Author: jamesclay

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Goodnight Netflix

When Netflix started in the UK back in January 2012 I was quite intrigued having heard about it a lot on TWiT network podcasts.

I was initially disappointed with the range of films and television programmes, older films and television series, but did give it a go. So I have now been subscribing for well over a year and have certainly watched some good tv series and films.

This month though I have decided to relinquish my subscription. The main reason is threefold, since moving house and changing from FTTC back down to ADSL, streaming video has been a bit of an issue, more so when other people in the house want to use the internet tubes. There has been a fair few times I have cursed Netflix for stuttering, only to find out that my son was streaming BBC iPlayer at the same time! Secondly, I am not really using it very much, I seem to be watching a lot less television as I get older and certainly a lot more selective; this leads into the third reason which is what I am actually watching on Netflix in the main are repeats of things I have seen before. For example I re-watched BBC’s Hustle and enjoyed that, but I had seen that on the TV before. I am certainly not taking advantage of other stuff on there. As for films, they do add new films regularly, but apart from the “B” movie dross that use to fill the shelves of your local video rental place, there are very few films that I want to watch and many of the new films I do want to watch I have found I have already seen at the cinema, I bought the Blu-Ray or rented the DVD from the local library.

So after a little consideration I am going to terminate my subscription and say goodnight to Netflix.

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Retiring

iPhone 3GS

After many years good service I have decided to retire my iPhone 3GS. It was the first iPhone I had purchased, though I had been using an 3G for work for about a year. When I got it I was totally impressed compared to the 3G and it did so much more and much better than the Nokia N95 it replaced (which was in itself a replacement for the LG Viewty I had that was an awful phone and was “broken” from when I got it). The Nokia N95 is, or was a great phone, it still has one of the best cameras in any phone I have used, and there are features of the Symbian operating system that seem to work much better than the same features on iOS. There were a few apps that I used on the N95 which I really liked and again haven’t been really surpassed on iOS.

I used JoikuSpot for many years to tether my laptop to the internet. This was a great app and very reliable, though it did kill the battery. The Nokia N95 was one of the first phones to have 3G and WiFi. I have never been that impressed with tethering on the iPhone and as a result rarely use it, much preferring to use Android on a Google Nexus One for tethering.

The other app I liked was Shozu which made it really simple when taking a photograph to upload automatically to Flickr or my blog. As it linked into the phone operating system, this meant you could use the standard camera app. Due to Apple limitations with how apps work with iOS, you can automatically upload images to iCloud, but not to other places. You can have an app that automatically uploads when you take a photograph, but you need to be using that app when taking the images. I have tried Shozu on iOS, but it isn’t as smooth as it was on the Nokia N95.

Despite my reservations on those two aspects of iOS, the rest of the features of the 3GS were very impressive. The key ones that stand out to me were the way it handled text messages, once I got the 3GS, was when I started to use SMS and texting. I really never got the hang of it on other phones, but with the “real” on screen keyboard I found I could handle that and I did a fair bit of texting compared to before. The camera was certainly a big improvement on the 3G, but still not as good as the N95. One aspect of the improved camera was that the iPhone could now more easily read QR Codes. The big difference really though was how easy it was to buy and install apps. Getting apps through the iTunes ecosystem made it very simple to get them. With previous smartphones you would need to go to different developers to buy apps and install them in different ways. If you needed to reset the phone you would need to ensure you had backups. With the iPhone you could get software from a range of developers from just one place. As a result I got hundreds of apps over the last few years for iOS. At least with Google Play today, you can have a similar experience with Android.

The main downside of the 3GS was the battery life, with careful conservation you could make the battery last a day, but if you did anything too power hungry then you would find, as I did, that the battery would run out in the afternoon. In the end I bought a case with an integrated additional battery. This did work well and ensured when I was using the phone intensively it would at least last the day.

The real tricky part of retiring the iPhone though was cancelling my contract with O2! I was out of “contract” on my pay monthly account, so there was no termination fee, but cancelling was very difficult, even when you eventually worked out that you had to “speak” to an adviser, all they tried to do was to keep you as a customer, can’t blame them I guess, but it was annoying. It also seemed to take ages…

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Safari Crashing

Safari Crashing

Over the last few weeks I have had an annoying bug when using Safari on my iMac running Lion. Now and then when I add a new tab (to paste in an URL, or opening a link or image in a new tab) Safari just quits.

If I restart Safari it “kindly” re-opens all the pages I had open, not always convenient if I was logged into an e-mail service or my blog.

It must be a bug with Safari as more often than not I am opening a blank tab, not clicking on a particular link or something similar.

At the moment it is annoying and a search of the internet tubes seems that I am not alone. However there doesn’t appear to be a solution either.

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Haven no wifi





Yorkshire Coast

On a recent short break at Haven Holidays’ Primrose Valley I was impressed that there was wifi across the site, including the entertainment complex and encouragingly in the caravans across the site.

Alas it wasn’t free.

Well you could have 15 minutes for free each day, and then you could pay for more if you needed.

Well 15 minutes is okay to quickly check e-mail or the Twitter, but nowhere near enough to stream an episode of Doctor Who or similar on BBC iPlayer.

I did check prices, and thought £15 for four days, wasn’t too bad. Before I parted with my money though I wanted to check how fast it was. So I signed up for my free 15 minutes and was very disappointed, very slow and much slower than my 3G connection was. It was about 1Mb down and a lot less up. I was mainly interested in using the wifi to upload photographs to Flickr.

So I decided not to use the free wifi and stick with 3G.

Towards the end of the break I “accidently” connected to the free wifi and this time was quite pleased with the speed of the connection. It was much faster than before. I wonder if the poor connection I initially had was either down to lots of other guests trying out and using the free wifi (probably unlikely) or the awful weather, cold, wind, snow we were having at the time?

