This week a good friend of mine gave me a pair of Apple EarPods with Remote and Mic. He was sent a replacement iPhone 5S to replace a faulty unit and they sent it retail boxed with another set of EarPods so I was given the new pair. The ones I currently use are the ones that shipped with my iPhone 4. They are now pushing 4 years old & still in perfect working order. In fact since my first iPod in 2006 I’ve never had a set of Apple Headphones go faulty. They are great quality & pretty much indestructible (I still have that original pair from my iPod I bought in San Francisco back in 2006).
Author: John Large
My name is John Large. I am a Web Developer, E-commerce site owner & all round geek. My areas of interest include hardware hacking, digital privacy & security, social media & computer hardware. I’m also a minimalist in the making, interested in the Tiny House movement & the experience economy along with a strong interest in sustainability & renewable energy. When I’m not tapping on a keyboard or swiping a smart phone I can be found sampling great coffee, travelling the world with my wife Vicki (who writes over at Let’s Talk Beauty) & generally trying to live my life as unconventionally as possible.
Raspberry Pi & Openelec – A good combination.
I’ve had my rev. B+ Raspberry Pi for just over a year since it’s release. When i got it I had a few projects on the go, including a sickbeard/sabnzbd/couchpotato server and a few media centres. At the time I had XBMC Frodo running on my Apple TV 1 via Crystalbuntu and on my ATV2 by Jailbreaking & installing. Both solutions worked perfectly so the unstable XBMC on the Pi wasn’t really worth pursuing. Also I had issues controlling with a keyboard & a Flirc when the ATV’s utilized the ATV remote so well.
Rii i8 mini 2.4GHz wireless keyboard for Openelec on Raspberry Pi
This week I finally took the plunge and bought a small wireless keyboard for the Raspberry Pi. The Pi in question is a B+ raspberry pi running at 700MHz and sporting 512MB ram. I’ve got a 32GB Sandisk Class 10 SD card in it and one of the excellent Pibow cases from Pimoroni.
Up until a few weeks ago I’d been using an Apple TV 1 as my main media centre (upgraded with a CrystalHD hardware video decoder & running XBMC) and a Jailbroken ATV2 as my backup. The Apple TV one is great, it’s fast & snappy but it’s a bit of a power hog & can take a while to boot up. Also Crystalbuntu is yet to be upgraded to Kodi as CrystalHD support was removed a few versions back. The ATV2 was great up until XBMC frodo when the hardware limitations started to show. I needed an alternative so I switched to Openelec on the Rapsberry Pi.
iOS 8.1.1 update for iPad 2
Just a quick post regarding memory issues and poor performance on iOS 8 when used on an older A5 chipset iPad 2. I upgraded to iOS 8.1.1 tonight and everything seems much improved. It’s nowhere near as quick as iOS 7.1.2 was, but it is snappier and less buggy. Also seems to have fixed the copy and paste issue I hacked a workaround for last week.
Safari loads faster and multi tasking is improved noticeably. Still having issues with gsm not working so I’m limited to wifi only but I’m glad to have a usable iPad 2 again.
Tech obsolescence in 2014
I’m a big gadget lover but I need to balance my love of tech with my environmental conscience. I’ve got a massive issue with replacing items which are still perfectly usable items. It seems so wasteful to replace a phone or a tablet simply because a newer version has been released. The new models may have a slightly better spec but often they carry a huge price tag. To me, the gain is minimal but the outlay is maximum.
This standpoint is reflected in my current lineup of tech. My one & only phone is an iPhone 4. Not a 4S, a humble 4. It’s jailbroken & locked down to ios 7 as apple no longer allow it to be upgraded. With the jailbreak tweaks its perfectly fine speed wise, I actually prefer the smaller form factor and the battery life hasn’t really degraded from the day I bought it.
iOS 8.1 copy and paste not working *fixed*
Like many people I’ve been struggling with the copy and paste bug in iOS 8.1. It’s so frustrating not being able to consistently copy and paste between apps. Often when pasting it would paste old content and would require many attempts to copy and paste successfully. Without a jailbreak available there was very little that could be done to rectify the issue.
I tried a factory reset and setting up as a completely new iPad. No joy. When you are an iOS family like ours, with many devices failing to work its a most frustrating issue to have. Then thankfully the pangu jailbreak for iOS 8 was released. I instantly jail broke and reinstated all my tweaks, making iOS generally more useable on my iPad 2. Then came the master stroke. I remember using a cydia tweak known as single use keyboard by Yanik Magnan. This tweak essentially wipes the clipboard once you have pasted your text. This is essentially meant for privacy, but I don’t tend to paste more than once. Because it wipes the clipboard once you have pasted, the next time you come to copy and paste the clipboard is empty and cannot replicate old data. This works very well for me and I hope it helps you.
