• Google keeps trying to become a mainstream thing. They probably don’t realize they’re huge and awesome cause the smart 20% of people tell the other 80% to use chrome and google. But seems like there’s a dead pool on Keep already

• Apple did try to secure their login stuff but turns out they had a huge recovery security bug. And cause that’s not enough newly released iOS 6.1.3 has a lock screen fail too. Of course, not to be outdone, Samsung managed to get a lock screen bug into Note2

• Nokia, in seemingly move puppeteered by Microsoft, came forward with patents they claim cover VP8 and declared they will sue and not license. If I was a Nokia shareholder I’d question why their sinking huge amounts of money to attack something undefined instead of making money off their assets. Speaking of puppeteering, Microsoft aparently has a say in Lumia design. And in other Microsoft news, nobody is shocked there’s allegations of bribery to get business.

• China is building an OS based on ubuntu. Actually, Canonical is making it for them. Lets see how that goes.

• In copyright db news, the US Supreme Court tells Wiley they keep using the word copyright but it doesn’t mean what they think it means. And cause it’s all about protecting the authors WHSmith is violating their moral rights. But apparently piracy is the american way!.

• USA is at the top of trawling for common people data but for some reason I don’t understand or feel comfortable with Portugal comes in second. And, of all people, Canada is trying to censor librarians. On brighter news Cubans get around their big firewall using flash drive sneakernets.

• Voyager 1 left the solar system while Jeff Bezos recovered the Apollo engines.

• This week wasn’t brilliant for Google. They closed down Reader, made sure RSS isn’t getting to Chrome and killed off CalDAV too. It’s almost as if they’re trying to break the internet.

• A Court of Appeal decided policeman can be filmed performing public duty in duty. And all it costed the taxpayers was 600 thousand USD. Not the politicians who passed the law, or who signed it or the public prosecutors who defended it and used it gung-oh. It cost the general tax paying public a bunch of unlawful convictions and $600k. This goes on everywhere, politicians pass illegal laws and the public gets to pay for it. Gotta wonder what will happen now that FBI gag letters were found inconstitutional.

• People, that’s not a iPhone prototype, it’s just a dev board. Stop being idiots.

• Horray someone told Apple about https

• PS4 ? Nah, Steam Piston.

• There’s a vote on the EU parliament about censoring pornography which then escalated into blocking of communications from citizens to MEPs cause apparently some MEPs can’t be bothered to receive communications from their electors.

• Seems like the majority of USA doctors don’t believe their patient’s records belong to their patients.

• Bradley Manning is being nominated again for the Nobel Peace Prize which I don’t think he will get seeing as uncovered another Nobel Peace Prize winner war practices.

• Samsung has gotten so good at copying Apple they even copy the security issues.

• Being a RIAA lobbyist sure is lucrative

• Bradley Manning keeps on is way to enter the very small list of people convicted for USA’s not-war actions.

• Hey guess what, China thinks USA is cyberattacking them. And guess what, the NSA actually spies on private citizens

The space used up by Other in my iPhone has been creeping up for while. Other is iTunes speak for “i don’t know what this is”. It’s basically what’s left of the used up space after all media and apps are accounted for. A bit of Other is natural, there’s always system temporary files lying around, config files, upgrade images and other random stuff. But when it get to 4G things have gotten out of hand.

At this point a regular user gives up and does a full restore from a backup. Not being a regular user I went with getting to the bottom of this so I evasioned my iPhone.

A bit of poking around the filesystem and sure enough something looked strange.

2.6G    ./Podcasts

I’m pretty sure I don’t have 2.6G worth of podcasts and iOS thinks so too.

So there’s 2G lost in Podcasts.

ls -1 | wc -l
210

Looking at the file count Podcasts never deleted anything and that’s despite me deleting stuff manually.

So where’s the other 2G ? Well, I found a bit over 500M in staged iOS updates and couldn’t be bothered to look further. The moral of the story is Podcasts.app is an unmitigated disaster. It’s probably the worse app Apple ever released. The first versions just downloaded stuff over and over using up cellular data. Then the control appeared but despite being set to never use 3G it would happily stream over cellular. And this space leakage is just as if Apple is forcing people to buy more expensive phones.