John Large – Technology, Hardware, Web Development, Digital Privacy & Ethics

Soundpeats Air5 Pro Review: Affordable Hi-Res Earbuds With Adaptive ANC Finding true wireless earbuds that balance hi-res sound, strong noise cancellation and comfort often means paying premium prices. Brands like Sony, Bose and Apple dominate the high-end, but Soundpeats has been building a reputation for delivering excellent value. Their latest release, the Air5 Pro, aims to offer flagship-style performance at a far more accessible cost. I was so eager to try these, I actually opened them & started using them straight away. Normally, I would take photos of earphones before using them, but I live by a loud road &…

I've had so many pairs of Soundpeats headphones & earphones over the years & they have possible the best quality to price ratio of any tech I use. The Q40HD are their updated sports earbuds and I just had to give them a go. I have an older pair of these I love when I go running. For me, these are ideal because they are wireless, but also a necklace type earphone. You can remove them from your ears and connect the earphones with their magnets to create a necklace, which keeps them in place when running by a busy…

I've been rocking these SoundPeats PearlClip Pro earphones for a month or so now, so thought it was about time I did a short review of these little beauties. They are currently available on Amazon with money off, so I can 100% recommend grabbing a pair. Let's dive into the review. I’ve been looking for something to replace my wired apple earbuds for a while now. Since upgrading to an iPhone 16 Pro and requiring an adaptor to convert USB-C into a 3.5mm jack, I was thinking of grabbing a pair of wireless earbuds. The Apple AirPods are great, but…

I’ve had an issue since upgrading to Sonoma on my 2019 Intel iMac. I have power nap disabled, as every time the computer wakes under power nap, my external drives spin up. My office at home is in the next room to our bedroom, so I hear the drives spinning up & down all night. It has been driving me mad. I'm not a big fan of the new energy saver settings in Sonoma, or the entire settings layout for that matter. When looking in logs using the following in terminal:- pmset -g log | grep ' wake' I could…

Long time readers of my website will know I'm a bit of a sucker for music & by extension any hardware or accessories which allow me to enjoy my music in a new way. I've been using my Beats Solo 3 for a while now but was contacted by OneOdio before Christmas to test their new A30 noise cancelling headphones. A week later I had the OneOdio A30's in my hand, and I was instantly impressed with this little gem. I wasn't expecting great things given the sub £60 price tag, but I've got to say I'm blown away by…

I held off upgrading to Catalina for a long time. I was hanging onto a few 32bit only apps and also I’ve experienced trouble in the past with new OS iterations. As we have reached 10.15.5 I decided to take the plunge and upgrade. We are running a few Macs in the house. Both MacBooks support Catalina natively, but my iMac is a 2009 model and as such is technically unsupported. I’ve been upgrading my 2009 iMac for a few years using the DosDude patch and it has always worked perfectly. The upgrade of the MacBooks went great, and even…

I first got hold of this Raspberry Pi 1 Model B back in May 2012. At the time, I bought the pi to replace an ageing Apple TV 2 which I had jail broken and was using as a kodi media centre. It worked well, but I preferred the Aluminium apple remote & IR sensor on the ATV2 so the pi was largely mothballed. A few years later I bought a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and this became our main Kodi media centre, replacing the Apple TV 2 and coupled with a Rii keyboard. It was much faster &…

Over the last few days I've had a massive increase in traffic from Chinese data centres & ISPs. The traffic has been relentless & the CPU usage on my server kept spiking enough to cause a fault in my cPanel hosting. I'm on a great hosting package with UKHOST4U and the server is fast & stable, but it is shared with a few other websites. This means that I couldn't just blanket ban Chinese IP ranges. Even though we don't sell our products in China, it seemed like a very heavy-handed approach, and to block via .htaccess with the entire…

Since updating to iOS 12 on my iPhone 6 I've had a major headache. Album art hasn't been working for my iTunes match (iCloud) music library, and I've only been seeing the standard iTunes missing artwork icon for my songs & albums. I even re-subscribed to Apple Music to see if the problem was iTunes match only, but it also affected most of the music I streamed from Apple Music too. I've managed to find a really simple fix for the album artwork problem. Head over into settings and click on the music tab. Once there, you need to disable…

