You know you are getting old when technology that you used every day is now in a museum.
I had one of these phones!
They were on display at Oakham Treasures in North Somerset.
I want the old Twitter back….
So you don’t like the new Twitter?
Well you can revert back to the old one in a couple of ways.
if you are running Chrome or Firefox then there is an extension you can install which forces your browser to use the old Twitter interface.
Install the extensions and your browser forces Twitter to use the old interface!
There is another way without installing an extension which is as follows.
Click More
Click Settings and Privacy
Click About Twitter
Click Directory
Click Home (sometimes you click Notifications first)
You should then have old Twitter back.
So there is a lack of persistence, but there is also a quicker method is to use the URL
https://twitter.com/i/directory/profiles
which I’ve added to my bookmarks for quick access.
I can’t get this method to work on Safari and persist though.
Connectivity issues
I was in London today, at a venue on Southwark Street and I was surprised to have connectivity issues, not just with my home iPhone on the Three network, but also with my work phone on Vodafone.
I don’t know why the connections were so poor, certainly both phones had high signal bars. We were on the seventh floor, which I have found isn’t usually an issue, but today, poor bandwidth or sometimes non-existent bandwidth.
It didn’t help matters that the guest wifi wasn’t working either.
All was fine by the time I got to Paddington.
Ten years later, it works….
On this day ten years ago I was trying really hard to read the this QR Code chocolate from that Andy Ramsden, who back then was working at the University of Bath. I think the chocolate was from a QR Codes workshop that Andy was running as part of a JISC programme. Doing a Google search unearthed this paper that he presented at the ALT Conference that same year.
Back then I failed miserably to read the code, despite using lots of different QR Code readers….
So I took a photograph instead and then ate the chocolate.
I even mentioned this in a blog post a few years ago about QR Codes on Cadbury chocolate bars.
It took a while to scan in the code as the foil packing and colours used on the QR Code made it difficult to capture the code. It reminded me of the chocolate QR Codes that the University of Bath made for the QR Codes project we did a few years back.
I think the issue back then was the contrast between the dark and white chocolate.
Today I wondered a bit….
So I used the in-built QR code reader in my iPhone and checked if it could read the QR code. Years ago you needed a unique app to read QR codes, today the iPhone camera has that feature built in, as do many Android phones.
So could my iPhone read this ten year old QR code, it could…
Yay!
Alas…. Though the QR Code works the website link it had encoded inside it is now dead and gone….
I wonder what it was all about?
Going back in time for Windows
I quite enjoyed the tweets this week from Microsoft celebrating the 1985 initial release of Windows.
With Excel, Chart, and even Flight Simulator, there’s no telling where Microsoft and the power of Windows will take you this summer. pic.twitter.com/sEHLuXysXn
— Windows (@Windows) July 2, 2019
My first experience of Windows was some time later with Windows 3.0 and remembering the big advance that Windows 3.1 brought to computing. It was probably Windows 3.1 that really made me appreciate the affordances that technology could bring to teaching.
I remember the huge fanfare that was Windows 95 and what a step change it was from 3.1. We even had video now on Windows, though it was quite small.
I never really moved to Windows 98 and moved straight to Windows 2000 when I started a new job in 2001. Well the laptop I was provided with did use Windows Me, but I soon moved over to 2000. I liked Windows XP and thought it was a huge improvement over previous versions of Windows.
After that I was more of a Mac person and rarely used Windows. I did have to use Windows 7 for a while, but found it confusing as I hadn’t used Windows for a long time. Today I have been known to use Windows 10, but my main computing platform these days is still OS X.
No more Flixter
I have never been a fan of the Ultraviolet process for the digital copies of films.
I blogged in 2013 about my dissatisfaction with the Ultraviolet process for getting hold of the digital copies of the films I had bought.
You didn’t even use Ultraviolet to watch the films, you needed to use a different service, in the UK that meant using Flixter.
I never liked the Flixter app for watching films, it crashed way too often. It never remembered where you got into a film, so you had to either start watching it again, or try and fast forward to where you had left off. In theory you could download and watch the film offline, but I found that even then the app would try and authenticate online.
In January 2018 I blogged about how I was expecting to use Ultraviolet to access the digital copy, but was pleasantly surprised to find that I got an iTunes digital copy.
I got e-mails in early 2019 informing me that the Ultraviloet service was going to shut down in July 2019. I didn’t think that would be too much on an issue as it was indicated that I would still be able to access my movie collection through Flixter regardless of the demise of Ultraviolet.