Nest Thermostat Now available in the UK
I remember seeing Nest a while ago when Kevin Rose tweeted & talked about it. I’m a real geek when it comes to eco technology & energy saving so i was very excited to finally get hold of Nest.
I finally found it in John Lewis in Liverpool. I had completely forgot that it had been released due to moving house but I’m glad I spotted it.
Nest is a smart thermostat which has learning capabilities & the ability to control it from an Android or iOS app.
The blurb for nest is as follows :-
Downsizing – biggest step complete
Well we have now moved out of our massive house. We are looking for a much smaller place so in the mean time we are staying with family & the few belongings we decided to keep are now packed neatly away in storage. We did so many trips to the charity shop in a van, not to mention all the things we sold on eBay including furniture and clothing.
The aim was to get all of our belongings into one short wheelbase transit. We managed to get it down to two loads in said transit but we still have some things to sell so the goal in achievable.
Downsizing – picking up pace.
Well things are starting to move quite quickly. We have been without a car now for almost a month and we have got on just fine. We are renting a car this weekend to do some days out & visit Manchester to get some business done. We ended up getting a really good deal and it was £60 for 4 days for a super economical small car.
The biggest thing is the house listing. After a month of waiting we finally got the house on the market & a sign up outside. Less than 24 hours later we have viewings lined up & hopefully things will move quickly. I’m excited to move on & start the next chapter of life. I know that won’t be in St Helens anymore & I’ve made my peace with that. The fact is apart from my good friends & a few family members I have very little tying me to this place now & it’s time to get back out there and start living again. Paying for this quasi-mansion has almost killed us. We have all this space & it’s lucky because once it’s all paid for each month there is very little money left over so we are trapped in it.
Downsizing Challenge – Bumps in the road but luckily no car
So we are still in the process of simplifying our lives. As you can tell by the blog, this has been put off for a while due to various family issues & our need to drive to/from Scotland every few weeks. We are slowly getting back on track but the downsizing is going to have to take a different shape.
As an update, we have now spoken to our landlord & are waiting on them finding a suitable tenant for the property. We are going to end the lease on this property & stay with family until everything calms down allowing us to move on. The plan for the future is still the same but due to the family problems we are going to be putting all of our things into storage for a while. Our storage is already sorted and we have committed to a 150sq/ft room. That’s pretty small when you consider we are in a 4 bedroom house with garage.
Downsizing update – One room empty
I finally managed to clear a whole room. The room happens to be a spare bedroom we where using as a store room/guest room. After a lot of selling & donating the contents of the room have been sorted & downsized considerably. Bed has gone as has associated bedding. Furniture has been sold and a lot of the stuff we where storing has been sold off. Feels great. The room is now clean & closed off.
Most of the stuff we had stored in this room where things that people had bought for us which we didn’t really want but felt obliged to keep. These have now been donated to charity. This means that someone will get some joy out of them rather than us storing them & our charity of choice makes some cash in the process. Furthermore we have reduced the size of home we need by one whole bedroom.
Still downsizing
Our downsizing challenge is still going on. But things are much harder than we first thought.
Firstly it seems like many people are doing something similar. It’s so hard to sell anything on eBay now and their fees are beyond ridiculous nowadays. People are just less willing to spend. We have sold quite a few things such as the Nintendo wii and other electronics, not to mention furniture, but they have sold for much less than expected. We do feel a lot lighter already so every cloud I guess.
Downsizing day 19 – wheels in motion
It’s been 10 days since my last entry on here. Unfortunately work and life has taken over and I didn’t have time to update the blog. However I’m still making a lot of progress.
Last week we sorted out our dressing room (a spare bedroom where we have clothes rails and my wife has her makeup). It’s not as posh as it sounds. We both went through our clothes racks. On our first pass over the racks we tried to look at everything we like and didn’t like or wear anymore. On the second pass we took out a couple of items to give to charity. Mostly older stuff and clothes we hadn’t worn for ages. We did a third and forth pass each time removing things we could part with. Doing this allowed us both to cut our collection of clothes in half. We donated them all to charity and rather than feeling sad about giving up some clothes, we are overjoyed at how easy it is to see what we have.
Downsizing day 7 – 1 week in
Well I’m now a week in to the downsizing challenge and its been a very hard week indeed. Sorting through your stuff is so tiring. So far we have done a trip to the rubbish tip with a car full of stuff, including an old mattress from our gust bedroom and associated old bedding (it was all beyond reusing) and lots of boxes & packaging we have been keeping for products. We also took hundreds of magazines for recycling along with some old kitchen things.
It’s funny how we attach value to things even though they are no longer of use to us. A kind of sentimentality to a magazine you once enjoyed & some misplaced fantasy that you will read it again. Some of the magazines I’ve had since I was 11 years old, mostly old car magazines and the sentimental connection to them is unreal. The truth is I’ve never read them in 19 years, I’ve just carted them about. They weigh about 100Kg and take up 4 under bed boxes. They have to go.