In the end I think if I had my latter experience to begin with I would have paid the £15.

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Lack of connectivity

Lack of connectivity

I know I shouldn’t be, but I am consistently and constantly surprised by the lack of connectivity that I see and find on a daily basis.

At the time of writing here in Weston super Mare I have no signal with Vodafone and just GPRS with O2.

There is a BT Wifi Hotspot, but at £5.99 for an hour I think not.

The lack of conduction means that I can’t access Google Docs to write this, also means Evernote isn’t an option. So I am using Pages, but not using iCloud, so will need to transfer the file later or when I do have connectivity do a cut and paste.

Without a decent connection I am loathe to try and deal with email. Too many people send big emails with attachments, or links which I can’t deal with on a slow connection.

Of course I could turn off the phone, but them I wouldn’t be able to write.

I could read a book, well if I had remembered to bring a physical book with me then I could have read that. I did try and read a book I had purchased from the Google Play Store, alas I hadn’t downloaded it to this device and I can say similar things about iBooks and the Kindle app.

It would have been sensible to download stuff in advance. The trouble is that unless you know already, how poor the connection is, you will be otherwise stuck.

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Google Reader is Dead

Google Reader is Dead

Google have announced that they are retiring Google Reader in July.

Retiring implies that Google Reader will be taking life a little easier, spend a little more time in the garden, visit National Trust sites, watch Countdown. Retiring implies that we might actually see more of Google Reader as they will be less busy than they were before.

No Google is trying to tone down the reality, the reality of course is that Google are going to kill Google Reader dead!

I’ve used Google Reader for many years, but probably like most people in recent years I’ve not used Google Reader natively, I have used it to deliver RSS feeds into services such as FlipBoard. This has to be one of the reasons why Google are probably retiring the service, the main reason of course is Google+, however another reason must be that we used the Google Reader service (and API) but we rarely visited the actual Google Reader service on the web. This gave Google very opportunities for monetisation compared to other things they do such as Gmail.

There is some concern that the death of Google Reader will actually result in the death of RSS. The reason for this thinking is that curation and sharing of news has moved from RSS onto social networking sites such as Facebook and the Twitter.

Interestingly ask yourself where did you hear about the death of Google Reader first? Was it in Google Reader, or was it on the Twitter? For me it was on the Twitter, and this says a lot about why we are now using social networking sites for sharing news and moving away from RSS.

I do like RSS, it makes sense to me, an easy way to push content to people. However it never really made the mainstream, as a background tool it was perfect, but is (I nearly wrote was) reliant on good tools for making RSS user friendly.

I still want to curate and collate RSS feeds from various sources so I am now looking for a similar alternative, what are you going to do?

Graveyard Photo Source

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Don’t be a Fanboy!

Me by Heloukee

I do get very disappointed with people who get so agitated by fanboyism, so much so that they ignore potential solutions as they are not made by their favourite “manufacturer”.

Often I get accused of being an Apple fanboy, which is not too surprising when I sit there at an event with my iPhone, Macbook and iPad. I must be, I am using all Apple equipment…

Uh no…

I use what I think is the best equipment for me in the context of budget, where I am, what I need to do, etc…

What I don’t do is constantly defend Apple regardless of the context. Likewise I don’t “attack” other companies on their products. It doesn’t achieve anything and isn’t helpful.

So what is the difference between constructive criticism and fanboyism?

If you hate everything that Apple makes then you are a fanboy. If you would never touch Windows or Android, then you are a fanboy. If someone criticises a product and the criticism is a valid criticism, and you defend that product regardless, then you are a fanboy. If you choose one company for everything you use (and importantly recommend too) and then attack everyone else for using different things then you are probably a fanboy.

I remember back in the first few years of the 2000s I was telling people about how I liked using OS X, but was told many a time that we shouldn’t be using OS X in education as Windows XP was the industry standard and used by businesses, therefore education should only use OS X. What I found rather amusing was when it came to choosing tablets, those same people who said we must use the “industry standard” of Windows XP, said we shouldn’t use iPads as they were a closed proprietary product… even though by most measures they were the industry standard! The true colours of those people as Microsoft “fanboys” came out.

There isn’t anything really wrong with choosing products from a single company, the reality is if you then spend time attacking choices by others, or defending the company’s products all the time, then that’s fanboyism.

At the end of the day, I will choose and use products that make my life easier, I will write and talk about those products, and I will also make valid criticisms about products I and others use. I am writing this blog article (in draft) using a MacBook and Pages (from Apple). I will publish it online using WordPress (open source) and using a 3G connection via an Android powered Google Nexus One phone. I know people will be able to read it using a variety of platforms and browsers.

So are you a fanboy?

Photo via Heloukee

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Flaky WiFi

Cross Country Trains

Back in October I talked about the wifi on CrossCountry Trains.

In the end I went with an £18 for 30 hours deal which I have been using since then.

I finally finished my 30 hours and it was time to renew. However at this time I have decided not to renew.

My main reason was that the last couple of hours was rather flaky and I often had dropped connections. With that kind of connectivity then I might as well rely on 3G and not pay any extra money.

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Charging Annoyance

MagSafe 2 Power Adapter

I am currently having an intermittent charging problem with my MacBook Retina. I “plug” in the charger and it fails to charge the battery, there is no green or orange light. If I tweak the charger then the green light comes on and then the orange. What I mean by tweak is that after plugging in the charger, I slightly move it up without breaking the magnetic connection and then down agina. At which point the light comes on.

I don’t think it is a hardware issue, but could be a software one. However I might be entirely wrong and it’s a problem with the cable! As it’s one of the new cables I don’t have a spare I could try.

At this time, now I know what tweak I need to do, it’s more of an annoyance than a huge problem.