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 how good these headphones are. My expectations were low due to price, but that was misplaced. They are wonderful.

They are on over ear design so the soft ear cups naturally block out a lot of ambient noise. Trigger the ANC switch though & you have 26db active noise cancelling which is brilliant. Like all noise cancelling, it is better at blocking out constant pitch of noise such as the hum of an engine, but these do well to block out most sounds, even sudden bangs and crashes in the environment.

Without the noise cancelling active, the sound response is decent from the 40mm drivers. Bass is punchy but not overpowering & treble doesn’t get muddy like it tends to on a lot of Bluetooth headphones. I’ve paired them with my MacBook, iMac, Apple Watch & iPhone, and they work flawlessly with each device, also allowing for easy switching between devices as they favour the current connected device which is outputting audio. Simply pause on one device and start playing on another and the audio source automatically switches. I have found that they work best without any EQ settings on iOS. I had a bass booster turned on for my earpods, but have switched it off for use with these. It was too bassy.

The multi function buttons on the side allow you to power on/off the headphones and also feature volume up and down buttons. Tap the power button to pause and resume and long press the volume buttons to skip tracks. The controls are always at hand, but I tend to use my Apple Watch to control my music, so not a function I use often.

One problem I did find was when pairing with my MacBook & iMac, the Bluetooth codec would default to SBC which is the basic Bluetooth reference codec & means audio will go out of sync with videos when playing. However, not stated on the box is that these headphones support the AAC codec which is the native apple codec on Mac/iOS devices. AAC is normally reserved for much higher end hardware & I’m surprised it isn’t advertised on the specs as it would make these even more desirable with apple users. Running the following commands in terminal on my iMac and MacBook enabled AAC support & audio/video streaming was in sync & the audio much better quality. I also enabled aptX for other headphones.

To enable AptX support
sudo defaults write bluetoothaudiod "Enable AptX codec" -bool true

And AAC support

sudo defaults write bluetoothaudiod "Enable AAC codec" -bool true

The headphones charge using a USB C cable which is supplied & the OneOdio A30 headphones also come with carry case, wired cable for use when battery is low or on older non Bluetooth devices & an airline adaptor to allow you to use them on a plane.

The headphones are made out of plastic, which doesn’t feel premium like the alloys used in other brands, but they feel robust and hard wearing. The ear cups are a comfortable synthetic leather & I haven’t had any issues with hot ears or itching. The headband is padded in a similar vegan leather and one aspect I really like is that the top of the headband where the logo is, is also padded. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve banged my beats against things like car doors and not wanted to look at the scratches & gouges. A nice touch.

Battery life is excellent. Specs quote that you will get 15 hours using Bluetooth and noise cancelling, while you should get 25 hours with noise cancelling disabled & 45 hours of just noise cancelling without Bluetooth switched on. This all from a 500mAH battery. For my usage, listening to music, meditating & watching films while I work, I find that I’m charging them once a week. I don’t tend to use ANC when sat in the office, but will when meditating or walking outdoors & I’ve found it a really handy feature. It really does help. These headphones also have mics built in for hands-free calling which is a feature I’m using a lot during lockdown.

For under £60 on Amazon these are a no brainer. Great price, great product and wonderful value for money. As good if not better than headphones I’ve used at 5-6 times the price. Their support of AAC makes them perfect for iOS & Mac users & if you stream from Apple Music, you will notice that the audio is crisp and pleasant as intended. A highly recommended purchase.

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 friends & reply to business emails on the go. I use it a lot. I don’t tend to kill time with the iPhone, I’m not a Facebook user and tend to limit my social media usage, but I still struggle to maintain battery life.

I was excited when Apple introduced their low power mode, but I’ve mostly found it useless as it manages to save very little power. In the past I’ve used low quality power banks. I had a cheap one from Primark which would give me around a 50% charge on the iPhone 6. I’ve also resorted to dropping into Apple stores in Liverpool, Manchester, London, Amsterdam & San Fransisco on my travels to replace the display iPhones with my own to sneak a charge. It would be handy if Apple provided charging bays at tables for this very purpose.

Anyway, after all of the road warrior action I decided to address the problem. A power outlet isn’t always available. You find them in places like Starbucks, but they normally have someone tethered to them for the long haul. I therefore opted for a high-capacity power bank.

After a search  & reading plenty of reviews I decided to buy the Anker PowerCore 20100 power bank from Amazon. It is currently reduced from £59.99 to £29.99 so it is an absolute bargain. This is a 20,000mAH battery pack and I’ve found it can keep my iPhone 6 charged for an entire week. The power bank itself takes a while to charge on a standard USB port or USB charger. I’ve been using my high-capacity 12w iPad charger to charge the power bank much more quickly & find an overnight charge will fill the power bank.

