Every once and a while, this message pops up in iBooks. “Failed to load book because the requested resource is missing.“. What’s this crap mean, and how do you fix it?
Well it means that something got screwy with iBooks. Most likely you had a book open running in the background, and iOS 4.0 needed the extra memory so it closed iBooks and then something screwed up.
The solution? It’s real simple. Load up the library, open another book, go back to the library and open the book that was refusing to open.
Problem solved.
Peace, JbB
Posted in Tips on 28. Jun, 2010
I’m at a Bestwestern, waiting to meet someone. Good time to talk about something I discovered.
Now this is tight. You know how there’s people out there that like to “read books” by listening to them? They buy audio books of whatever book they like and listen to them in the car, while working out, whatever. Most do it through audible.com.
The problem with that is only the best selling books are in audio book format, your not gonna’ find lesser known books there. Audio books are more expensive than regular ebooks because, of course, a lot has to be put into making an audio book. Also, although iPhones store the your current position of an MP3 (which audio books are), if you happen to reboot your phone, it’ll lose you position of the audio book. And worst of all, there’s no way to own both the ebook and the audio book without paying twice for the same book. Screw audio books.
Well, not entirely. There is a way to turn your existing ebooks from the iBooks store into audio books. …For free. Through VoiceOver.
VoiceOver is a way to use your iPhone and have it speak items and words on-screen for you. I use VoiceOver to read web pages when I’m driving on the road, through my Lexus’s speakers. You can set it so that it continues reading through a page automatically. It never worked for audio books though. It could read text on Stanza, but couldn’t automatically read to the next page. And wouldn’t work at all for the Kindle app. But it does work for the iBooks app, and it automatically reads through each page automatically.
These a few advantages of using iBooks as an audio book.
Every page is automatically saved VoiceOver turns to. So if you happen to let your iPhone run out of power, your iBooks location is automatically saved.
You only have to buy the book once. You can then read it as an eBook, or have it read to via VoiceOver.
But you have understand how to use VoiceOver. So go figure it out yourself, but here’s how to do it.
Once you have the book open, triple click your home button to bring up the accessibility menu (make sure you have your triple home button action set to “ask” in the settings).
Tap “Turn VoiceOver On”.
Tap once on the text area of the book.
Tap and drag down with two fingers to start auto-reading.
Now your book will start being read to you via your iPhone’s text-to-speech system.
To stop or pause the reading, tap with two fingers on the screen.
To exit VoiceOver, triple-click the home button.
Tap once on the “Turn VoiceOver Off” button.
Then double tab anywhere on the screen.
It’s also a really good idea to lock the orientation of your iPhone, because if you turn and your iPhone rotates, it’ll cancel the speech reading.
So this method can’t do everything. You can’t have it read to you while in the background or things like that. But that’s fine, ya know?
Now, personally, I’m not sure how much I’ll be using this feature. I personally enjoy reading a book more than listening to it. And I would use it when driving, except for the fact right now the Neocell is being used as my car GPS navigation.
So this is a pretty tight method, right?
Peace, JbB
Posted in Tips on 22. Jun, 2010
Here’s how to close multitasking programs (iPhone 3GS & iPhone 4 only) with iOS 4.0. Double click the home button to open the multitasking bar and tap and hold down on an icon until you see the image below. Then tap the red minus.
Here’s something interesting to note (that I suspect people won’t realize for a while). Each of those apps you see there, such as Skype and all third party apps, until they’re updated for multitasking like Pandora is, aren’t really running in the background. They’re like a 12 app history of what you’ve had open, but aren’t really open in the background. That’s a good thing though. But those apps aren’t running in the background and there’s no need to close them because they aren’t really open.
In fact, there shouldn’t be much need to close backgrounding apps either. Most of them that is.
The reason why is because, once you stop their backgrounding function (such as pausing audio), the background API’s stop working.
So we shouldn’t need to worry about closing programs. Most programs that is. Some programs, such as the GPS navigation app from Navigon, don’t have a real “stop” function. They use the GPS and have no reason to stop. That’s a program we’d want to stop by closing it. Even if doesn’t effect performance, it would drain the battery life.
In fact, most things don’t use the CPU of iPhone 3GS’s to its fullest. But that’s the point. To get the most battery life, iPhones don’t use the CPU to it’s fullest. But with multitasking, things change. You can leave a GPS running and still get great performance, but it’ll eat into your battery life.
So that’s why we wanna’ close /stop apps that do a lot of stuff from running in the background if we’re not using them.
Peace, JbB
Posted in Tips on 07. Jan, 2010
A lot of people want to know how to tether their internet connection using their iPhone without being jailbroken. Well baby, I’m gonna’ hook you up. Well here’s how to do it, and although this is a more complicated way to do it than the walk-through I gave before (iPhone OS 3.1.2 AT&T Tethering Jailbreak How-to ), but this one will work if your in different countries.
How to Activate and Enable Free Internet Tethering on iPhone 3.0
- Open Safari
- Visit either http://help.benm.at/tethering.php or http://www.iphone-notes.de/mobileconfig/
- Select your country
- Select your service provider
- Tap Install to install the new profile
- Select Install Now to install and download the new profile
- Now go into your iPhone Settings -> General -> Network -> Internet Tethering (look, internet tethering setting, yeah baby)
- Turn Internet Tethering On
- When it talks that junk about bluetooth, just tell it USB Only if your connecting your iPhone via cable.
- Now that tethering is turned on, just connect your iPhone to your computer and your set (yeah baby)
- There’s one last thing to do (something that other web sites seem to leave OUT)… Your iPhone may / will act screwy, so go to Settings -> General -> Reset ->Reset Network Settings. After the short reset, iPhone should be able to be used for MMS, Voicemail and Internet tethering.
And there you have it. Nice ‘n’ easy like Georgia Weezy, am I right?
If you found this useful, follow me on twitter @ twitter.com/johnBbaird .
Peace, JbB
Update: Tethering does in fact work for OS 3.1.2 jailbroken or unjailbroken, and there’s the proof.
