Tag: iphone

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Lightning Port

I had to get my iPhone fixed recently. The charging connector would only fit correctly into the socket at very particular angles. This was a touch annoying and it also meant that I couldn’t play music in the car as I use the cable to send information to the stereo. I could connect via the headphone cable but that’s a pain and I can’t use the car stereo to control the iPhone.

Searching online it looked as though I was going to have to post the phone it off to some company and then wait for it to be returned. I was almost looking forward to spending some time without my phone. It would certainly be a bit weird. I know I rely on it a lot for weather, news, email, twitter, remote control, in fact nearly everything tech-wise. I rarely turn on my PC now because I don’t do a great deal on it. I use the PC when I have to type because I don’t like non-tactile typing on phones [such as writing this website].

For some reason I hadn’t thought of looking for shops in town that would fix my phone. I also had found some instructions online showing how to do this by myself but given the equipment I would have to buy and the time and stress of doing this alone in my dining room it just wasn’t worth it. I would have liked to have tried doing it myself but the phone is a precious thing!

I searched Google and the little map bit in the right came up with some possible places in town where I could get the phone fixed. I gave one a call and they seemed confident they could fix my port and also change the battery at the same time. I enquired about warranties and times to fix etc. I was reasonably happy to let them have my phone.

One morning I took my phone in to town and left it with Mobile Street to be fixed. Customer service was good. They seemed like bright people and confident they could fix my phone. It would take about an hour.

Later, I went to collect the phone, pay my bill which was comparable to the online services, and feel connected again. The technicians had managed to fix my phone charging port, replace the battery and also clean some chocolate that had ended up being dropped in the speaker grill.

The charging port works brilliantly. The battery seems better than previously but I haven’t really been able to test it properly as the phone has had a lot of use. The battery dies pretty quick at work because I work in a building that is almost a Faraday cage and my phone is constantly seeking a signal. At weekends the phone has been used to play games a lot and so it is being used intensively. Maybe one day I’ll try not to do much on the phone and see how long the battery lasts.

I, once again, feel connected to the world.

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Logging My Life

I’ve had a request [!] to cover some subject matter on this website! What a wonderful thing to happen. I’m quite excited to use this opportunity to pass on information that might influence others. Mind you, I guess the point of some of my communications is to persuade readers to think and to challenge their current thought patterns.

Since December 2011 I have been recording everything I eat. I did this originally to help me lose mass. I do it now to maintain my mass. I think I have a curious relationship with food, although it’s probably not much different to anyone else’s. Over the last twenty five years or so my mass has varied from around 80Kg to 95Kg. Long gone are the active days of my teenage years where I didn’t have to think about these things. I can still remember going gliding with the Air Cadets at RAF Wethersfield and being asked my mass in pounds, it was 140lbs. I don’t think I could physically get that low any more.

During the first half of 2012 I actively tried to lose mass. The process of this will be covered in another communication. To help this process of losing body mass I logged my food using an iPhone app. This is good for a few reasons. Firstly, you get to learn and understand the calorific values of the foods you eat. Secondly, you realise that it’s extremely easy to over eat. Lastly, you start to see the body as an incredibly efficient food-to-energy machine. It shouldn’t really be a surprise but the amount of food needed to sustain the body is not really that much in comparison to the amount we expect to eat. There is a big social problem in that large portions are acceptable and that people can’t add up. When you learn that walking or running 1600 metres will burn around 160 calories [just under two slices of plain bread] you realise that it’s a lot of effort to lose half a kilo of fat!

I use MyFitnessPal to record my food intake and, early on during my mass loss programme, I used this to record my activity and exercise too.

myfitnesspal

Food can be scanned and the nutritional details are entered automatically. It’s a very handy way to keep track of what you eat. Sometimes you have to guess, especially if you eat out, but over time you get a good idea of how much energy is in the food. I will be a bit more specific in another communication.

To track my exercise I use an app called MapMyRun. It tracks the route that I run and then also converts the information it receives to calculate my energy burn. This app can be used for cycling, walking or logging any activity.

mapmyrun

I have spent quite a while looking up energy burn and calibrating the data I get from the app. I have looked at academic papers about energy use and also looked at information from Australian sports institutes. In very basic terms, if you walk or run 10m you use 1 kCal. I think the apps I use are accurate to a sensible level of accuracy. If there are errors it could be within a 200kCal range and it wouldn’t really affect the outcome. Just by being more aware of energy intake and output you learn to self regulate a bit.

