John Large ⁽¹²⁸⁾

Since upgrading my main iMac to High Sierra I've noticed that the Aluminium Apple remote I use to control iTunes and Kodi is no longer working as expected. I tend to use the Candelair alternative driver for my remote as it's better at making the remote play nicely with Kodi, but I've found even using the Candelair driver is causing issues. The remote works for left and right but the up & down function isn't working. This seems to be connected with the core High Sierra driver which is now using the up and down functions for volume control even when…

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the internet and more importantly the business model of the internet. It is becoming more apparent that the current business model of the internet is broken. A handful of adverting companies now control all advertising revenues online & this has led to companies like Google & Facebook monopolizing both the revenue streams and the access to content. Google & Facebook are now seen as the major sources of online traffic. Google monopolises search, while Facebook monopolises information aggregation and links. Google’s business model is one of algorithms and control of search, with a…

I've been looking at buying a bluetooth speaker for a while now. I tend to keep visiting retail stores & trying technology long before I commit to buying. I had been trying the bose soundlink mini II for months but I was always put off by the price. The Bose speaker is excellent but the price just seems too high for me. After playing with various speakers in airport electronics shops and high street stores I decided to head over to Amazon to take a look. A speaker that caught my eye right away was the SoundPEATS P4 speaker. The…

I've always been a fan of RSS readers. Right back when XML was starting out and RSS feeds became the norm on blogs & websites, I would use an RSS reader to aggregate the posts from my favourite sites & blogs. Back then I'd access them for offline viewing on my palm pilot or O2 XDA (well before smart phones we had palm tops such as the XDA and companies like Palm who provided me with the Palm IIIc where huge). The advantage of RSS was the fact that posts could be pulled in from loads of different sources, without…

As regular readers will know, I love my 5th Generation iPod video. I bought this iPod back in 2006 while on holiday in San Francisco & it has seen heavy usage daily since. The iPod has always been kept inside a protective hard case, a Belkin case, and generally well looked after. Over the years it has required a new Battery to be fitted which I did myself & also I've replaced the original 30GB hard drive with an iFlash Quad unit. The iFlash Quad allows the use of cheap Micro SD cards for storage & mine currently has 256GB…

I've been having a nightmare trying to get the Cloudflare plugin for wordpress to play nicely. After installing it I found that I had a blank settings page when I tried to enter my API details. I tried setting Cloudflare into development mode & also pausing Cloudflare but still the settings page wouldn't load. I started searching online for a solution and there seemed to be solutions for loads of older versions, but nothing about the current 3.0.3 plugin. After successfully getting the plugin to run on various other copies of wordpress on the same server I started to look…

Net Neutrality is defined as "the principle that Internet service providers and governments regulating the Internet should treat all data on the Internet the same, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication". While many attacks have been made on Net Neutrality by large corporations, including trying to create a two tier internet & ISP's slowing the traffic of competing streaming services, on the whole the basic definition of Net Neutrality has remained unscathed. However the definition of net neutrality may just be out of date. As I see it, net…

Over the past few days in the UK there has been a renewed sense of urgency within government to address & ban/circumvent end to end encryption in communications apps. On Wednesday of last week in the UK an attack was launched on Westminster. During the subsequent investigation it has come to light that the attacker used the WhatsApp messaging app to message a friend or accomplice minutes before the attack. The government's response to this, perhaps with the best of intentions, is to outlaw or circumvent encryption for the purposes of law enforcement. The reasoning, to stop criminals using platforms…

As part of my cybersecurity posts I've decided to write briefly about PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption of email. We will use GPG which stands for GNU Privacy Guard and is a compatible free software equivalent of Symantec's proprietary encryption algorithm. Both PGP and GPG are interchangeable so you can use either protocol. These keys use a high level of encryption. I Use RSA 4096 for my keys which is possibly a little overkill, but I like to future proof when learning. GPG is important for emails as it means that an email remains encrypted between the sender & the…

I've been planning on writing a series of posts on cybersecurity for a while now. I've been interested in computer security for decades & have always tried to secure my machines, data & online profiles. In the modern computing landscape, many aspects of basic cybersecurity have been lost. When I started out online, perhaps in the early 90's, there was a strong culture of using online handles as opposed to your own personal details. We had an awareness that the internet was a public sphere which is universally accessible. The internet is a public place, but it is also a…