Now it would appear that with the demise of Ultraviolet that Flixter has also decided to shut up shop.
In theory I won’t lose my digital films as they will be transferred to Google Play.
I am slightly disappointed I didn’t have any choice in which service they will be transferred to, as I usually either use iTunes or Amazon Video. I have a few films on Google Play, but I usually don’t use it. Looks like I will be using it more now.
Re-tuning the EyeTV
Every few years you often need to re-tune your Freeview TV as the way the channels are organised and broadcast changes. Sometimes my TV lets me know, sometimes it’s a broadcaster that says something on air (which I usually miss) and more usually I find a load of channels missing and wonder what happened. This was certainly the case when my children mentioned missing channels on our Sony KDL48W605. So a quick check of the Freeview website and it was apparent that a re-tune was needed of the TV.
If the TV needed doing, I guessed that EyeTV on my Mac would also need to do it too. The mechanism for doing this is, is not entirely intuitive. What you have to do, is to use the EyeTV Setup Assistant.
Go through the screens until you reach Auto-Tune TV Channels and then click the Auto-Tune button.
So I let the EyeTV software do its job and all my channels were back to how they should be.
EyeTV EPG Problems
I can’t quite believe I have been using EyeTV 410 for over fifteen years now and that the original Firewire based hardware is still working, though the software has gone through a few upgrades.
The EyeTV 410 has a DVB-T digital TV tuner that allows you to both watch Freeview TV on your Mac, but also record it. You can then export it to watch on mobile devices. It’s also possible to stream live TV and recorded programmes to mobile devices, not just on the local network, but it’s also possible do that over the internet.
As with Digital TVs, the EyeTV uses the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) that is transmitted alongside the video.
I was having a few issues with the EPG as it was picking up any information from the BBC channels. I could view the channels, but no channel information was available, which meant I couldn’t (easily) set recordings, though with iPlayer I do that less and less now.
I checked for software updates, no the software was up to date.
I tried to Update the DVB Programme Guide, but that didn’t work.
I then cleared the EPG database.
That didn’t work either.
I then went through the setup assistant which is accessed through the EyeTV menu.
You usually use the assistant when setting up the device, but now and again I find it useful to “reset” the EyeTV settings, or when Freeview require a re-tune.
Going to the Auto-Tune TV Channels screen of the assistant, I clicked Auto-Tune and let the assistant do its job.
This worked and I could see the channel information for the BBC channels in the EPG.
They’re not deleted…
In a recent blog post I reflected on if I should renew my Fickr Pro subscription.
I said
“I think the time has come, after eleven years to leave Flickr.”
So I decided not initially to renew my Pro subscription and look for alternatives to host my photographs online.
After some thought I realised I appreciated the way in which I used my Flickr account to not just store photogaphs, but also access them for images for blog posts and Twitter updates. However I still didn’t think $50 subscription was value for money.
So I was still going back and forth between do I subscribe or do I let it lapse.
However a decision by Flickr to retain all CC licensed photographs, has allowed me to defer my decision, as all my photographs are CC licensed, they haven’t been deleted.
At the time of writing, I am still thinking about paying the subscription, but I think I am learning towards yes.
Top Ten Blog Posts 2018
Over the last twelve months I have published 19 posts.
The post at number ten was from ten years ago, and contained a (now deleted) YouTube video on the new Skyfire browser for your Windows smartphone or PDA. Skyfire discontinued its Skyfire Web Browser in 2014.
The post at nine was now a rather dated post from ten years ago about how Scrabble’s owners were going to sue Scrabulous.
The eight most popular post was another ten year old post which was about when Apple was offering some free TV shows on iTunes.
The seventh post was from 2012 when my HP Photosmart printer died. My printer is dead! was a sorry tale about how replacing the ink cartridges on the HP B110a resulted it in destroying the print head.
The post at number six was Comic Book Fonts which was about the amazing comic book fonts from Comic Book Fonts.
The post at number five was wondering Where are my Comic Life Styles? I found them.
The fourth most popular post was about the free wifi (or lack of) on my holiday, Haven no wifi.
The post at three was about Dusting off the Pogo my old Polaroid Bluetooth pocket printer. Still going strong.
The second post was about when my iMac Fusion Drive Failed and had to have it replaced.
So the most popular post on the blog was my post about QR codes on chocolate bars, Cadbury QR Coding and Twirling was published in 2015 and was one of many posts I published on the use of QR codes back then.
