I’m really disappointed that Beats 1 Radio won’t work in iTunes on older versions of OSX. On my mountain lion OSX 10.8.5 machine which is an older iMac (and runs awful on Yosemite) I found that when updating to iTunes 12.2 all parts of Apple Music work with the exception of Beats 1 radio. This seems ridiculous as everything else works fine. It’s obviously a ploy to get everyone to upgrade to Yosemite & eventually El Capitan. Problem is, older machines don’t play well with the latest OSX.
I was lucky enough to get everything done early today & by 4PM I was already updating my iPhone 6 to IOS 8.4. – 15 minutes later I was signed up to the 3 month trial of Apple Music & trialing this exciting service. Initially Beats 1 Radio was just a loop of ambient music called Ambient 1 – Music for airports by Brian Eno. We kept getting brief voice over of Zane Lowe chatting to other locations & engineers in the run up to a 5PM GMT launch. And then at 5PM Zane launched with a local Manchester Band named Spring King and the song City. Manchester went worldwide & opened Beats 1 Radio. Good work.
Like all tech folk I ate dinner early yesterday & sat down to watch the live stream of the WWDC 2015. This is a big day in the tech calendar & we often learn of new & exciting things coming out of the super secret Apple engineering labs. It wasn’t quite as good as 2013 when I was in San Francisco for the WWDC but I can’t complain.
The three big announcements this year where iOS 9, OSX El Capitan and Watch OS – With a little extra bit at the end for Apple Music & Beats 1 radio. All exciting things & a lot to get your head around.
Our first batch of gift vouchers arrived after buying them on the Zeek iOS app. So far loving this.
Yesterday in Manchester I managed to get my hands on the brand new Apple Watch. I was as skeptical as most people when Tim Cook introduced these at the Apple Keynote in March 2015 but I must say I was very impressed. It was a bit of a scrum to get hands on with these watches in Manchester. A lot of people showing interest & Apple Employees where doing “fittings” which essentially means opening beautiful wooden drawers below the Apple Watch display & allowing you to try on the various editions.
1. The North Face e-tip lightweight gloves
2. 2000mAh Battery Bank
3. Mulberry Wallet
4. Oyster Card & Amsterdam OV-Chipkaart
5. Compact umbrella
6. Oakley (4+1)2 Polarized sunglasses
7. Notebook & Parker Jotter pen
8. Nixon – The Sentry watch
9. Multi-tool
10. Huawei E160 3G dongle
11. Sandisk 16GB Flash Drive
12. Apple iPhone 6
13. Apple iPod classic 5th Generation U2 Special Edition Black/Red (30 GB)
14. Keys on Element Lanyard
15. Apple EarBuds
16. Retractable iPod cable
17. Micro USB short lead
18. Apple lighting cable & power adaptor
19. Spare GiffGaff sims
20. Integral SD card reader
I finally got a chance to order a Raspberry Pi 2 a few weeks back. I’ve been meaning to post about it for a while but I’ve been extra busy. I ended up picking the Pi up from The Pi Hut after really struggling to track one down on the high street. As always the service from The Pi Hut was great & a few days later my new Pi arrived.
It’s hard to believe that the Raspberry Pi team have managed to squeeze so much power out of the same form factor & price point. The fact that it’s a quad-core means that everything feels much snappier. Less like a mega budget hobby machine & more like a mid range desktop PC. It will always be limited by processing power & RAM, not to mention raw graphic processing, but when you consider the price point & opportunity to try any project you like for very little financial outlay the Raspberry Pi will always be a great machine.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-