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Tech Stuff: Top Ten Blog Posts 2022

In 2022 I wrote and published 30 posts. In 2021 I published 32 posts on the blog, this was less than in 2020 when I wrote 43 blog posts. Compared to 2019 when I wrote just 18. 

Having some photographs when I visited The Harry Potter Studio Tour I decided to share some of the more suitable photos as backgrounds for Zoom and Teams and this was the tenth most popular post on the blog and dropping six places from last year was: Harry Potter Teams and Zoom Backgrounds.

Despite new posts and more traffic, the ninth most popular post, dropping seven lpaces, on the blog was my post about QR codes on chocolate bars, Cadbury QR Coding and Twirling which has been my number one post for a few years now. It was published in 2015 and was one of many posts I published on the use of QR codes back then.

Number eight, rising two places, was from June 2020 when I wrote about our gas metre: How are we using gas overnight with our new smart meter? Having had a smart metre installed, I started to notice that we seemed to be using a fair amount of gas and electricity overnight! This made no sense, as we didn’t have the heating on, no hot water was running and the only electrical device running was the fridge!

Dropping four places to seventh place was a post from May 2020, on how the amazing BBC Archive had posted a series of images of empty BBC Television sets across the years to be used as BBC Zoom and Teams Backgrounds. I used these quite frequently in my Zoom meetings.

TARDIS

Rising one place at number six was a post from December 2020 about Using iPad as separate whiteboard in Zoom, which was a follow on post from one I had written about using an iPad in Teams

Fifth place was Ten Amazing Winter and Snow Backgrounds for Teams and Zoom perfect for this time of year.

Well we had winter and now we have summer. Going up four places, the fourth most popular blog post on the blog was from April 2021 and was a series of images (virtual backgrounds) I wanted to use for online meetings over the summer: Ten Amazing Summer Zoom and Teams Backgrounds

Dropping two places to number three was Using iPad as separate whiteboard in Teams. This was a post in response to a tweet on the Twitter.

This inspired me to give it a go and see if I could get it to work and as a result documented the process.

.Going up four places, the second most popular blog post was from December 2020, Ten Great Christmas Zoom and Teams Backgrounds. Using the excellent image sites, UNsplash and Pixabay, I put together ten festive images that could be used as backgrounds for Zoom and Teams meetings.

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

In July 2021, there I was opening a PowerPoint file from my OneDrive folder when I got this error message: Sorry, PowerPoint can’t read ^0. I couldn’t open any of my files on OneDrive. Having looked around for a solution and to be honest it wasn’t too much help. I did try and reset OneDrive but this didn’t work. I was convinced that this was a permissions issue rather than file corruption or data loss. The file sizes looked fine for example. In the end though I did come up with a solution which I wrote up as a blog post to help others: Solving the Sorry PowerPoint can’t read ^0 error and this was the most popular blog post this year, rising four places from last year.

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I think the Apple Pencil might be “dead”

Having purchased an USB-C to Lighting adapter from the Apple Store in Bristol to connect a first generation Apple Pencil to a 10th generation iPad, I think there might be a problem with the pencil.

It seems to be failing to hold a charge, despite being connected and fast charging from the 10th generation iPad.

Reading the web it looks like that as I haven’t used the pencil in a while, the battery has died.

Currently I have it connected to an older iPad with a lightning port, hoping it will charge.

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Pairing 1st generation Apple Pencil

iPad with Apple Pencil
Image by Sakura Phutthalong from Pixabay

One of the (now not so) little people got a new 10th generation iPad for Christmas.

He asked if he could borrow my first generation Apple Pencil to do some drawing on his iPad. Now what I wasn’t sure what to do was how to pair this. It needed charging first and I tried using my iPhone which didn’t work. I then got out the old iPad, charged that for a while and then charged the pencil. I realised that the pencil was paired via Bluetooth with the older iPad, so I unpaired them.

We then tried to pair the now charged pencil with the new iPad and no joy. 

Reading on the web, it was apparent that the method of pairing was to plug the pencil into the iPad. Now this is where we had a challenge. The 1st generation Apple Pencil has a Lightning connector, the 10th generation iPad had an USB-C connector.

What I don’t have is a USB-C to Lighting adapter. I do have a USB-C to Lightning cable, which came with my phone, but this has a male Lightning connector and the pencil also has a male Lightning connector. I have mislaid the female-to-female Lightning adapter that came with the pencil a few years ago. 

So it is looking like I will need to go shopping to buy this USB-C to Lighting adapter.

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Enabling Touch ID and failing

We were setting up a new iPad that one of the (now not so) little people got for Christmas.

The 10th generation iPad has the Touch ID option for purchases.

As we went through the process of downloading apps, we had to keep entering the Apple ID password. We checked the option to not require the password for 15 minutes.

Require After 15 Minutes – If you’ve entered your password within the last 15 minutes, you won’t be asked to enter your password again.

This didn’t seem to work. So we enabled the Touch ID option for purchases.

Upon purchasing the first item, Touch ID worked fine, however for subsequent items, purchases required the password.

I knew that this was not the way it should work.

We would go back to settings and uncheck and then check the option for Touch ID.

However, despite purchasing a first item, Touch ID working fine, for subsequent items, purchases required the password again,

We seemed to be stuck in a loop without an idea of how to fix it. Google wasn’t much help, with sites only talking about checking and unchecking the option for Touch ID.