I do like Anker products, the build quality is second to none & the quality in general of their products is superb. I prefer to buy once & buy well & this fits the bill. It’s made from sturdy, rugged plastic and is quite heavy. It has a charge indicator button and four small blue LED’s to show you the current charge level of the power bank, much like that found on Macbook’s.

This particular model has a single micro usb input for charging (with the supplied cable) and two standard USB outputs for charging any USB device. The Power Bank also comes in a great padded sleeve with a draw cord, which is perfect for travelling & throwing into your backpack.

The Anker PowerCore 20100 can charge two devices at the same time & I find it charges my iPhone 6 as quickly as a mains adapter. On a recent trip, it managed to keep my iPhone 6 charged for an entire week, which is crazy.

The Anker PowerCore 20100 can output 4.8 amps and features something they call Power IQ technology, which optimizes charging based on the device it is charging & can rapid charge supported devices. I feel more confident using a device like this over a generic one as I trust the quality of the cells used & trust it won’t burst into flames or fry my devices.

I also found this is the maximum capacity I would go for as anything larger can been troublesome when it comes to airport security & carry on luggage. There is a limit on the size of lithium-ion batteries that can be taken on a plane without scrutiny, so to save the hassle I went with an acceptable battery capacity.

Finally the packaging. I’m a bit of a packaging geek & Anker satisfied my geekiness. The packaging is wonderful & even feels nice. You can see just how good the packaging is in the pictures below.

If you use your smart phone or tablet on the go I would recommend you go & grab one of these before the price increases. It has become a staple in my everyday carry & always sites fully charged in my backpack. No more hunting for sockets. I’ve also been able to bail out friends when their devices have died.

Do you use a power bank? Let me know which ones you use & your experience with them. In the days pokémon Go it would appear more & more people rely on them to keep their devices charged.

I first tried deleting old apps and app data. This helped a little. I then deleted all of the music off my device which freed up some space but not a great deal. Next I opened the Battery Doctor app and ran the clean up scripts included, which clean out old cache and orphaned files. Again, this gave me a few extra MB but nothing noticeable.

The final thing I tried was to disable iCloud music under settings > music. As soon as I returned to check the storage space available I could see I had quite a bit more free. I checked back 5 minutes later and I had gone from almost full to 2GB free. It would seem that the caching of music on the iPhone with iTunes match is very inefficient on smaller devices. I see the benefit of caching music files for quicker retrieval & a reduction in cellular usage, but on smaller devices this really doesn’t help and I do wish they would include a way to disable caching, or a cache time-out.

If you use an Apple iPhone or iPad along with iTunes match/iCloud music I would advise giving this trick a go. Turn off iCloud music and watch your free space return. I now do this on a regular basis to free up space & delete the cache. It has really helped me free up space & made my 16GB iPhone much more useable.

If you are having the same issue please do let me know. I would love to hear your own fixes for storage issues on smaller iOS devices. iTunes match & iCloud music library seem very under-optimised in iOS 9 & I do hope they invest some more time & effort into improving this, especially on 16GB devices which I assume they will phase out in future iPhone & iPad models.

I looked online & the tear down guides & forum posts looked complex. By all accounts, the liquid had fried the logic board and it was toast. I enquired about repair which was starting at many hundreds of £££. I then considered a refurbished machine which would have been £500+ for the exact same laptop (age & spec). I then snapped back into my old ways & started troubleshooting.

Out came the screwdrivers & apart came the unibody. After carefully removing the keyboard ribbon cable & starting the laptop using the diagnostic power pads on the logic board, I was surprised to see it boot up. I plugged in an external keyboard and the Macbook was fine. This instantly pointed to a faulty keyboard. As the power button and keyboard are on the same circuit it would appear that the liquid had bridged the power circuits permanently and that’s why it wouldn’t power up. It was like permanently holding the power button down.

I headed over to eBay & a new keyboard & backlight was only £24.99 delivered. This was for a brand new, official apple replacement. I bought the keyboard & the next day installed it in the Macbook. The dismantling was tedious, over 100 screws most of which are tiny. But I installed the keyboard, reassembled the machine & it’s now better than it was before. Brand new, grippy matte keyboard and backlight.

This is why the ability to repair an item is so important. The laptop would have been scrap, like I’m sure many are, for the sake of a simple replacement keyboard & a bit of labour. Without this I would have been unable to replace the laptop due to cost & would have likely gone into debt to acquire a new one.

