jamesclay, Author at Tech Stuff

July 21, 2012

It’s quite good really…

Let’s get a few things straight, though I may have a reputation for been something of an Apple fanboy, the reality is somewhat different.

Yes I have the iPad, yes I use an iPhone, true the MacBook Air does spend a lot of time with me when I am out and about, also true that the iMac at home (and the one in the office) are well used. You might think that I am an Apple fanboy and I only buy Apple?

The truth is more complicated. I like products for what they do and how they make my life easier, better, quicker and more efficient. Over the last few years the end result has been that I have been buying more and more stuff from Apple.

When the iPhone first came out in 2007, I didn’t like it, no real apps, no decent camera and importantly for me no 3G. At that time I was using the Nokia N95 which was, though somewhat chunky, was a great phone with a decent camera. With wifi and 3G I could use it as a portable wireless hotspot. Though with the iPhone 4 that became a possibility, the reality today is that I use my Google Nexus One for tethering over the iPhone. It is more reliable, it keeps the connection live and the impact on battery life is minimal – that was the one downside of using Joikuspot on the N95 it killed the battery life.

I do like the Apple laptops, but before getting a G4 PowerBook I was sold on Sony laptops, especially the compact ones. These, with their extended batteries, lasted all day and were small and light. I think it was Windows Vista which really moved over to OS X in the end. The constant updating and permissions issues made using Windows such a drag that using OS X was always like a breath of fresh air.

Even today, having used an Airport Extreme as my main home network router, having gone back to Netgear as I have reverted back to ADSL from FTTC I have found that the routing side is less than perfect and I have had a few network issues. True not all my Apple networking stuff has worked all the time.

So going back to the blog post title, “It’s quite good really…” am I talking about a new Apple device, no it’s the Google Nexus 7. I’ve had it two days so far and I am really impressed.

For a tablet that costs just £159 it has the responsiveness and speed that I would expect from a tablet costing two or three times as much. Google have put a lot of work into it and the new Jelly Bean Android OS to give the end user a great experience. It is that great experience which counts as I am sure that is the reason that the iPad has cornered the tablet market even though it has its limitations. I am in the process of writing a full review of my experiences so that will come later. The Nexus 7 does have some limitations and issues, but overall I am really pleased with it and liking it a lot. It’s quite good really…

July 19, 2012

Amazon Yesterday Shipping

Tired of waiting for packages to arrive? Amazon’s newest shipping option delivers your package a day before it’s ordered.

July 15, 2012January 1, 2020

My printer is dead!

My HP Photosmart had run out of ink, so after spending £20 on new cartridges I was disappointed to find out that adding the new ink cartridges killed my printer. Leaving me with a repair bill which is a lot more than the printer cost to buy!

Last year I bought the HP PhotoSmart B110a in the main so I could print direct from my iPad using AirPrint.

I was impressed with, what was a very cheap printer, both in terms of print quality and scan quality. I particualrly liked how I could scan from my iPad as well as print. My older Canon multifunction required me to install drivers and software, the HP PhotoSmart had an embedded web server in it so all the functionality was available through a browser.

The printer was running out of ink, so I placed an order with Amazon for some new cartridges, cheaper than going to Staples. I did order proper HP cartridges too. Before they arrived I know some members of the family tried to print, but apart from an incomplete print out I wasn’t too worried.

The new cartridges arrived and I went through the process of installing them into the printer, something I had done a few times before.

After installing them I shut the lid and expected to be able to print… but no there was an error message on the screen of the printer.

Ink System Failure
 0xc19a0023
 Please turn printer Off and then On

Well I did that… no change.

I searched the web, and after a little difficulty found this HP page. Went through all the processes with no luck, still getting the error message. The printer hasn’t responded to any of my attempts to fix the problem. The printer is reporting that the printhead is “damaged”. I am not sure how installing new ink cartridges would have caused the printhead to fail…

I actually can’t remember when I bought the printer, didn’t blog about it, like I should have, and as a result I have a feeling that it is out of warranty. The HP site says it is… but that is based on when the retailer bought the printer, not me!

The “solution” appears to be to replace the printhead. Now having done some searching, it will cost about £40 to replace the printhead. My dilemma is that a replacement HP PhotoSmart printer (the 5510) is £70 and I have no guarantee that a replacement printhead will actually be a solution.

I have a horrible feeling that if did spend £40 on the printhead and it didn’t work, I would have wasted a fair bit of cash and would still need to buy a replacement printer!

The scanner part still works so it’s a bit of a quandary on how to move forward. I can still print using my old Canon printer (but not from the iPad), hmmm, not sure what to do.

July 6, 2012

Google Classic

Source

Via xlearn

July 3, 2012

Chroming the iPad

I actually quite like Safari on the iPad, but was intrigued by what the new Google Chrome App had to offer.

