If you have a shiny new iPhone 4S as some of us do here at The Flickcast and you’ve experienced less-than-stellar battery life, this will be of interest to you. There’s been a few reports around the Internets, and elsewhere, that the iPhone 4S’s battery life leaves something to be desired.

Sure, it could have to do with the fact that it features a faster processor or that Siri is a bit power hungry. Or, as was postulated by the folks at iDownloadBlog, it could be the iPhone 4S’s Time Zone service that’s causing the problem.

Reportedly, a bug in iOS 5 (which ships on all iPhone 4S units) forces its location tracking feature to remain active much more than necessary which drains the phone’s battery far more quickly. Users can manually turn off the automatic time zone setting by going to Settings > General > Date & Time. Once there, toggling “Set Automatically” to “Off.”

We’ve tried this “fix” on a couple of our own devices and so far it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. That said, and this is in no way scientific, we tend to get pretty much the advertised battery life on our iPhone 4S units. So, maybe it’s actually a hardware problem on some units and not software after all? Or, perhaps it’s a carrier issue as our iPhone 4S units are all using Verizon and not AT&T?

Whatever the issue, Apple is usually pretty fast to issue a fix for these problems so expect to see one sooner rather than later. In the meantime, let us know if you try this “fix” and what your results are, if any.

When AMC’s The Walking Dead hit it big last year, we knew that TV studios and management companies would be capitalizing on the trend and pushing as many of their horror TV projects they have to the top of the greenlight list. The true test, however, is whether any of those shows would turn out to be decent.

Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story has proven that fact with only a handful of episodes, and FX has taken notice as well. The cable network has just announced a second season for the show. THR has the official word from the network.

“It’s one thing to have the ambition and guts to reinvent a genre in a way that makes it captivatingly fresh for a broad audience — it’s something else entirely to have the craft to back that ambition up,” said FX president and GM Jon Landgraf. “Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have hit the trifecta withNip/Tuck, Glee and now American Horror Story, which will be scaring FX’s viewers to death for many years to come.”

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This week’s pick is John Carpenter’s independent horror classic hit Halloween that held the record as the highest grossing independent film of all time. Halloween helped to usher in a new era of slasher films throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Carpenter’s use of camera angles, music, photography, and story help create one of the most frightening films of all time.

Carpenter sights many influences ranging from Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Orson Welles. Carpenter’s then girlfriend and producer at the time Debra Hill had a concept about a group of teenage babysitters stalked by a masked killer. The script was called “The babysitter murders.” Producer Irwin Yablans suggested the title Halloween. Carpenter and Hill reworked the script to have it occur on Halloween night, and changed the title to Halloween.

Graduating from USC film school in the early 1970s, Carpenter’s first big break was the action hit Assault on Precinct 13 which producer Irwin Yablans viewed at the Milan Film Festival along with financier Moustapha Akkad. Both men liked Carpenter’s style and approached him about making a film for them. Akkad fronted the film’s three hundred and twenty thousand dollar budget and Carpenter was given four weeks to come up with the film.

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