I’m not one to throw things away, technology lasts a lot longer in my household than it does in most. I had an original Xbox 360 for 10+ years which became a Frankenstein of a machine, most components repaired or replaced. The same with my old iMac which is my main machine. In fact I’ve always been like this.

The fact that technology is now being crippled by software updates is worrying. Apple have essentially ruined my old iPad 2 with iOS 9. It’s slow & laggy and the ability to downgrade to a useful iOS has been removed. This is forced obsoletion. This week in the news we are learning that Error 53, caused by the replacement or damage of the home button/finger print scanner in modern iPhones, essentially causes the handsets to brick on update. This is wrong. Apple say this is a security measure, but surely the software should disable the fingerprint scanning capability and not the whole handset. I’m sure people would still be angry about this but at least they could use a pass code and still use their phone.

This sounds less like security & more like apple clamping down on unauthorised repair of their products. Everyone will know that apple repairs are far more expensive than a local repair shop, or even self repair. I’m glad to see this is being investigated legally, as it sets a dangerous precedent for us as consumers of technology. If an item we own can be made redundant by a software update, surely that can be classed as criminal damage. At the very least it can be classed as a perfectly usable product not being fit for purpose.

Can you imagine if your car needed repair & you took it to a normal mechanic (not affiliated with the manufacturer) only to find your car had become a useless hunk of junk. I for one pay more for Apple Products than I did for my car so this analogy is not that far out.

This corporate control of devices after purchase needs to stop. I’ve always been a hardware hacker, I like to see what technology can be pushed to do. The way I see it, when I buy hardware, I want to be in charge of what I can do with it.

For this very reason, I’m now actively seeking out repairable tech. Companies like Fairphone are challenging the corporate attitude to closed systems. They offer an easily repairable smart phone & will supply all the parts & help required. They are also ethical & transparent. This pleases me greatly. Smart phones are expensive. If anyone told you 15 years ago that you would spend £600+ on a mobile phone you would have laughed, but here we are. Convergence of technology means we rely on them more than ever & so pay the high price tags. Surely that means that if we are so invested, we should be able to at least attempt repair.

If you have any views on this I would love to hear from you. I’ll do a full write up of the Macbook repair & diagnostics as soon as possible.

The first stumbling block I had when moving to Cornwall was perhaps the biggest, internet access. We live in between the villages of St Blazey & Lostwithiel on the south coast of Mid Cornwall. Coming from a major metropolitan area & back to Cornwall meant giving up any notion of 4G and hopefully falling back on 3G. That was a no go with my GiffGaff sim as the O2 coverage in my new house was 2G (gprs) only. And that was too slow to even send iMessage over. I therefore started ordering sim cards from all of the major mobile phone providers in the uk. This would prove to be a bigger challenge than I expected.

The first one to arrive was an EE sim. The coverage checker showed low coverage, but our property is near to 3 EE towers so I thought I would give it a go. No signal indoors and barely any outdoors. Certainly no data to speak of. Rubbish!

Before I go any further I need to set the scene in the new property. It’s a converted church from 1840. It has walls made of granite which are almost a metre thick. Couple that with the fact we are in a valley & things don’t look great.

The next sim I tried was a sim from 3. Again, their coverage checker said no coverage but what the hell, it’s worth a go. I tried outside and got a signal but nothing substantial and very weak. No signal indoors. Booooo!

The next sim up was a Virgin Media sim. At this point I ordered everything I could. Again, no signal.

The last sim I tried was a Vodafone sim. Vodafone are a company I’ve never used & I’ve always thought they are overpriced. Their coverage checker did show coverage & even said 4G coverage within 3 months. Great I thought. I bought the sim & topped up. Nothing. GPRS 2G signal only with zero throughput. This is where things got interesting. I got onto Vodafone support online & they said I had used all of my data. They reckoned I’d used all 500MB in 20 minutes over a non functioning gprs connection. Complete nonsense. We went through all of the scripted rubbish for over an hour in which time the agent kept contradicting themselves. Saying my internet wouldn’t work without the apn settings being correct, which they where, then saying I’d used all my data, which I hadn’t. Never did get that refund & I would advise everyone to be cautious dealing with them. I certainly won’t consider them in the future.

So I was left with my trusty GiffGaff sim on the O2 network, limited to GPRS only. I did find that forcing my iPhone 6 to only use 2G or 3G did allow some date transfer, but it took 5 minutes to send an iMessage.

I find it ridiculous that this is still the case in 2015 Britain. I can travel in all directions upto 4 miles before I get 3G & most of the time I only have a shaky gprs connection. The lack of rollout in rural areas has never really affected me until moving back to Cornwall but I can see it being a massive barrier to digital economy access for rural residents.

