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I was driving up to Yorkshire in my Funky Cat and my iPhone was being wirelessly charged, and I was connected wireless to the car for CarPlay. I was using CarPlay for Waze navigation and for listening to a podcast.
However after a couple of hours, the iPhone shut itself down as it was overheating. I turned off the wireless charging and let the phone cool down.
Once it was cooler, it was all okay.
I was doing some background reading for a blog post I was writing about CarPlay, when I realised that CarPlay was ten years old. Not sure why I think that is surprising. My previous car was built in 2015 and it didn’t have CarPlay. Though I got my Funky Cat in 2023, though promised, it didn’t at that time have CarPlay. So, my first experience of CarPlay was with a Nissan Juke earlier this year. Of course my Funky Cat now has CarPlay.
After waiting for a fair while, Apple CarPlay is now available for the Ora Funky Cat (or should I be calling it the Ora 03) as a dealer installed update.
CarPlay is a smarter, safer way to use your iPhone while you drive. You can get directions, make calls, send and receive messages, and enjoy your favourite music. All on your car’s built‑in display. And CarPlay now features more app categories and custom wallpapers for your CarPlay Dashboard.
It was announced on the 20th May and I booked my car in for the update with my local dealer. I took it in on the 24th May and left it with the dealer.
Well the CarPlay update to the Ora didn’t go to plan…
The dealer had the car for the whole day, but didn’t start the update until close to the end of the day. The update failed, so they needed to keep the Funky Cat to try again. Alas it was a bank holiday and I was working away in London this week. So the plan is to pick up the car on the following Friday.
In the meantime I was given a courtesy car, a Nissan Juke. After spending ten months driving the Funky Cat, it was quite disconcerting to go back to a manual petrol car. I had to remember to change gear.
Unfortunately failed update was a lot more serious than just a failed software upgrade. The update failed for an unknown reason and essentially bricked the head unit in the car. The head unit needed to be replaced, and it had to be sent from China.
Eventually the part arrived and was installed.
I was finally able to pick up the Funky Cat on the 20th August, just under three months from when I had dropped it off. You could tell it had spent most of the time parked somewhere out of the way, as it was covered with cobwebs and a fair amount of bird droppings. The first thing I did was take it to a car wash.
After all that they still didn’t do the CarPlay update.
Spent time re-learning how to drive the Funky Cat, remembering there is no clutch nor a gearstick. I also realised how much I had missed driving the Funky Cat and the whole electric vehicle experience. I also realised that the Funky Cat was bigger than the Nissan Juke, but thought the Juke felt cramped inside, the outside felt huge, like an armoured car.
After sorting things out with the dealer, I booked in the update for the 6th September.
They did it in the morning and I am really pleased with the update. I had used CarPlay a fair bit with the Juke, so knew what to expect. It looked really good on the Funky Cat dashboard. Waze worked, as did my music apps.
Both happy and relieved it is all done now.
In a recent reflection session I attended as part of a development programme I talked about one piece of the course that stood out for me. For me this was the active learning opening session. I thought it would be one thing, but it was something else entirely. The session was completely different to what I had expected it to be (this is a positive statement). Even so it exceeded my expectations.
I realised that I have an advice monster!
In preparation for the session we were given the following advice.
if you are wondering why we stress the importance of not giving advice in these sessions, here’s a great Ted talk that demonstrates it well.
This is a nice talk on why even though you may be desperately wanting to give advice, you know they need advice, the reality is that they don’t. After watching this, I realised that I have an advice monster!
I use to be the youngest member of staff in the places I worked. The mantra often was, I lacked experience, and that experience would come with age.
Now I am old. I have decades of experience.
But this learning enabled me to recognise that I need to use that experience in a different more constructive way. With age comes experience, but the best way to use that experience is to help others to gain their own experiences in arriving at solutions.
When it came to the session itself we were working with colleagues on solving a problem or issue they were having without providing advice. The session was rather challenging in getting to help the person without offering advice or a solution. In some ways it was quite frustrating.
With age comes experience, but the best way to use that experience is to help others to gain their own experiences in arriving at solutions.
After getting 157 miles on my last 100% charge, it was refreshing to see that today after charging to 100% the predicted range was 180 miles.
I was visiting IKEA in Bristol and according to the Tesla app the Tesla chargers at the Eastgate Retail Park work with non-Tesla cars.
Alas, despite success with other Tesla chargers across the UK. I was unable to get a successful charge with these with my non-Tesla EV. I tried two different chargers without success.
Plugged in and the charger was unable to “find” my car. I had to manually release my car from the charger.
I got home with 8% left, so popped to the local MFG for an emergency top up charge.
I have used the Revive chargers at Sand Bay before, and had a few issues. I was back at the car park, it wasn’t critical that I charged, but I thought I am going to be a couple of hours, let’s put it on charge. I have a Revive account now, and use it on a regular basis at Worle Railway Station.
I plugged it in and it all seemed to be going okay, but due to poor 4G, I was having issues with the Revive website.
I left thinking I had it sorted. The Ora app, said it wasn’t charging, but that happened last time.
Came back after a lovely walk, to struggle once more to access the website, but managed to stop the “charge”. I said the “charge” as it failed completely to work.
At least I wasn’t relying on getting a charge.
After getting my car back from the dealer today was the first time I charged to 100%.
The predicted range is 157 miles.
I would have expected something more, but it’s not awful.
First time viewing the charging process using the new app as well.
I wrote about an issue I was having with One Click SSL version 1.5, it had been updated to version 1.5 on the 26th August and my sites had automatically updated the plugin. I couldn’t log into my sites and even when I could (via the IONOS login) I couldn’t upload images or post blog posts.
The solution was to deactivate the plugin, this did not deactivate SSL, but it took a while to work out what was happening.
It looks like I wasn’t the only one having issues, as the very next day, version 1.6 was out and this resolved the issue I (and others) were having.
I was posting a review post to my food blog, when it both failed to post and I couldn’t upload the photograph I was going to use in the post. I thought this was strange.
When I uploaded the photograph I got an error message. When I tried to post the blog post without the image I was redirected to the One Click SSL plugin page and the post wasn’t posted.
I did wonder if I had an SSL issue. My annual subscription goes through this month, but that was all fine, it had gone through three weeks ago.
As is demanded and expected these days, my various WordPress blogs are protected by SSL. I have a SSL subscription with my hosting company, and use the One Click SSL to enable the SSL on the blogs.
I tried to use one of my other blogs, and found I couldn’t log in using the WordPress credentials, as this is a IONOS supported WordPress site, I was able to log in using my IONIS credentials.
I had the same issue as I did with my food blog.
So, it was looking like all my blogs were impacted by this issue.
I did try and update the One Click SSL configuration, but that didn’t work. I deactivated and reactivated the plugin and that didn’t work.
I still had SSL, just that posting and uploading wasn’t working.
I wondered if it was a hosting issue, but why was the error then redirecting me to the One Click SSL configuration page on the WordPress dashboard.
I checked the plugin page, and saw that it had been updated to version 1.5 on the 26th August (yesterday) and my site had automatically updated the plugin.
I realised I probably would need to sort this out. I did wonder if I could downgrade the plugin version, but couldn’t find a simple way to do that.
In the end I deactivated the plugin.
I checked the site, it was working fine, and I still had SSL. The plugin One Click SSL configures the SSL for the site, but isn’t necessarily needed for SSL, as that is a hosting thing, not a WordPress thing.
I then checked, I could now post to the site. I left it for a while to confirm that deactivating the plugin did not deactivate SSL. I still had SSL and my site was working. I did the same fix for all my other blogs and I was finally able to post that food blog post.