Month: February 2025

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Apple’s Image Playground

One of the new features for the Mac is Apple Intelligence. I was curious about Image Playground and how that would work.

Produce fun, original images in seconds with the Image Playground experience right in your apps. Create an entirely new image based on a description, suggested concepts, and even a person from your Photos library.

Having tried it, I would say it is nothing special. Yes the images are nice, but you can tell they are AI generated. It also doesn’t do photorealistic images.

As a tool to create some fun images to share with friends, yes it’s fine, so use it for that.

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Roaming in Finland

I was flying off to Finland and would be using my iPhone out there.

Following issues with using data in Portugal a few years ago with excessive data usage on my iPhone, I followed the same process I had used in October 2023 when I went to Amsterdam and last year when I went to Europe.

When I was on the plane at Heathrow, I went into Settings -> Mobile Data and turned off virtually all the apps which could use mobile data. Took me a while as there were a fair few. I turned off mobile data for virtually all my apps and also specifically iCloud Driveand iCloud Backup. I am pretty sure they were the culprits for my excessive data usage whilst in Portugal.

As and when I needed to use apps, I either used the hotel wifi, or switched on mobile data for specific apps.

I didn’t  run out of data this visit, it was a shorter visit, just a few days. All worked fine.

I was also impressed with the mobile data speeds in Finland, which to be honest knowing their history (you know Nokia) wasn’t too surprising.

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Well what is the point then?

When flying I usually download films and TV programmes onto my phone, so I can watch them in flight mode.

I had downloaded a film from Netflix, and on the plane I set it to play. After a few minutes whilst watching a film I had downloaded I got the following error.

You've reached the end of what was downloaded so far. Please connect to the internet to continue watching.

You’ve reached the end of what was downloaded so far. Please connect to the internet to continue watching.

Now I was a little confused, as I was sure the film had downloaded fully. I opened the film again and checked, by moving through the file that it was all there. So I started the film again, fast forwarded to where I was. I watched it for a few more minutes. I then got the error again..

I went through the same process again of restarting the film.

After the third time, I stopped watching.

I have no idea about the error and what caused it, I have had issues before where downloads have expired, but this was the first time I had this specific error.

The whole point of downloading is so that you can watch a film without the need for an internet connection. In this instance I couldn’t connect to the internet as I was in the air. 

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Well that’s better

So after getting just 125 miles recently, I  did a charge to 100% and the predicted range was a much better 168 miles.

This was guessing down to warmer temperatures and recently using the heating less.

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How low can you go?

After what I thought was a low predicted range at a 100% of 139 miles, I found myself with a predicted range of just 125 miles when I recently charged to 100%.

Certainly a combination of low temperatures, heating, pre-heating the driver area, motorway driving, and demisting the windscreen.

Though this time last year it was just 122 miles.