In the end we did a full factory reset of the iPad and started the set up process again.

This time we enabled Touch ID in settings first, which asked us for the Apple ID password, then in the App Store, purchasing via Touch ID worked fine and as it should.

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Places in London to work

Saw this Twitter thread. Really useful list of locations in London for working and reading, where you don’t need to buy endless cups of coffee.

But I like coffee…

coffee
Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Well not continuously…

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Ten delicious festive backgrounds for Zoom and Teams

Time to get into the Christmas spirit in the last few weeks at work with these delicious festive food backgrounds for Zoom or Teams.

Right click the images to download the images.

nuts
Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
Photo by Michele Purin on Unsplash
Snowballs
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
stollen
Image by Couleur from Pixabay
Orange
Image by Couleur from Pixabay




hot chocolate
Image by Sabrina Ripke from Pixabay
cookie dough
Image by Myléne from Pixabay
walnuts
Image by Willfried Wende from Pixabay
Image by Sabrina Ripke from Pixabay
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Roaming in Berlin

Berlin

This week I travelled to Berlin for a conference. I had issues with roaming when I went to Spain in the summer, it took an online chat (or two) to get that sorted. It wasn’t easy at first when I was in Dublin in September, but that sorted itself out relatively quickly. So I did wonder what would happen when I arrived in Berlin.

Well no issues whatsoever. As soon as I turned off airplane mode, I connected to a network and I could make calls and use the internet.

Though I have an unlimited data contract with Three they do stipulate a 12GB fair use allowance when roaming. I wasn’t too concerned as I knew I wouldn’t be streaming or downloading large files.

I was also able to connect to eduroam (wifi) at the conference, so that saved me some data.

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Warm MacBook

coffee and laptop
Image by Free Photos from Pixabay

I am still having issues with my MacBook doing “something” having closed the lid and placed in my bag. It seems to be still running even the lid is closed.

In the past when I shut the lid of the MacBook Pro it would sleep and when I opened the lid it would wake.

I have noticed that on too many occasions when retrieving my MacBook from my luggage or my backpack that it is warm. It is also doing “something” as it is also running down the battery. This is annoying as the battery is quite old and it doesn’t have the battery life it use to have when I first got it five years ago.

I am wondering if it could be Bluetooth, though a lot of things are better with Bluetooth, I am not sure in this case it is. Could it be my wireless headset? Could it be AirDrop?

The only solution appears to be turning it off, which to be honest is no hardship when you are putting it in the bag in the back of the car. But sometimes you want to be quick, lift the lid and do something and then put it back in the bag.

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IFTTT Instagram connection fixed

It appeared that my IFTTT applet I use to publish my Instagram photos to Twitter was broken. 

I use the Applet, Tweet your Instagrams as native photos on Twitter which takes an instagram posting, posts the image to Twitter. You can share your Instagram postings automatically to Twitter from Instagram, but back in the day this would only post a link. So rather than post each image manually to Twitter I used IFTTT to do this automatically. It had been working fine for years, but recently stopped working. I did get a notification, so I went into IFTTT disconnected and reconnected the applet. I then posted an image to Instagram to check it was working.

Got me thinking I might want to see how IFTTT an worth with Mastodon. Though I do intend to wait and see how Mastodon fares, and if auto-posting is a thing there.

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Moving to Mastodon for the coffee

I moved to Mastodon this week.

Elon Musk started to impact on the Twitter, so much so that lots of people were talking about moving off the Twitter and onto other similar services, with Mastodon getting much of this traffic. We had some discussions about Mastodon at work. I went out and created an account on mastodon.cloud and then discovered I had already created an account before, well back in August 2018, on mastodon.social. So, I went back and deleted the new account and started to use the original account.

Though I had been on Mastodon since 2018 the recent influx has got me back on the app. Though my stream of stuff seems to be mainly people telling people how to use Mastodon and what and what not to do on the service and how it is different to the bird place (they mean the Twitter).

Reminds me of Twitter in 2009 when there was a similar level of new users starting to use that service. Back in 2008 I wrote this blog post about how I used the Twitter. I basically said Twitter was all about the coffee.

You can say pretty much the same about Mastodon.

However for me Mastodon is all about the coffee.

It’s the coffee you drink with colleagues during a break from work, where you discuss work stuff, but also discuss your commute into work, what you saw on TV last night, what bizarre thing you just saw, the weather.

It’s the coffee you drink whilst browsing the web and when you find an interesting web  site and you post the link to your blog, in an e-mail, on your VLE.

It’s the coffee you drink in a coffee shop, where you’re reading the paper, reading a book, chatting.

Mastodon is the coffee you drink in the Library reading a journal, a book, writing stuff.

It’s the coffee you drink with fellow delegates during a break or at lunch at a conference. Where you discuss the keynotes, the presentations, the workshops, where you are going next, your hotel, the food, the coffee, what you do, where you’re going, what gadgets you have in your gadget bag.

Mastodon is about these moments, but without the physical and geographical limitations. Mastodon also allows people from different institutions, different sectors, different organisations, different departments to share these moments. I brings in people from different industries, different countries, different perspectives.

When you decide to follow someone, ask yourself could you drink coffee with this person, would they drink coffee with you?

At the end of the day Mastodon is all about the coffee as Twitter was in the day.