Notes on new Apple stuff

I upgraded to Snow Leopard this weekend. It seems to be significantly buggier than 10.5, which is extremely disappointing.

  1. WiFi is incredibly unreliable. It seems to freeze up often, requiring me to turn it off and back on to reconnect. Must frustrating, particularly as I’m trying to perform multi-GB Time Machine backups over it.
  2. It takes an extremely long time for my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to connect after a reboot. Around thirty seconds. I’ve taken to powering them down and back on. Lame.
  3. For no reason I can discern, the system will refuse to let me launch new shells. Not in Terminal, not in Emacs, not in Screen, not anywhere. I can launch new apps, but any /bin/bash process hangs when I launch it. Logging out and back in fixes it.
  4. OpenVPN doesn’t work anymore. I was using Tunnelblock 3.0b14 on Leopard; that complained about incompatible kexts and refused to launch. I upgraded to 3.0b16, which launches okay, but refuses to connect with no error message whatsoever. Nothing in the logs. No idea why it doesn’t work. I installed Viscosity, but that doesn’t work either; it complains about command-line arguments. I hacked on the configuration, but didn’t get anywhere.

iPhone OS 3.1

I upgraded my (new) iPhone 3GS. There isn’t much to report, except that audio-only playback has returned! Sort of. It’s buried really deep, but I found it in 3.0, and it still works in 3.1.

  1. Start playing a video podcast. It doesn’t work with movies anymore, only video podcasts.
  2. Press the home button. The podcast will stop playing.
  3. Press the play/pause button on the headphone remote. The audio will play, and you can pocket your phone.

Sucks, but at least it’s still there.

2009/09/13
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Discussion

I’m having many of the same problems. I use Shimo for my VPN app, though, and that works great.

Paul
2009/09/14

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