Author: jamesclay

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Entering a parallel universe….

I was recently at a conference in London and I am sure that a few people thought they had entered a parallel universe, as before at conferences I was often seen with a MacBook, an iPad and an iPhone. At this conference I was carrying a Windows Surface Pro, a Nexus 7 and an Google Nexus One phone. No Apple hardware in sight!

I have recently changed jobs, so my MacBook was given back, as was my work iPhone. I did have a home iPhone 3G, but recently ended the contract on that one, so I cancelled the contract and gave the phone to my wife, as her phone had recently died. In a similar vein, I had gone out and bought the iPad (third generation) when it came out, but after a few months I also gave it to my wife, as I was using one at work and for most home purposes my old original iPad was doing a fine job.

Going to London the main problems I had was missing the Tube Exits app, which tells you where to get on the tube so that when you arrive at your destination station you are both a) on the correct side for getting off, but also b) right next to the way out.

The other problem I had was with maps, of all the map apps I have used, my personal favourite is the original Apple Maps App, which used the data from Google. I had it on my iPhone 3G and was disappointed with the upgrade last year. I was using maps to get from Euston Square Tube Station to Senate House, and though I knew the approximate direction, I wasn’t exactly sure where it was. In the end it was more luck than judgement I found it.

At the event itself my main device was the Windows Surface Pro. The battery lasted for most of the day and I was certainly using it quite hard. I have to admit I wasn’t too impressed with the images it took, I have had much better results with the iPad.

However it was easy to tweet from the device (and when I needed to catch up with e-mail or find URLs). Even with the “touch” keyboard it isn’t really a blogging device, and elsewhere I have found it easier to use a real keyboard (as it happens an Apple one….).

As for the Nexus, well that was a backup device, but I did use it to listen to some podcasts on the train home.

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Slow, but sure

iMac

I am finally getting my iMac working again after the system crash. Though I do have backups, there was some recent data that I wanted to retrieve, and as I do manual backups of the data (I know)my preference was to restore the drive as is, rather than rebuild from scratch. The simple way would have been format and then resinstall my apps and data.

Initially I was able to get the drive to “appear” using Firewire Target Disk Mode using another Mac. So my first approach was to “fix” the drive using the OS X Drive Utiity. This failed and the error message wasn’t that helpful, which was format and reinstall! I could mount the drive and read the files on the iMac, but couldn’t write to the drive or delete files.

My second approach was then to clone the drive onto an external Firewire drive, however this just didn’t work, in the main as I have a large full 1TB hard drive. So I went with manually copying over the files, but as I was copying from Firewire to Firewire through an old Mac, this was slow. When Finder said it was going to take 720 days (yes days not hours) to coop over 200GB of data, I knew that this approach wasn’t going to work.

So I created a boot drive using a spare external Firewire drive and installed OS X onto that. I then booted the iMac using the external Firewire drive as the startup drive. Success, however, though when using another Mac I could see the internal drive, when booting the iMac from an external drive the OS wouldn’t let me mount or see the internal drive.

Using the Google I searched on the Disk Utility Error Messages and the response across the web was to use DiskWarrior. I was a little hesitant as I suspected now that the drive problem wasn’t file system or OS based, but was a hardware problem (based on my previous experience).

In the end I did decide to buy DiskWarrior and once installed I got it going to let it do its work.

It took a fair few minutes to get going, but alas it couldn’t fix the directory problems and confirmed that there was a hardware issue with the drive and it would need to be replaced. However it also created a temporary file structure, which allowed me to copy files off the drive onto the replacement external hard drive and importantly do this quite quickly.

I was unable to clone the drive, but as I could copy files I was able to confirm I had the most recent copies, as well as checking system files.

So at the moment I am using an external drive, I will be taking the iMac to the Apple Store as I am disappointed that the replacement drive didn’t last very long, even though I am out of AppleCare.

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Oops, used too much 3G, but it wasn’t me!

Though I have a legacy “unlimited” 3G contract with T-Mobile (EE who are EE) it would be apparent that I have reached the fair use limit of 3GB this month. Now the reason I have gone over the limit was for a range of reasons, but the main culprits are streaming podcasts, updates for Windows and a system update for my Nexus 7.