Over the last few weeks I've been trying out the new SoundPEATS Q12 bluetooth headphones. I already own a pair of the Q30 headphones which I use a lot with my Laptop and iphone. I wanted a more compact pair to grab on the go & use with my Apple Watch. I've got a Nike+ Apple Watch Series 3 with Cellular and I tend to use my watch a lot to listen to music on the go. It means I can keep my iPhone in my pocket or backpack & not worry about being disturbed. It's also amazing to use…

I've been using social networks for many years. My original masters thesis revolved around the then emerging technologies of social networks. I coupled the ideas of early day twitter & Facebook & combined them with a virtual learning environment for universities. Back then, I thought that social media, the semantic web & Web 2.0 as we called it, was the future. Through the years I've adopted more of these platforms and integrated them into my life. I've continued to study them from both a personal & a societal point of view, and in the last few years my view has…

I've been a huge fan of Cory Doctrow for a while now. With regular appearences on 2600's Off The Hook radio show, not to mention his work for the EFF, he is well known in internet circles. This video is over an hour long, but goes a long way to explain the direction in which our technology (and the companies who run them) are going. If we leave it to the quasi-monopoly companies we have already, we are in for a rough ride. Recommended for any internet user, especially those with a penchant for smart home devices (he outlines some…

For the last few months I've gone through a bit of a regression. As a born & bred internet nerd, I've always thought that online content was king. I'd pour over articles, blogs, forums & personal websites absorbing information. For the most part I still do enjoy all of those outlets, but one website genre has been sapping too much of my attention, News sites! During the run up to the 2016 EU referendum in the U.K and the presidential elections in the U.S my news consumption increased at an exponential rate. My drug of choice was The Guardian online.

As many readers will know, I opted to go down the Sonos route of home audio as opposed to the Apple Homepod route. While my devices are generally all within the Apple ecosystem, I don't yet rate Siri & I do like the option to use third-party music streaming services such as Tidal if I see fit. I also like the Sonos app & the fact that I can control it from the app without having to use voice controls at all. One of the biggest features of Sonos that I use are the lock screen controls. My device usage…

This has been a long time coming but I've finally cancelled my Netflix account. I've had a Netflix account off and on for years, almost since they started rolling out online streaming and on the whole, it has been mediocre at best. I did enjoy having access to older TV shows such as Bottom and Red Dwarf, which I grew up watching & always enjoy putting on for nostalgia, but I finally decided to end my subscription. Netflix on the whole is a good service. It is relatively cheap & does have some good content. The problem stems from the…

Before I get into this, let me just say that this is my own opinion, based on music that I like & using the kit that I currently own. I'm by no means an audiophile & I don't pour thousands of pounds into my home hi-fi kit. I've been trying to find the best combination of streaming & local storage of AAC to suit my needs & these are my findings. Over the last few months, I've been trying out Apple Music, Spotify Premium, Amazon Music Unlimited & Tidal. I also have my own music collection which is ripped to…

I'm a huge fan of TED talks. I tend to watch them when I'm doing something mundane in the home office such as organising a drawer or waiting for a task to complete on my servers. As an academic & everlasting university student (I'm still planning on going back to finish my PhD) I find lecturers and talks on just about any topic both fascinating and interesting. I use the curated playlists on TED a lot, but sometimes I just select an interesting video & see where it takes me. Below are the three videos I believe you must watch…

This evening I was having a quick browse on the internet. I was looking for Social Media videos, more specifically scientific lectures regarding the effects of social media on our brains. Purely by chance I stumbled across this TEDx talk by Dr Cal Newport. Cal is a university professor & by chance, he didn't ever sign up to Facebook when the rush to create accounts was in full force. His reasons at the time are quite trivial, he was a little miffed that Mark Zuckerberg's business had taken off so well while so many others had failed in the dot-com…

I've been thinking a lot lately about algorithms and their brute force introduction in to our everyday lives. I think there is a time & place for an algorithm but in many ways, they are failing us as users & failing us as a society. There are times algorithms are of great use, such as those used by search engines to gather up millions of documents, sort them & hopefully present the one closest to your search term. I take issue with the algorithms developed by the likes of Google, but more with respect to how they censor results &…

I've been looking for a pair of Bluetooth earphones for a while now. I wanted a pair with a short wire attaching the two buds as I often take them out to stop and chat with people when walking around the city. With my wired apple earbuds, I normally run them up under my T-shirt and out at the collar so I can take them out and let them hang from my neck. This single requirement has put me off Bluetooth and wireless headphones for a while until I came across the Soundpeats Q30 wireless earphones. A few months ago…