell bleach, and people started to move towards the café’s interior. As my nose started to tingle and run, it became obvious this was not an over-zealous cleaner, but some chemical the police had used to disperse the troublemakers, and there was a full-scale dash for the inside. Fortunately the effects were dispensed with by a good nose blow, and by the time we stepped outside again 15 minutes later, the air was clear again and the café’s terrace refilling.

When the Kindle was launched, the Internet was alive with speculation as to whether this was an ipod-style revolution, or the sainted Amazon’s first mis-step. Since the release I have seen little press coverage, although as I learned from the review, the fact that the initial manufacturing run sold out in five hours and it has taken six months to come back into stock may have had something to do with it.

Fortunately, the Guinness always tastes good in Ireland and we found some lovely pubs in which to shelter from the downpours.

• O’Neills is a huge sprawling labyrinth of a bar which meant that while it was buzzing with atmosphere, it was still possible to find a table.
• The Bank pub on College Green: Splendid 19th Century banking hall now turned into a classy bar and eatery. The food was good, the staff friendly, and the decor superlative; it also reminded me a lot The Treasury in Melbourne.
• The Stag’s Head: A cosy traditional pub that is just difficult enough to find that it’s not rammed with tourists. Too good to share.