I generally use Chrome more than Safari when using my desktop Mac, but until now there wasn’t that choice on the iPad.

After installing Chrome and starting the app you have the option of signing in with your Google account.

This to be honest is the only real reason for using Google Chrome so that you can sync with your desktop browser.

Trying out some of my usual sites I found it worked fine.

Of course there is no Flash support, but a lot more sites realise that and are offering their content in alternative formats. A lot more of the video on BBC News for example now works on the iPad, regardless whether you use Chrome or Safari.

Despite the fact that this is Google Chrome, it relies on the Safari WebKit as a result the performance is similar to mobile Safari. As a result I was disappointed when I tried Google+ on Chrome. I got the same “mobile” browser default that I do on Safari. I prefer the desktop browser version of Google+ over the Google+ App and really don’t like the mobile browser version of Google+.

If you really do like Chrome, alas you can’t using iOS change the default browser, clicking links in Twitter apps or Mail will result in Safari opening.

On the desktop I use multiple browsers, so for me it makes sense to have a similar capability on the iPad. So far I like the synchronisation with the desktop version of Chrome and I think that will be the key reason I will use it.

Get Chrome in the iTunes App Store.

July 2, 2012

Nope, no fibre for me

I’ve had it confirmed to me by BT that the cabinet, my phone line is connected to, is not on the upgrade plan to FTTC. Nor are there any plans to upgrade it to FTTC in the near future. What I think this means is that BT either can’t or won’t upgrade the cabinet.

I don’t see them doing it anytime soon, so I will be stuck with a slow ADSL connection for the foreseeable and long term future.

There also doesn’t seem to be any real alternative either.

Ah well….

July 2, 2012

I need some fibre

As you may know if you read this blog post, I recently moved house and in doing so lost my FTTC connection and had to go back to a rather slow ADSL connection, slow as in less than 1Mb. I usually had 37Mb down with FTTC so you can imagine my annoyance.

One of the reasons I am more annoyed is that I am still on the same (enabled) exchange and we only moved less than half a mile down the road.

I am in the process of asking BT when I can expect the cabinet I am connected to, will be upgraded to FTTC, or even if it is possible to upgrade it to FTTC.

It seems surprisingly difficult to find out which specific cabinet I am connected to. From a postcode search of 2011 data it would appear that there is an 85% chance I am connected to a cabinet that isn’t part of the FTTC upgrade plan and may not even be able to be upgraded.

Using the BT checker (retail and wholesale) the answer is categorically that I can only have really slow ADSL.

Using SamKnows seems to indicate a yes to FTTC!

However as we took our phone number with us when we removed, I have a suspicion that they may be using old data.

I have put a support request into BT and am hoping for an answer on Monday. You never know I might be on fibre faster than I could hope, or (more likely) find out that I can never have fibre.

ADSL isn’t cutting it, I need more bandwidth. So if I can’t get fibre what options do I have for fast broadband then?

July 1, 2012

No more MobileMe

MobileMe is Closed

So today there is no more MobileMe.

Yesterday Apple shut down MobileMe and now your only choice is iCloud. There are big differences between iCloud and MobileMe and as a result many of the features that I found useful in MobileMe are now no longer available and won’t be replicated in iCloud.

It has to be said, MobileMe was not one of Apple’s best products and in many ways, compared to their hardware and OS, was plain awful.

When I compare what iDisk was to what Dropbox is, we can see why Apple needed to do a lot more to make MobileMe the service it was advertised to be. Dropbox, for those that use it, is a fantastic service that basically syncs a 2GB folder across your computers and integrates well with iOS apps and devices. Save a file to your Dropbox folder on your desktop Mac, it will then synchronise with the cloud and if your laptop is running, Dropbox will sync and the file will be available on your laptop. For me, with smaller files, I often found Dropbox faster and easier than trying to copy files across the network… that is saying something. On the other hand iDisk was a total waste of time. iDisk was launched in 2000 and was part of the free iTools, this evolved into .Mac and in 2008 became part of MobileMe. My own experience of iDisk was that it was slow, took ages to mount and if you tried to sync with the desktop it only resulted in lots of disk thrashing and unsynchronised files. I always thought it was just me and my slow ADSL connection. When I upgraded to fibre in 2010, with 40Mb down and 10Mb up I was gobsmacked on how slow iDisk was… These speed issues meant to me that iDisk was something I used now and again and wasn’t a service that could be relied on for a daily basis. I remember been initially sceptical of Dropbox, expecting to see similar performance issues to iDisk, so you can imagine my astonishment when using Dropbox, even with large files on how fast it was. More recently I’ve had similar speedy issues with Google Drive.

I did use homepage.mac.com from iDisk for a while as a web server as it was quite convenient for hosting images and videos, even with slow iDisk speeds. Alas with the end of MobileMe that means that server has been shut down!