With my new commute, I have not had the time to download podcasts and have been using BeyondPod on my Nexus 7 to stream podcasts over the internet. This does work most of the time, but of course would have quite a negative impact on bandwidth.

I also have been using a new laptop, an Acer Windows 7 machine, but of course didn’t check the update settings and as a result it has been downloading updates in the background! Well got that changed pretty sharpish, but too late for reducing the impact on my 3G bandwidth limit.

What T-Mobile do when you reach your limit, is give you a “free” 250MB booster, which I thought would be fine for a few days. What I didn’t take into account was my Nexus 7 downloading the 4.3 Android update, which was 158MB. Now what I don’t get is that my Nexus is already at 4.3 and has downloaded this update a fair few times now!

As a result for the next few days I am probably going to be without 3G… well now I will need to rely on free wifi at stations. I am slightly annoyed (only slightly mind you) as my 3G coverage has been quite poor this month, I do believe that the main reason has been other people sucking up the bandwidth, was quite impressed with 3G speeds when I took a later, quieter train.

Now do I move over to 4G?

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It’s crashed, it’s crashed…

Well maybe I should have been expecting it to do that, but my four year old iMac last night decided to throw a wobbly and fail to restart after crashing out.

Despite some attempts to start in safe mode, reset the PRAM, in the end I started it off in Firewire Target Disk Mode and connected it to another Mac. The result it looks like the hard drive is on the edge of failure. This is annoying as this was only recently replaced under AppleCare. My iMac is now out of AppleCare, so I am not sure what to do. The SuperDrive has also stopped working properly, well maybe it stopped working ages ago, I rarely use it, so perhaps I didn’t notice.

I am not sure what to do next, I do want to still use the iMac, but should I repair the drive or look to replace it. I would like to probably upgrade it to an SDD and then replace the SuperDrive with a standard HDD, but not sure if there is someone who can do that for me, or how easy it is to do myself.

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No 4G Nexus 7 for the UK

Nexus 7 2013

The new Google Nexus 7 is coming to the UK on the 28th August, however we will only be seeing the wifi versions, £199.99 for the 16GB version and @239.99 for the 32GB version. There is no news on the LTE (4G) version coming to the UK.

I really like my original Nexus 7, it’s my favourite travelling device, much easier to carry about than the iPad. It’s much more portable than the iPad mini and fits into more pockets and bags than the iPad (or even the iPad mini).

I don’t think I need to upgrade my existing 7” Nexus, though I do like the idea of the “retina” screen, but I do think having a 4G Nexus would be useful for travelling, without worrying about having to tether to my phone, so would consider upgrading it, if there was a 4G version available. I do think we will see cheaper and more widespread 4G over the next year or so.

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It just stopped…

Airport Express

My Airport Express working. Actually what happened was my TV which was connected to the Airport Express by wire couldn’t access the internet (so no BBC iPlayer for me then).

What I couldn’t fathom out was why it had stopped working, as I hadn’t done anything, I hadn’t done any updating, no re-configuration or changed any wires.

It was still broadcasting the SSID, so I first checked the wireless, devices connected to the Airport Express fine, however they got no internet access.

First did a hard reboot of the Airport Express, that didn’t work. So I did try and reboot the router and that didn’t work either. I was using a static IP address with the Airport Express, so I changed that to dynamic and the Airport Express ended up with a 169 IP address, a self-assigned address. So it wasn’t getting an IP address from the router, so I rebooted the router. No joy there.

The Airport Express isn’t directly connected to the router, it’s connected to an Airport Extreme which in turn is connected to the router. The reason is that there wasn’t a spare ethernet port on the router when I added the Airport Express to the network.

In the end I changed the ethernet port it was connected to on the Airport Extreme and guess what? Yes it all started working! So there was nothing wrong with the Airport Express, it was something else; the ethernet port on the Airport Extreme.

I have no idea why the ethernet port stopped working on the Airport Extreme. Well my network’s working now.

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What is Augmented Reality?

AR in Plain English

This is another of those really clever videos from the CommonCraft people, who take the time to explain what Augmented Reality is in plain English.

An introduction to a new technology that adds a layer of useful information to the “reality” we see on screens of mobile phone and computers.

Watch the video.