MP3 Songs on iPhone greyed out; “This song is not currently available in your country or region” error message

iPhone sync has always been a little wonky, but today I discovered this gem. A few audio tracks showed up on my iPhone but were greyed out; tapping them resulted in an “This song is not currently available in your country or region” error message.

What worked for me was to turn off “Sync with this iPhone over Wi-Fi” in iTunes and click the sync button. Lo and behold, the missing mp3 songs were transferred to my iPhone and I can now play them.

This happened on Windows 10, but may apply to Mac OS as well.

I’m using iTunes 12.12.2.2 and an iPhone SE (2020 model) with iOS 15.1.

iPhone: Can’t Enter Recovery Mode

I was just trying to factory reset an old iPhone 6S, following these instructions provided by Apple. However, try as I might, the phone would just reboot.

Turns out my notebook’s USB port I was using to connect the iPhone 6S for doesn’t provide enough voltage and is thus ignored by the iPhone. I think this is so the phone doesn’t risk running out of power while updating.

The solution was to use a powered USB hub.

Gnucash: “Install Online Price Retrieval for GnuCash” results in “Access is Denied” error

When I tried to install Stock market price retrieval for Gnucash – via the included script – I was presented with an “msxml3.dll: Access is denied” error.

At first, I thought this was an UAC problem and reinstalled GnuCash outside the Program Files directory, but this did not help.

The solution turned out to be reasonably easy. In “Internet Options”, go to Security -> Custom Level:

Then, scroll down to “Access data across domains” and set it to “Enabled”:

The installation should now work.

Once it completed (it takes quite a while), I reset “Access data across domains” to “Disabled”.