Internet is up … 20 minutes later it’s down … 30 minutes later it’s up … 4 minutes later it’s down … 35 minutes later it’s up … 3 minutes later it’s down … 25 minutes later it’s up … 6 minutes later it’s down.
My life for the past four days. To say my patience is a teeny bit thin is an understatement. Apparently an engineer is coming tomorrow. Why? No idea because the problem is with the ISP or in the area.
One of the things I’m desperately trying to find the time to get cracking on is shooting some video. It’s always fascinated me. I have a pretty old Sony Handycam (tape!) that is relegated to being used as a webcam for the iMac. But with the iPhone 4S being able to shoot HD video it’s become very accessible. MBH also got a dinky little Kodak point and shoot that takes HD video as well – for those moments when you don’t want to be messing around with an iPhone in plain sight.
So that is the plan for this weekend. I probably won’t be putting it up here. Maybe. I think I might put it on another site. I have a Vimeo account open and just ready – can’t stand Youtube for that.
Google SVP of Chrome and Apps Sundar Pichai, commenting on Google Drive from this interview. Bold text mine:
Today when I look at different solutions out there, those are still in the old metaphor of “here are files that you want, manage them.” This is about you living your life online — planning a wedding, buying a house — and having your data available in that context. I think it’s a big pivot and that’s what excites me and makes it a good product. It’s in the natural flow.
I wouldn’t underestimate the fact that you can use it not just with Google but with third-party applications over time will be a big differentiator. And third is deep search is very powerful. There is a lot of deep computer science in there, the fact that you can comment on any file type, that there’s full-text indexing with optical character recognition, all that happens magically with our infrastructure.
And the phrase I’m looking for? Oh yeah, fuck that!
I look for Cloud Storage not the likes of Google to crawl all over my files.
So I pulled the trigger on buying a new 4S from Apple. That’s the thing with Apple products, you have to do your research to work out whether something outrageously better is just about to come out. If there is a new iPhone in the Autumn it will probably be an incremental upgrade. I’m not too interested in LTE (4G) and the camera is (surprisingly) the thing I most use on my current 4. So should be safe for a while. As usual in our house that means MBH get’s my 4 as she’s been making noises that my old 3GS that she has is far too out of date 
Next thing I was considering was an upgrade to a MacBook Air from my unibody MacBook. This is a little tougher. The iMac is older than the Macbook. I think I got the iMac in 2008. But with a memory upgrade and new HDD it’s absolutely fine. The line of iMacs is due to be upgraded but I don’t really care too much. The iMac is a workhorse and does what I need it to do. I’d like to be able to carry around my MacBook a little more though. As much as the iPad is a real day-to-day machine that’s always with me – some things I really need to be able to do on the MacBook. Getting an Air would be a good option for portability. But there’s a number of things stopping me pulling the trigger on that:
I can wait a couple of months to see how those rumours play out.
“Cool an hour until the movie starts. I know, I’ll play some BF3 on the PS3″ (that I haven’t touched for two months plus)
[50 minutes later]
“Oh great, 75% complete on the updates” … YAWN
I just completed a survey for Netflix because my initial impressions are good ones. Also, if that data is used anything like it is where I work it will be analysed to the nth degree, gets visibility up to Very Important People and is actually used to improve things.
I didn’t have to fill out contact details, my name or anything, but it did come through email. I know enough about email tracking though so when the question ‘Have you ever watched TV programmes or Movies from torrent sites in the past month?’ came up it was a very stern ‘Er, absolutely not’
*COUGH*
I was going to do a longer post on this but it really doesn’t need it.
I really don’t give SHIT what the tech press think Apple will or will not release this week. I am unsubscribing like crazy right now because it bores the hell out of me. Whatever it is will be incremental, it will be done well and it will sell. I won’t be buying as I have an iPad 2 and that suits me fine. I’m more interested in the harmonisation of IOS and OSX and the development of the cloud. It works, but it’s not brilliant, they need to seriously revamp iTunes and iPhoto but that’s going to take a while. I don’t want to read a Kabillion ‘news articles’ on it until that happens.