Luckily at home (thanks to the Superfast Cornwall initiative) I now have a solid BT Fibre connection at 38Mbps, but outside and around my home I have nothing but voice and limited gprs. Hopefully things will get better as O2 have a 98% coverage commitment and have access to 800Mhz and 900Mhz frequencies which allow for lower throughput but better range & building penetration. We will wait & see. Until then I will be constantly nagging O2 to upgrade my local masts.

UPDATE: 26th October 2015

Overnight, 3G & 4G where activated on my local mast. I now have 4G signal in my home and 3G signal for a mile or so around it. Thank you so much O2 for undertaking this much-needed work. And please keep working to get more & more rural residents & businesses connected. It is vital that people have easy access to the internet & the digital economy. Not to mention the boosts to a tourist area like this if people can use maps, review sites, social media and more to research and self promote the area.

So far Apple Music is an hour old in my hands & I’m already loving it. The initial setup was pretty easy with the exception of some awkward genre bubbles to select when setting up your profile. There seems to be a ton of artists available to stream and iTunes match has been integrated into a My Music tab.

I’ve followed a few of my favourite artists already & played with the streaming quality which seems responsive & crisp. No load times to speak of & nice bitrate streaming. I would like to see a way to limit the bitrate for use on mobile like in the Google Play app, hopefully apple will adopt that for users with smaller data plans.

The UI also seems pretty good. I keep losing the now playing as it minimises to a bar which needs to be clicked to bring it back. Will get used to it in no time but weird as users are used to looking at the bottom or top of a screen for minimised windows.

As it’s a brand new platform, a lot of the connect features are yet to be populated. Artists will need to start using the service & scrapers will need to start collecting content for the artists. I also found that bands such as Tool are not available to stream, but this is pretty standard as they aren’t on Spotify. Also Steve Wilson’s new material isn’t available. I’ve already found a bunch of music which isn’t available to stream so this will compliment my library & iTunes match as opposed to replacing it.

Anyway this is all new & I’m still playing with it, but I’ll write another post when I’ve got to know Apple Music better. Until then, a bunch of screenshots for you.

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.

The thing I’m most excited about is OSX El Capitan. Whilst the name won’t be to everyone’s liking the underlying improvements should be. Improving the architecture of the OS and utilising Metal to boost core graphics and core animation by almost 50%, not to mention improving efficiency by providing low overhead access to the GPU should be of great benefit to OSX users. This is achieved by shifting more processing over to the GPU without the overhead for faster processing and a snappier feel. The demo that Epic gave of the upcoming title Fortnite ran crisp & smooth on the test hardware. Also with Swift now going open source I expect to see a lot more development using swift & with more integration of swift into El Capitan we should see some great stuff from developers.

I will be really interested to see if Metal and other improvements will run on older hardware. I’m still using an early 2009 iMac as my main development machine which is still more than capable and as yet not worth the upgrade. We do have a newer Macbook pro but I will be over the moon if this runs well on our older hardware too. I had to revert back to Mountain Lion on the main machine as Yosemite was very buggy & full of memory leaks. It ran at an acceptable speed but nowhere near as fast as ML. From the App Store reviews it seems a lot of people have had issues with Yosemite so I reverted back to ML until such a time that stability is improved.

iOS 9 was also announced at WWDC and some of the new features do look great. Most notably the new News app looks like a game changer. It’s essentially a proprietary RSS aggregator using apples own mark-up but the articles and formatting did look great on the demo. I wonder how it will work now more & more news content is going behind a pay wall? I tend to use the BBC app on iOS for my news and Feedly for all of my other RSS feeds but in the days of twitter I tend to follow the major sources of news such as Cnet, The Verge, The Register etc and read their articles as & when they tweet a link. With tweetbot this works great as I can view them in reader view. If news works as suggested & the news outlets do adopt the platform it will be amazing, if they decide not to support News it may just add to the already fragmented news/article reading experience.

Also in iOS 9 apple announced new multi tasking & keyboard functions along with split screen multi tasking. Granted the Split Screen will only work on Apple’s flagship iPad Air 2 but for future generations it’s the right direction to go for tablets. The new keyboard functions including using two fingers to create a trackpad with cursor have been a long time coming. How often are you trying to edit text in iOS, it magnifies where it thinks you want the cursor to be then starts jumping all over the place. Not Cool.

The new multi tasking does look great & should help people be even more productive with a tablet. As an old school techie I would never be without a desktop computer *shivers*, however many people now only have a smart phone or tablet for all of their computing tasks so the more capable these machines are the better for everyone who designs or develops apps & websites. The more people we have actively online the greater potential we have to achieve great things with our work.