I like the apps I used to log my life as they synchronise with my Up software. This means that all the information I enter cross-pollinates and everything adds up nicely! It saves having to enter lots of data into different apps.

apps which sync

Yes, I do know that I used the term MASS throughout this communication and I am aware that I was actually referring to what most people would call WEIGHT. The problem is that I’ve not been measuring my weight for a few years, if I had the units would be in Newtons. If I use the units of KG then I must be measuring MASS. If you don’t like the use of this term then I suggest you don’t read any more of these communications.

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CopyTrans Manager

For quite a while I have found iTunes to be thoroughly frustrating. It has issues with my music collection, randomly adds songs I’ve deleted and doesn’t like updating the artwork on my albums. iTunes also takes an age to synchronise my phone and when it does it fails to update artwork, copy playlists or new songs across to my phone. It seems to be a pretty bad and bloated piece of software. I don’t use iTunes to back up my phone and rely on the cloud for that, which I am thankful for as iTunes probably wouldn’t cope very well with it.

I searched the internet thingy and found a free piece of software called CopyTrans which has a suite of iPhone utilities. I was rather hesitant about using it as it could really mess things up. Would it work with iTunes and my phone and help me do the following:

  • Edit my playlists on my phone without me having to add songs one at a time?
  • Update the artwork on my phone without me needing to delete the songs and then load them again?
  • Copy music onto my phone quickly and efficiently?
  • Actually read my phone database and allow me to edit it (kind of)?

I do still need iTunes but only to manage my playlists on the NAS drive as that is where my Sonos system reads the files. I guess I could use a completely different music manager but iTunes works well as long as I don’t connect my phone to the PC (which is kinda the point of the software).

I downloaded CopyTrans and started it up. The Manager part of the suite is free to use. I was quite wary of doing this. I love my music and have spent ages making sure I have the songs I want and the correct artwork. It’s quite a time investment.

“Connect Your Phone”

CopyTrans wanted my phone. I connected it and waited. CopyTrans read my database and a song list appeared on my computer. I tried to copy some new songs across to my phone.

IT WORKED

AND QUICKLY

I tried editing a playlist – easy. I even tried making sure my artwork was up-to-date (I had noticed two albums only had artwork on the first song), this was really easy and IT WORKED.

The online help files are really good. It all seems so easy.

CopyTrans you have made my life a lot easier and I am thankful. I hope millions read this and use your software, but unfortunately this website only gets ~270 hits a month. More people should use CopyTrans.

Confession –  I have absolutely nothing to do with CopyTrans. I just think their software it worth a mention here.

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Made Me Laugh

I was having a text conversation with my sister about my lack of mixer drinks for use with Jack Daniels. I tried to say that I’d go and buy some coke but I have fingers that are a bit bigger than my keyboard on the phone. Whoops!

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I seriously laughed out loud in my house while alone for a good five minutes. It’s still a giggle when I think about it.

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Head

HEAD is the title of my current favourite playlist on my iPhone and Sonos system. I use the iPhone in the car and the Sonos system at home. If I ever get the chance to listen to music at work then I use the iPhone there also, I have some Bose headphones I plug into.

Anyway the HEAD playlist consists of the following songs (an eclectic mix!):

  • “Das Grauen” from “Hell Starts With An H” by Reaper
  • “TIP the DANCER” from “YOUR WORLD IS BURNING” by Panzer AG
  • “Get Out of my Head” from “Today We Are All Demons” by Combichrist
  • “Inhuman” from “All Beauty Destroyed” by Aesthetic Perfection
  • “Duality” from “Vol 3: The Subliminal Verses” by Slipknot
  • “Motherfucker” from “All Beauty Destroyed” by Aesthetic Perfection
  • “Surfacing” from “Slipknot” by Slipknot

I once owned “If You Want Blood . . . . You Got It” by AC/DC on music cassette and I think that whole album pretty much played the same role in my life as this current playlist. I played the cassette so much that the tape eventually stretched in various places and I had to upgrade to a CD as it sounded awful.

I’m grateful to Andy for helping chose the songs for this playlist.

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Current iPhone Background

My current iPhone background is this stunning picture of the Earth and Moon system taken by the Cassini spacecraft from orbit around Saturn. We are so small and insignificant! God must have been having a serious joke when he placed us on this land, there’s so much out there, and we’ll never get to it (do the physics/maths).

