Author: jamesclay

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Charging in Bristol

Drove to Bristol. Parked at a Health Club and Spa to charge the car. Checked with reception if I needed to register my car, I didn’t. I then went to plug the car in. I couldn’t get it to charge, so moved to the second charger, this time it worked.

I had some jobs to do, so I did those before heading back to the car. I didn’t do a full charge, but drove off to Cabot Circus.

I had intended to top up my charge using their charge points, but they were all full. So, I had to park in a “normal” space. I had sufficient charge to get home.

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Emergency Steering Function doesn’t work

Finally worked out why I was getting alerts with my Funky. I had the Emergency Steering Function enabled. This feature will ensure that you don’t drift off the road.

Well let’s just say it doesn’t work. Well it does work, just that it doesn’t work with the roads I drive on. After doing some “testing” I found that the system wasn’t getting confused with the lines (or lack of lines) on the road. It was also inconsistent.

So now I am turning it off when I start driving. I was also frustrated to see that despite switching it off, the car doesn’t remember that setting, so I have to turn it off every time I get into the car.

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Uninstalling Wireless NIC on the iMac

Back in November 2020 following the installation of FTTP I did buy a TP-Link Archer T3U AC1300 mini wireless adapter for my iMac which was too far away to be cabled to the router. 

This though was no faster than the built in Airport card, however I could use it on my MacBook which had a slower card and I have managed to achieve speeds in excess of 400Mbps, but not quite the 800Mbps I was hoping for.

In the menu bar though on the iMac was the remnants of the Wireless NIC installation. I never really worried about it, and clicking it just told me the TP-Link Archer T3U AC1300 mini wireless NIC wasn’t installed. I knew that.

However I did recently decide to see if I could remove it from the menu bar.

What you need to do is hold the Option key when clicking the icon in the menu bar, and then you get the following menu item.

So I clicked Uninstall USB-WiFi.

I was presented with a confirmation screen.

I clicked Yes.

I now no longer have the wireless NIC icon in my menu bar and the driver is no longer installed as well.

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First time charging

Drove to work today in Funky and at work set the car to charge. This was not as simple and as easy as I thought it was going to be. I think this was partly as it wasn’t as simple as plugging in the cables and the car charging. However I got there in the end. I didn’t though manage to get to a 100% charge.

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It has arrived

After much thought my new car has arrived. It is a GWM ORA Funky Cat First Edition.

I had been thinking about making the move to electric for some time. In the end I went with a GWM Ora Funky Cat. I will be writing about my experiences with it and publishing them on the blog.

This is a fully electric car and I chose the red and black model.

I’ve never driven an electric car before. The Ora Funky Cat is an electric car, so is also an automatic. Also I’ve only driven an automatic once before, and that was a hire car in Scotland back in March 2006 and that was a (huge) Volkswagen Passat estate. The Funky Cat also has an electric parking brake, so no handbrake. 

It was with some trepidation that I sat in the car and drove off…

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My Photo Stream is Dead

My Photo Stream stopped working on the 26th June. Yesterday I got an email from Apple which said it had been shut down.

This is a quick notice that My Photo Stream has now been officially shut down.

I really liked My Photo Stream, but time moves on. I have moved over to iCloud Photos instead.

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Amazon Fresh to close

Read this article on BBC News: First Amazon Fresh till-less grocery store in UK closes.

Amazon’s first till-less store in the UK, which opened in west London just over two years ago, has been closed. The Amazon Fresh shop opened in Ealing Broadway in March 2021 and was the online giant’s first “just walk out” grocery store outside of the US. It permanently shut on Sunday along with two other Amazon Fresh stores, in Wandsworth and East Sheen.

I used it once, wasn’t that impressed. From a technological perspective, yes it was very clever and worked a treat. The system did exactly what is said it would do.

The main reasons I wasn’t impressed was that, partly I felt I couldn’t pick anything up to check labels, just in case the system didn’t “work”. The main reason was the variety and choice on offer. They did have a good range of stuff, but it wasn’t really stuff that I wanted to buy.

The whole shop has now been boarded up.

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“Horrifying” AI Video

Saw this video on the BBC News website.

They watched Given Again, so I looked that up, as I thought that was an interesting use of AI.

Given Again from Jake Oleson on Vimeo.

I have downloaded the Luma AI app and am trying it out. To be honest with not much success and getting any results like those in Given Again. Will need to do some reading and more experiments.

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Unable to Upload, resolved!

screengrab of Photos

After syncing my Photos library to iCloud Photos I was left with 86 photographs which Photos was unable to upload.

It wasn’t initially clear why they were unable to be uploaded.

The solution I found on the web was to export the original files and then delete them from Photos and then import them into Photos.

When I tried that I got a 47,001 unknown error, which wasn’t really very helpful.

However after doing some more searching, the issue appeared to be that the original files were missing from the library and all that remained was the low resolution thumbnail.

As I had already made a back up of my photographs to Amazon Photos, I was able to find the originals on that service, download them, import them to Photos and then upload to iCloud Photos.

All fine now.

Makes you realise the importance of having your photographs in more than one place.

I have a minimum of two backups, one on an external drive and one in the cloud. 

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iCloud Photos Folders

Elizabeth Line train

It took a while to sync my iMac Photos library to iCloud. Initially I was concerned that the folders on my iMac weren’t syncing to iCloud, but after the iMac had finished uploading all the photographs in the library, the folders were then created on iCloud. Though my smart albums weren’t synced.

While the iMac was uploading photographs, it wasn’t initially downloading the photographs I had been taking with my iPhone, which was also using iCloud Photos. However, as with the folders, once it had finished uploading, iCloud Photos downloaded the new photographs to the iMac.

Overall I am pleased with moving to iCloud Photos, it does what I want.