Also announced for iOS 9 are new Maps which include better walking & transit maps. Granted these will only support major cities so the majority of people will never benefit from this, however it should be a good improvement when visiting unfamiliar cities, especially by integrating mass transit into maps itself. It will give you detailed instructions including transit times and numbers along with detailed internal maps of stations. I’m a bit of a mass transit geek so don’t often struggle with figuring out subways and trains, however for many people this is a hugely daunting task so can only be a good thing.

Finally apple announced a more energy-efficient iOS 9, with an estimated 1 hour extra of battery life under general usage & a new low energy mode to conserve upto an additional 3 hours of battery time. That’s got to be a good thing as smart phones become more and more etched into our lives. A few other things were announced for iOS 9 but I’m just covering the things that got me excited.

With regards Watch OS I’m not really that excited. The Apple Watch is a great device, I’ve played with them & love them, however I just don’t have a need for one yet. I may in the future pick one up but right now it’s just not something I want or need. The fact that apps will run natively in Watch OS 2 is great for developers. I’m sure developers will come up with uses for the apple watch that apple never even dreamed of. I’m just not prepared to be an early adopter on this so not much to say on Watch OS.

Just as we all thought the WWDC keynote was over we heard Tim Cook mention we have something else to talk about. I for one was preying it was an Apple TV update but alas it was something completely different. Apple Music & Beats 1 was announced. As always when apple bring in musicians to talk to a room of developers it all gets a little awkward and weird. Almost like they have had the worst actor in the building quickly learn a script that goes totally wrong. I was happy to see Trent Reznor talking about Apple Music & his involvement and the service does look good. I’ll be happy to get my 3 month trial on the 30th June when iOS 8.4 comes out.

Apple Music is essentially all the best bits of Spotify, myspace of old, twitter, instagram, facebook and music news websites all rolled into one. With connect you can follow your favourite artists, see latest releases & checkout stuff they are working on & generally connect more with your favourite artists. This has been a long time coming. Since the shift from physical media to MP3/AAC/Streaming storage & acquisition of music has become far easier, but the social aspects of music & music discovery have faltered. I used to love going to a record shop(s) and browsing the racks, seeing new releases, chatting with like-minded people & hearing new music in store. I loved swapping CD’s with friends & discovering new bands. In the age of iTunes & streaming this has all but disappeared. I’m hoping that the new connect service goes some way to bridging that gap & hopefully artists will promote music they love & not just self promote. The new discovery tools are apparently user curated & not algorithm led so hopefully the suggestions will be just as good as those made by your mates/peers back in the CD/Tape/Vinyl days.

Alongside the Apple Music subscription service they announced beats 1 radio. Broadcasting out of London, NYC & LA it’s meant to be a 24 hour global radio station. I hope that they bring some more countries into the mix as broadcasting from two US locations & London hardly seems representative of the world. I’m glad to see they brought in Zane Lowe. I didn’t like a lot of his Radio 1 stuff but that’s simply because I don’t rate mainstream chart music, however in his early MTV days & in his own music taste this guy does know what he is talking about. It may finally shake up the old chart system & broadcast radio nonsense & finally expose some new genuine talent.

So that’s my quick recap of WWDC 2015. I hope I managed to express what parts of WWDC I most enjoyed. Did you guys watch? What in particular are you looking forward to?

I love how the apple earphones integrate with iPod and the Ipod music app for iPhone. The play/pause & volume controls are great when I put my music on Shuffle. I use iTunes match so I stream my entire library to my iOS devices. My library has over 15,000 songs in it so I use the skip button quite often & it’s great to be able to do it via the cable remote. I also like to answer my calls while I’m on the go, walking around cities. It seamlessly mutes my music so i can take the call using the built in cable mic and then resumes playback at the end.

The new EarPods are a revelation. The positioning of the bass and treble speakers are perfect. The bass essentially plays into the cartilage/bone around your ear so it’s full bodied & not deafening. It’s so much richer. The small treble speaker gives great definition to higher notes & the whole experience is a major improvement on the older earphone design. They come in Apple’s infamous rubbery finish and the parts of the cable that meet the ear buds & the 3.5mm audio jack are perfectly reinforced to stop bending and splitting. They come beautifully packaged in a plastic wrap box. These are well worth the money & I would recommend them to anyone. I also find that they sit in my ears much better & feel far more comfortable.

As someone who listens to really heavy music (I tested these with Down, Lamb Of God & Kyuss) I really recommend them. The bass is incredible for in earphones and doesn’t leave that horrible muffled hearing when you stop listening.

You can buy them directly from Apple or Amazon. Amazon have them for £10.95 delivered. Absolute bargain!  ]]> 1094