“Why are there no Paper Boys anymore?” I thought to myself this morning while lying in bed. I felt the urge to not move, making my way through a few hundred cups of tea pouring over the papers. That’s what (some) Sunday mornings are about. Nowadays though you have to get up, get dressed, put enough coffee in you to function and head down to the nearest shop. When it’s cold and windy it’s a pain in the arse.
“You could go and get the papers” said MBH hopefully.
“Fuck that it’s freezing and it would require far more energy than I’m willing to spend right now”
My first job was a paper round. It was practically medieval back then. I remember it took three loads of the bag to get all the papers delivered. That bloody nylon strap cutting into my shoulder. Lashing rain or blizzards and two foot of snow didn’t stop the papers being delivered either (I caught Bronchitis from the two foot of snow scenario). But it was glorious to work hard for your own money £5 a week plus £1 bonus if I didn’t screw it up. At that age it was an absolute fortune. Definitely not the major leagues of child labour though. That crown sat with the ‘Milk Lads’. They’d hang off the back of the Milkmans truck and jump off to leave bottles of milk on the doorstep. Remember when milk was delivered? Rumours flew about that they got at least £15 a week. They did have to be up at around 05:00 though. It was a closed shop however, you only got the job by knowing somebody who was already doing it and if a spot opened up. Very union-esque.
None of that now though. The mere thought of it would probably give some EU busybody coniption fits.
Anyhoo, so I’m lay in bed this morning wishing somebody would deliver my paper. I’d already gone through Twitter and my RSS feeds. But I still like reading the papers. Hate the bloody Independent, want it banned from the house as it’s just utter shite. I do like the Times though. I know it’s part of the Murdoch Group but all reporters and columnists aren’t all bad. I decided I’d give the Sunday Times app a go for the iPad.
Surprisingly it’s not too bad. Everything is there as it is in the paper – some of these apps have edited and selected content. I enjoyed it so much I decided to subscribe. So for around €10 a month I get access to the Times, Sunday Times and wedbsite all automagically on my iPad. That makes me happy.
My virtual paperboy.
Potentially a rambling post while I catalog the issues I’ve been having with my home wifi network today. But always good to store it somewhere.
If I think about it we have, hmm, thirteen devices in this house that connect to the Internet. That includes the iMac, Macbooks, iPads, Phones, Apple TV, a couple of consoles and a work notebook. Wireless coverage around the whole apartment comes from an Airport Extreme connected to the cable router. An Airport Express is at the ‘back’ of the apartment set to extend mode which gives me total coverage.
The other day I upgraded both Airport devices to the latest firmware 7.6.1 and everything seemed to work fine. About midday today my work notebook lost wireless connection. Not a rare occurance using private VPN’s etc to connect to the network. But then it refused to reconnect. I don’t enjoy using Windows systems as the entropy of running it for a while without a restart seems to be pretty quick and I had a lot of documents open. But restart I did as I needed to get a document somebody was sending me. On restart the notebook saw my home network, but refused to join it. Couldn’t repair the connection or anything.
Luckily I run Aiport Utility on all the iOS devices so grabbed the nearest one to check for issues – nothing. The most annoying thing was the iMac which sits next to the work notebook continued to stream Internet Radio,
Nevertheless I restarted the Airport Express to see if that would resolve the issue
No luck whatsoever. Still couldn’t get the Work notebook to join my home connection. It could see it but gave a vague message that it couldn’t join. Tried to repair any problem it had with it’s wireless card but it gave me a suggestion that I could try to troubleshoot the access point. The same access point that TWELVE other devices could quite happily connect to.
I made a few changes to the Aiport configs – such as ensuring theu both assiigned channels automatically and they both were connecting to WPA/WPA2 Personal (as the Express was reporting only WPA2 Personal).
