Posts

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Missing #366photos

Last year I took a photograph everyday and posted it to Instagram and Flickr.

#366photos

On the 1st January I kind of breathed a sigh of relief that it was all over, job done. I wasn’t going to not take photographs any more, but I wasn’t going to feel the pressure of taking a photograph everyday.

Don’t get me wrong I did enjoy taking a picture everyday, it was quite a challenge to ensure that I didn’t repeat a picture, alas there were a few which are similiar…

I also liked the challenge of doing different kinds of pictures and that really did make me think about what pictures I was taking and which filters or how much to crop.

I liked using Instagram, and it was nice getting positive feedback from my Instagram followers.

Though I did feel glad when the year was over, now we are in February, though I intended to take just as many photographs as I did last year that certainly isn’t the case. In January 2012 I uploaded 115 photographs to Flickr, whereas in January 2013 it was just 34.

I think I might get back into a “photo a day” habit, but I won’t be tagging them in the same way.

Posted on

Ultravioleting

In recent years I have been buying, what the trade call, triple play movies, these sets contain a copy of the film on Blu-Ray, a copy on DVD and a digital copy for your mobile device. Though more expensive than just buying the Blu-Ray (or just the DVD) what I did like about it was I could watch the film on my TV and then if I wanted to watch it again I could watch it on my laptop or on my iPad.

With most of the films I bought the digital copy was in an iTunes format. This was fine with me as I already used the iTunes ecosystem for music and video.

More recently, well since December 2011, I have noticed is that the trend now is to use Ultraviolet.

UltraViolet (UV) is a digital rights authentication and cloud-based licensing system that allows users of digital home entertainment content to stream and download purchased content to multiple platforms and devices. UltraViolet adheres to a “buy once, play anywhere” approach that allows users to store digital proof-of-purchases under one account to enable playback of content that is platform- and point-of-sale-agnostic.

In theory what you do (in the UK) is sign up to Flixster and then you can redeem your Ultraviolet code and watch or download your movie.

I say “in theory” as I haven’t actually managed to do this process. The first time I signed up, I think I some how managed to sign myself up as an American. This would have been pointless as I wouldn’t have been able to access my “UK only” films. There was also no way to change your country. this is obviously to stop regional piracy. I do think that these “piracy” measures are short-sighted, as what they are actually doing is stopping me, an actual customer who has paid for the film, from watching the film; whilst the actual pirates wouldn’t even worry about such things, probably using a copy from the film studio or similar…

I have to say that is one thing that does annoy me after spending my hard earned cash on a DVD or Blu-Ray the first thing I see (and usually you can’t fast forward or skip it) is a clip telling me not to pirate films… Hello? I bought the film, I didn’t pirate it, I bought it, why tell me something I already know and do. If I pirated a film, I wouldn’t see that clip would I, so why show customers who are honest, want to watch the film, a stupid clip telling them to buy films… they did. I wouldn’t mind so much, but half the time you are “forced” to watch the clip, as they have restricted the capability to skip or fast forward the clip. Why don’t they put that clip on pirated films?

So back to Ultraviolet, so of course I tried to sign up again, and it wouldn’t let me, as I had already signed up… When I tried a different e-mail address, that didn’t work it timed out. In the end I gave up.

I think part of the problem was that I was trying to do all this on my iPad. Why the iPad, well I wanted to watch the film on the iPad.

I think the best option will be to do it all on a PC and then hopefully, if Ultraviolet will allow it, then it will let me access the films on the iPad.