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.
Downsizing (living simply) challenge
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 time was when I was at University living in a small one bedroom flat and spending on average £40 a week total (with the exception of rent). I had no money but had no money worries. We lived in a small manageable apartment which was cheap to rent, cheap to heat, took about 20 mins to clean and not an inch of the place was unused dead money.
Problems posting comments on blogger from iOS iPad safari and chrome
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 blogger.
iPad 2 Celluar Data Problems – O2 PAYG
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 sat next to me had full signal. When I could get signal I was pretty much limited to GPRS. it seems that I’m not the only one with these issues, the O2 forums are awash with those complaining about this exact same issue. I tried downgrading to IOS 5 but still the same problem, which leads me to believe that it’s either a baseband issue (unlikely) or an issue again with O2 carrier settings. Due to the problems I had earlier in the year I would go with it being an O2 issue.
Carmageddon for IOS.
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 outcry version with green blood & zombies. We played this game relentlessly. Unlocking all the cars but never knowing just how to unlock them. You play it enough and it just happens.
Unrestrict premium 2
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 allowing me to watch on the tv in the kitchen or bedroom as I don’t have multiroom.
Apple TV 1 – CrystalBuntu – OpenELEC
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 a TV license & could watch them for free on our set top box so hardly a crime). We also convert all our DVD’s into .mp4/.m4v/.mkv files so we can watch them without going to find the disk.
Air parrot for osx – AirPlay mirroring to atv2 & atv3
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 SkyGo on your TV via apple TV.
Google Chrome for IOS.
I can’t believe it has taken such a long time for chrome to appear on the app store for ios. I switched to chrome on all the desktops & laptops a while ago as safari was buggy & a memory hog & Firefox started crashing a lot since they tried to update too much of it.
Chrome on the desktop is great. It syncs all our passwords and bookmarks on all machines, which is a great help when you share hardware like we do. It means that no matter what machine we are using we have all our bookmarks & passwords ready to go.
OSX Lion SMB Samba XBMC fix
This is an update to my last post regarding fixing samba in OSX Lion. I have since ditched samba altogether in favour of NFS. NFS is built into OSX as standard & is a very fast unix sharing protocol. It’s quite hard to configure but thanks to a handy OSX tool called NFS Manager it couldn’t be simpler to setup. NFS is now also supported in XBMC and Firecores Media Player for ATV2 so this is a good time to get to grips with NFS & rid your life of Samba once & for all.
Ok First you need to grab a copy of NFS Manager for free & Install. Its available from NFS Manager
iPad 2/iPhone 5.1.1 Jailbreak absinthe music not working Fixed
I’ve been having a problem with Music playing on my iPad since jailbreaking with Absinthe on ios 5.1.1. It’s jailbroken so I can install retinapad for iPhone apps & xbmc for plugin development. Music in the built in app wouldn’t play. I Use itunes match and it would show as playing but nothing would actually play & the track time wouldn’t progress. I suspected a corrupt library somewhere, so I fixed it as follows.
1. Close the Music app, then force close the app to make sure it’s not in memory.
2. Go into settings > Music > and disable itunes match.
3. Install Open SSH via Cydia.
4. SSH into your device with the default username of root and password alpine (I use cyberduck to SSH into my ios devices as it’s a familiar FTP style interface over SSH, very easy to manipulate files without terminal).
5. navigate to /private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control
6. Delete everything inside the Music folder
7. Delete any file modified recently, all playlists DB files etc from the itunes folder at /private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/iTunes (You could probably delete everything in the folder as it should be regenerated by ios, but do so at your own risk, perhaps backup all files in this folder first.
8. Once deleted go back to settings & enable itunes match.
9. Fire up the Music app and watch all your music re-download from iTunes match, now click any song and it should play from the cloud.
10. Download any/all tracks you like & enjoy.
Mophie juice pack air for iPhone 4 – review
I finally took the plunge and invested in an external battery pack for the iPhone 4. Being an iPhone owner since the 1st generation I’m well aware of the iPhones issues with battery life. I’ve managed to change my charging habits so that Everytime I’m sat at the iMac I dock the iPhone, Everytime I’m in the car I charge it via the 12v socket in the car via an adaptor, and whenever I travel I take the powercord with me and plug it into any plug I can find. I’m forever topping up.
Finally invested in better batteries for our gadgets
It’s been a long time since we last had a decent battery charger & batteries. In fact it was october 2007. I remember it because we took them away with us to NYC for a trip and they never came home with us. Since then, many of our gadgets come with good quality built in lithium ion batteries, so there has been little need for a battery charger. Regular visits to the pound shop or ikea have been perfect for cheap batteries, but far from froogle or Eco.
So we invested in an energizer accu recharge. It came bundled with a set of 1300mah batteries and cost £5.99 from asda on offer. We also opted for some heavy duty 2300mah batteries to power things such as our digital camera. The 4 2300mah where more expensive at £10 but they are well worth it for high drain devices. Now here is the fun part. We spent £16 in total. We have been buying disposable batteries in packs of 4 for £1 each and buying maybe 8 packs a month. So in two months this will have paid for itself, and these are guaranteed for 100’s of charges so they will essentially save us hundreds of pounds over the coming years. The Eco benefits & the cost benefits make this purchase a no brainier and I really hope all my readers will switch to this much greener & cheaper way of powering gadgets.
The eternal dilemma – environment/cost considerations
I’m not really an Eco warrior. I do my bit, save power & recycle like everyone should, but the major driver for me in being more economical & in turn environmentally friendly is costs. I hate paying lots of money to oil company’s, gas suppliers, electricity companies and other multi nationals who literally have us over a barrel. They have given us an appetite for energy with low costs and now we are held to ransom paying huge amounts of money to continue our lifestyle. Much worse is that many of these things such as driving to work and heating our homes are not luxuries. If we don’t drive to work or to city centres to shop, we put nothing back into our economy and then become a burden on the rest of the taxpayers. This burden may not be that great for city dwellers but for anyone who lives remotely rurally this is a nightmare scenario.