Still no bloody luck. The I tried restarting both of the Aiport devices – everything could connect except the work notebook … and now my iPhone 4 couldn’t connect to the Express either! Argh no steps forward and two steps back.
I would understand a little if I had just upgraded the firmware and it immediately had problems, but I’d been running on the new firmware happily for at least 36 hours.
I tried to do some troubleshooting and searching – with the work notebook and the iPhone 4 both down I figured it must be something to do with the Radio Mode. Both the work notebook and iPhone would have problems connecting to an n network which is why I was broadcasting g as well, and at 2.5GHz and not just 5GHz.
But the whole network was still set to Automatic mode and I should still be broadcasting n and g. Super frsutrating! In the end I reset both the Extreme and Express and set-up the network again. But exactly the same problem. Everything can connect – except the iPhone and work notebook to the Express. Taking a break for a cup of coffee I brought my iPhone with me and noticed it had no problems connecting to the Extreme in the living room. Dammit, it was definitely the Express then.
Tonight I decided to go a bit for a long shot and downgraded the Express to firmware version 7.5.2 (pre 7.6 release) and the iPhone connected with no problems pretty much straight away. UPDATE; Shite it is still not connecting now or even showing the network being broadcast from the Express. The work notebook? Despite running happily on the network this morning with no changes? Still can’t connect so I have it connected to the Express via Ethernet cable and it swims happily on the network then.
So, conclusions and possible next steps for investigation:
Well, Netflix is happily streaming on the iMac and wherever I go with the iPad in the apartment – so I give up for tonight.
Will update this post later if I ever get a solution.
UPDATE: Well fuckity bollox that has only taken about ten hours to figure out from researching and it seems to be only one option change that means every device is connected happily (will try work notebook tomorrow as no way I’m logging into that now to get caught in emails)
Both the Airport Extreme and Airport Express are on Firmware version 7.6 now. I have a feeling this is not the solution but I’m going to leave it until the weekend to test that.
If you hold the alt key and then click on the wifi icon on the iMac/Macbook toolbar you can see more information regarding the local networks. By doing this I could see that my hone network was not broadcasting on 2.5GHz – only 5GHz which would give the work notebook and iPhone issues
I left the Radio Mode setting as 802.11a/n – 802.11b/g/n (automatic)
I left the 5GHz Channel as Automatic
I changed the 2.4GHz Channel to Manual and selected 7 (seems everyone in the area is broadcasting on 1)
VOILA! Everything is happy to connect to the Network with no strange issues. I’ll test this on the 7.6.1 firmware at the weekend. Lesson? Don’t trust Automatic Channel selection too much – especially with a lot of wifi in the area.
Codecademy is an interesting concept and seems to be getting a lot of traction. I signed up and am working my way through the basic lessons. Now, I started out programming eons ago with the first version of BASIC I think. Then tried a bit of Fortran (for the little robots), then Machine Code (made my head hurt) before graduating to COBOL and then half a dozen languages on and off over the next 20 years or so. The problem with me is my programming skills get a little messed up unless I’m nose deep in it. So to use a language analogy I end up “Parlez vouz la Italiano sehr schlecht” – mixing up Ruby syntax with Javascript or PHP can be painful only until you recognize that’s what you’ve done.
The lessons seem easy enough but I’d be interested in what a complete non-coder would make of them. I did find myself thinking “Why didn’t they position it this way?” or “That could have been explained a little better”. Luckily they have a nice feedback button for each lesson.
They’ve also started a code year project where you get lessons every day. Signed up for that as well as it’ll be interesting to see where that goes. The last language I learned a little bit was Ruby on Rails. But it’s been a few years since then and having quick look at the repository it seems to have changed beyond recognition. The only one I’ll slightly keep my toes dipped into is PHP and HTML – if only so I can keep this running how I want it to.
I have been considering Obj-C for a little while – but to be honest I have zero time to think about that right now.