Since upgrading to OS Sierra on my iMac, I had noticed a horrible buzzing noise coming from my external desktop speakers. The pop would occur after a short timeout and seemed to indicate that sierra had put the audio driver to sleep, leaving no output to the external speakers. The initial switching off of the speakers would cause the pop and then the speakers would buzz until a system sound woke up the audio driver & played a sound. This hissing & buzzing of the external iMac speakers was driving me mad. A few years ago I remember a fix called…

On October 27th Apple held one of their new product unveiling conferences & I was instantly disappointed. I was sat in a coffee shop in central Manchester watching the stream & almost shouting at Apple in public. Apple hardware has been iOS focused for a long while now & any real innovation in the computing hardware side of things has been seriously lacking. I bought a 24" top of the line iMac back in 2009 & I've used it daily ever since. The new hardware just doesn't warrant the outlay & the performance gains are negligible in my opinion for the price. To…

This week Apple unveiled its latest & greatest flagship device, the iPhone 7 & 7 Plus. This is the first Apple conference which I haven't attended or streamed live from home. For me, the magic of Apple is starting to fade. Don't get me wrong, their hardware is exquisite, but their decision-making & rush of new hardware & software to market is getting a little tedious. Especially on the software side, nothing is quite as polished & flawless. Everything feels buggy & clunky. It also feels like Apple are innovating for the sake of it. I was majorly put off…

Modern smart phones aren't great when it comes to battery life. This can be blamed on the user as much as the device itself. We tend to use smart phones for everything nowadays. From MP3 playback to calls, texts, social media & maps. The usage is endless. Unfortunately the power life is not. I often find myself in cities & on trips without access to an outlet & I can be down to 50% before 10AM. I use my iPhone to conduct my business, manage my life, listen to music & take photos. I use it to pay for coffee, to organise meeting…

For a long time I've been meaning to sort out SSL certificates for my domains & secure traffic to them. Last year HTTPS became a google ranking factor & since then site wide HTTPS adoption has been on the increase. The problem with HTTPS is that up until recently it required buying an SSL certificate from a vendor & installing it on your hosting. SSL certificates are not cheap & need renewing on a regular basis. It isn't just a one-off cost. Furthermore, if you have multiple websites hosted on shared hosting, you need to sort out & purchase a separate certificate for…

I've been using OpenELEC for a few years now, having it installed on an older Apple TV 1 (ATV1) and more recently on my Raspberry Pi 2 for use as a media centre. OpenELEC drastically simplified a kodi installation on any supported hardware & by aiming OpenELEC at being an appliance they managed to make a lightweight & rock solid kodi OS. It would seem over the past 6 months or so, development of OpenELEC and support for OpenELEC has wound down. Maybe the developers have other projects to focus on, but I found that it wasn't being updated as…

Regular readers will know that I now use a Lenovo X200 for most of my computing needs. It has Libreboot installed and I run Trisquel 7 GNU linux on the laptop. This laptop is perfect for linux, all of the hardware including the updated Atheros wifi adaptor have open source & free drivers available & the machine is truly 100% my own. The laptop itself is still fairly powerful for an older laptop with an Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU P8600 @ 2.40GHz dual core processor and upgraded ram to 4GB it really is a good mobile workhorse. I only paid…

I love my old school technology. While I love all the new developments in tech, I'm still one of these people who wont replace something which is perfectly good just to upgrade to the latest model. My 5th Generation iPod is no exception. I bought this iPod in 2006 from the Apple store in San Francisco. It was my first new Apple device & I opted for the special U2 edition, not because I particularly like U2, but because I loved the black with red click wheel. This iPod has seen heavy usage since the day I bought it. It has…

I've been having major issues with my iPhone 6 running out of storage capacity. I have a modest amount of apps installed on the iPhone & I have the 16GB version of the iPhone 6. I was constantly receiving the storage almost full banner on my iPhone and even when looking at the storage & iCloud usage in settings I couldn't figure out what was taking up all the space. This tutorial will also apply to iPad as it's an iOS issue and not an iPhone specific issue. Works well if you keep receiving the message "iphone storage full" and…

This evening I was greeted with a message from my trusty firefox installation that OSX 10.7 (Mountain Lion) is no longer supported and as such won't receive any future updates. This contradicts the message over on the Firefox support site which states that support will continue to August 2016. I, like many people still run an old iMac. This machine is fast (faster than my brother in laws brand new iMac running OSX El Capitan) in real life even though the hardware is in no way a match. I've tried all new versions of OSX on this machine and the…