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Up

While on my trip to Washington DC I met someone who asked me for my opinion on a bracelet / wrist band thing they had bought. I was worried at first because these things tend to be utter rubbish, woo if you will. There are many performance bands that are supposed to interact with your body’s vibrations and improve your coordination and these are all fraud. They don’t work and they never will. If someone like Powerbalance can show that their bracelet works then we will have to re-write all of modern physics [similarly if ghosts exists then what are they made of? Get me the proof and we’ll develop new physics].

I had just been introduced to the Up by Jawbone wristband. A movement (not position) tracker. It has a gizmo inside that measures how much you move and then you can upload that data to your iPhone or android device. I was so excited by this that I went and bought one from the Apple shop in Georgetown [DC].

Up By Jawboen

The device is easy to use. You wear it on your wrist and then upload the data to your phone app twice a day. You don’t have to upload the data that often but it seems about right.

I have to say I have been really impressed with the data I can collect. The Up band will time and measure the distance of a run, it’ll buzz me when I’ve been inactive. It can tell what sort of sleep I am having and when I got up to look after my boys.

The big question is how to use the data. It’s all very well collecting this stuff but it’s another knowing what to do with it. I have no idea how to use this data to inform what I should do in the future. The walking and running data is fair enough, I know I can aim to move around more but the sleep data? I can only sleep how I sleep. Perhaps I need to search the interweb thing to see if I can find out how to improve my sleep without having to give up alcohol! I love my wristband. I love the information it collects and the graphics it shows me. I’m just not sure what it tells me!

 

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The American Way – Sacred Reich

This is a thrash album. During the mid to late eighties there were a number of bands who changed the sound of metal. Metallica and the rest of the big four are considered the trailblazers. I found Sacred Reich while on holiday in Saint-Jean-de-Monts during 1990. One day while walking in the town we found a market and one of the stalls was selling music cassettes.

I bought this album purely on the front cover and it being surrounded by other bands to whom I listened. After a few listens on the car stereo and possibly a Walkman the album really grew on me. I think I recognise it as brilliance now. I love all the songs, even 31 Flavors! Recently I downloaded a digital version and it’s now on my iPhone. I find this album particularly calming and often its mood matches mine perfectly. There might only be eight songs but they are all good.

Given that this album was released in 1990 I consider the political messages of the song Crimes Against Humanity rather prescient. The song is about humans polluting the Earth and although this was a major concern in the 80s it is more of a concern now with anthropocentric global climate change affecting our planet! Sacred Reich aren’t the only band to criticise human pollution, Testament and Metallica have also written songs much to the same effect.

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All Hell’s Breaking Loose At Little Kathy Wilson’s Place – Wolfsbane

I saw Wolfsbane support Iron Maiden at some time, I think. I’m trying to remember how I got into them but apart from possibly seeing them as support I have no idea. I bought this EP (kinda) on music cassette originally. It is easily the best British Heavy Metal album of the early nineties. There might only be six songs on this record but they are seriously worth having.

My personal highlights from the track listing are:

  • Steel
  • Paint The Town Red
  • Loco
  • Hey Babe
  • Totally Nude
  • Kathy Wilson

The only slightly wobbly song is Hey Babe and that’s still good in comparison to all the other stuff out there. Seeing Wolfsbane live was great and I think I saw them at The Marquee many moons ago. Apart from the song Manhunt on another album it’s just worth getting this EP.

It took me a while to find this on CD. When I was going through a phase of digitising my collection and replacing all my music cassettes and vinyl albums I searched for Kathy Wilson everywhere. I think I finally bought it from an Italian trader on eBay. The volume is a little quiet but then I think that is how the early CDs were made. In recent times it appears that they have cranked up the volume. In reality they’ve just added 5 to all the volume levels, I’m not sure you get better sound quality.

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Washington DC Panoramas

I’ve finally become really grateful for the iPhone 5. Not only does it have the storage space I require but the panorama photo option is excellent. Hence, this page of some of the panoramas I took on my DC trip [are you bored of this yet? I’ve got 21 years of “when I was in America” to make up for].

This is the river Potomac from Georgetown Harbour to the Key Bridge.
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This is the National Air and Space Museum – the Udvar-Hazy Extension.
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Space Shuttle (orbiter really) Discovery
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Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird
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Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument
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Skyline Drive View
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Theodore Roosevelt
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The Capitol
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The White House, West Wing and Government Building
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Nats versus the Marlins
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Ford’s Theatre
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