Category: Technology
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Magic Mirror
Note: Taking good photos of mirrors is very hard! This photo suggests lots of double images, but in fact they’re not visible to the human eye, and the text is nice and sharp! Nor can you see acrylic marks in the screen. Yes, the mirror still works as a mirror. And yes, I’ve intentionally blurred…
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The Pricing of Apple TV+
Apple has announced that it’s upcoming TV service will cost £4.99 in the UK (and $4.99 in the US). That’s instantly brought a lot of comparisons with other services’ prices since it undercuts all of its major competitors. They will also give you a year free when you buy a new Apple device. However, I…
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News Twitter Feeds and Inky WHAT E-Ink Display
See update at the bottom if you’ve come to this from Google. For some time now, I’d been meaning to create a little display that shows me the latest news. I’d had a Pimoroni Inky PHAT kicking around for a while, but it’d had broken. For complicated reasons, I ended up with one of Pimoroni’s…
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Powerbeats Pro Review: with an Android Phone
TL;DR Excellent sounding and superb fit; but some significant connectivity and synchronisation issues alongside an atrocious case. I’ve been using these new headphones for a couple of months or so now, and think that I’ve used them enough to put together some sort of review about them. The first thing to say is that the…
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NAS Upgrading Fun
I’m documenting this, just in case there’s someone out there for whom it’s useful. I had two NAS drives, both made by Synology. I have a DS210j that I bought back in 2010. It had a pair of 2TB drives in it with a mirror RAID array, and perhaps the most important thing stored on…
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Longer Lasting
Over the last few weeks, a lot of things around me have started to break. Most annoyingly, the TV that was given to my father just over 18 months ago has developed a fault in the panel – the lower quarter flickers and then stays slightly greyer and fuzzier than the rest. It’s only 18…
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YouTube: Different Things to Different People
There have been a few stories kicking around about YouTube’s end of year “Rewind” video. YouTube has been making these for a few years, and they’ve grown to become big-budget affairs. But this year’s video is seemingly the most “disliked” video in YouTube history. Now I should say upfront that I have not watched this video.…
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IKEA Tradfri Lights Working with Hue, Alexa and Google Assistant
Here’s another one of those tutorials that I really shouldn’t need to write but somehow do, because despite dozens of tutorials already existing online, it was only a combination of things that got everything working for me. In short, I already have a Philips Hue lighting set-up and I wanted to add some IKEA Tradfri…
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Building a Desktop National Rail Dashboard
For ages now I’ve been meaning to put together a home dashboard: a screen that gives me up to date information about my local railway station with the departure boards showing. A slightly bigger ambition was to have the dashboard also display times for nearby buses – and perhaps the weather and Twitter news feeds. …
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Surface Go – Review
In 2015 Microsoft released the Surface 3 and I bought one. It wasn’t the most powerful Windows PC ever. Indeed, it was very much under-powered. But it was light, portable and ran full Windows applications. I bought it to allow me to run full Windows applications when I was travelling. Although it had limited on-board…
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Google Podcasts
Without an enormous amount of fanfare, Google yesterday launched Google Podcasts for Android yesterday, with the possibility of being game changing. I’ve long argued that for the Android/iOS podcasting gap to be closed, Google needed to get involved and create a generic app. Apple Podcasts is a pre-installed app on every iPhone sold, and with…
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Garmin Varia RTL510
I seem to have a constant battle with rear lights on my bikes. The main problem is that I use a saddlebag on my full-size bike, and attaching a bike light to it is a seemingly simple task, but tends not to be brilliant. If you have enough seat-post showing, then placing the light below…