This has actually caused me an issue with my eLearning Stuff podcast, as I used the rss.me.com server to host the podcast feed XML file. I did this as it gets hammered quite a bit by podcast clients and I wanted to avoid my own server getting this hammering and causing bandwith issues. I will now need to find a new place for the XML file. It’s not too bad in one respect as the main podcast feed actually fed into Feedburner. So that’s one thing I had forgotten about that I now need to fix.

One of the features of .Mac I really liked was that my bookmarks in Safari were not only synchronised across my Macs, but they were also available in the cloud, I could get them online. This was really useful when using a Windows PC. This “feature” was removed when .Mac became MobileMe and that annoyed me. However the synchronising of my bookmarks across my Macs did continue, which was better than nothing. Of course MobileMe as well as synchronising my bookmarks, also synchronised keychains and settings. Though iCloud does bookmarks, it has stopped doing keychains and some other things. I always found this useful when configuring a new Mac. Now I will need to do things differently.

I didn’t make a huge use of the MobileMe galleries, but feel less confident with the iCloud Photo Stream. My setting is “off” in the main as I do take photographs of family with my iPhone and iPad but don’t want them online straight off!

The one that has really put me off iCloud though was going through the upgrade process to Lion on my iMac. In attempting to upgrade to Lion I actually managed to kill the hard drive on the iMac. What I actually think happened was that there was an issue with the hard drive and the Lion upgrade process caused the drive to fail. The end result was, luckily in having Applecare, a replaced hard drive and an iMac running Lion.

As for Back to my Mac, I have never got that to work… but I think it’s probably an issue with my work network. One day I might try again.

Overall I am still not sure about iCloud. I still have to work out how best to use the iWork aspects, I normally use Dropbox for iWork on the Mac, but I quite like Pages and Keynote on the iPad, and it’s here that iCloud may be useful in synchronising files. I have concerns over synchronising, it made a mess up of my bookmarks and I would worry about files in case it did it with that.

So are you using iCloud? Are you happy with it? What am I missing?

June 28, 2012

Music, books, movies and tan slacks

After announcing their new 7″ Google Nexus 7 tablet at the Google I/O conference keynote, Google released a video talking about the device and the benefits it provides users. After clicking play, make sure you turn on closed captions by clicking the “cc” button.

It was pointed out to me that Google have used automatic closed captions on their video and let’s just say the transciption of speech to text was not perfect, and in some ways quite amusing.

Thank you to Ron Mitchell for pointing this out to me.

June 23, 2012

Lost my fibre…

Back in October 2010 I upgraded my broadband to FTTC and improved my internet speeds dramatically….

Finally had my broadband upgraded to FTTC and I am impressed. With 40Mb down and 10Mb up this is significantly faster than the 1.3 down and 0.6 up I had before.

It has already changed how I use the internet, whereas before I would probably not consider downloading a film from iTunes during the day, as it would soak up my bandwidth and would take hours to download; now it takes under five minutes to download! No problems with downloading large files and updates now.

This week I lost access to FTTC and dropped back down to those old slow ADSL speeds I thought I had left behind.

The reason was simple I moved house!

Though I only (really) moved down the road and even though I am still connected to the same enabled telephone exchange, it would appear that the cabinet I am connected to hasn’t been upgraded! So as a result no FTTC for me.

The first big issue was digging out an ADSL Modem to use, and alas the one I had, had probably been in the garage or a while, and didn’t work. You can’t use the modem that is provided with FTTC, hence the need for an ADSL Modem. Spent about an hour trying to work out why the old D-Link modem wasn’t working. Doing a hard reset didn’t work. So it was a quick trip to PC World to find a cheap ADSL Modem. In the end I got the Netgear N150 Wireless ADSL2+ Modem Router. I didn’t in fact need the wireless as I use Apple’s Airport Extreme for my wireless networking.

It was easy to configure via a web browser and it wasn’t long before I was connected and using the ADSL connection.

Back when I got fibre I wrote:

The other key advantage is streaming video, which was almost pointless before due to buffering, and like downloading, previous streaming would soak up my bandwidth, having 40Mb down means I can stream and do other stuff at the same time.

Now that I am back on ADSL (and slow ADSL at that) I am once again unable to stream video through my connection and do anything else. An experiment with BBC iPlayer resulted in a slow browsing experience and buffering video. Now that’s going to be annoying and frustrating. The first casualty looks like it will be my Netflix subscription… if I can’t stream video then what is the point? It will also become a hassle to download video files from iTunes too.

I also have concerns about webinars and Skype as I have a very poor upload speed.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love our new house, it’s great. I just hope that BT will get around to upgrading the cabinet soon so I can get FTTC. I also hope they can upgrade the cabinet…. would be doubly annoying if I could never get back on fibre.