John Large ⁽¹²⁸⁾

Trusty iPhone 4 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…

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…

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 :- Most people leave the…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. Another major problem we are having is with City Centre landlords.

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…

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…

Below are the things that I'm selling off as part of the downsizing challenge. If you are interested in anything drop me an email jodsclass@gmail.com 1. Nintendo Wii + loads of extras - Softmodded consoles plays backups & homebrew Nintendo Wii With Wii Sports, wii Sports resort and Wii motion plus controller, Mario Kart with steering wheel, wii fit plus & balance board, console in white with nunchuk, standard controller and arcade controller. All boxed. Very good condition. Looking for £100 for the lot, or a near offer.

I Thought I should give you a little background into my life & to try and convince you this isn't a privileged middle class reaction to a lifestyle. When I was younger I had no money at all. My dad & I lived with my grandmother and we all pitched in as a family. We had one part time wage in the household. We where lucky in the fact that my grandmothers mortgage was paid off in full when my grandad died. So we all lived in a house on one part time wage. To say we had little money…

My current 4 bedroom 4 bathroom townhouse with Mercedes in the drive. All of it has to go. Keep checking back to see our downsizing progress.

This has been building up for a while now, but the last 2 weeks have been an eye opener & turning point in my life. For years I've been striving to prove myself as an adult, to prove success & to an extent wealth. I know that sounds hideous but take a look at your life and tell me you aren't doing the same. Living towards some social norm of house, car, family, career, nicer house, nicer car, better job. It's a treadmill. I looked at my life over the past 15 years and the happiest I've been over that…

My wife is just getting to grips with her new iPad mini. We bought the mini so she could carry it around in her handbag or backpack for blogging. She is a beauty blogger and is always replying to comments, blogging, tweeting and generally interacting with her peers. After setting up the ipad mini with all her apps we hit a snag. As soon as she tried to leave a comment on blogger blogs she was unable to, due to some seriously bad CSS/JavaScript. A login box pops up on screen but the on load function is knackered. Poor show…

I've had my iPad 2 since it was first released in the UK, thats a couple of years now and since the beginning I've been with O2 for my cellular data. this worked really well up until a couple of months ago. Firstly there was a bug with IOS/O2 carrier settings and it was constantly bugging me to update my carrier settings. This finally went away when upgrading to IOS 6.0.1 but since then my O2 data coverage has been shocking. The ipad would constantly say it was searching for signal, even though my wife's iPhone on the same network…

I've been meaning to review carmageddon for a long time but haven't been able to find the time to write it up. I've been a fan of carmageddon for years. Since the first release on the PC I can remember my 3DFX graphics card clicking into gear and the game starting up in glorious 3DFX graphics. All crisp and smooth. Friends would watch on in awe, as on their pc the game looked blocky and rubbish and we had super fast frame rates and insane graphics. Of course we had the version with blood & pedestrians, not the post public…

Just a quick post to say I started using Unrestrict premium to enable AirPlay on all apps and to allow streaming of audio & video from apps which normally only allow audio streaming. Many apps including tv catchup & live Streaming apps restrict AirPlay streaming to audio only but this will allow you to stream audio & video to your apple tv 2 or 3 via AirPlay. The main reason I wanted to get this hack working is so I can stream sky sports f1 from my iPad to the apple tv via sky go. I can now do that…

It's been a busy week. With the lack of ability to jailbreak the Apple TV 3 and the rising prices of the ATV2 due to it's jailbreak friendliness I was torn between spending a lot of money on another Apple TV 2 or going down a different media centre route. I've always used XBMC (now Kodi) since it's birth, even before when it was Xbox Media Player & my family have become accustomed to how everything works. It works wonderfully for our needs & we now don't have any subscription TV services (granted we download TV episodes but we have…

Although AirPlay mirroring is slated for release in OSX mountain lion next month, I've always found air parrot to be a great way of AirPlay mirroring & want to share this review with you before Apple steal a lot of their custom. Air parrot allows you to mirror what's on your mac screen over the network to your apple TV. It will mirror in 1080p if you have the latest apple TV and it also mirrors the audio from your mac. Surprisingly it keeps everything in sync audio wise and is a great way of watching silverlight content such as…