Category: hardware

Apple TV 2015

A friend bought me a new Apple TV for Christmas this year. I was perfectly happy with my old Apple TV box (the previous generation), so I wouldn’t have gone out and bought myself a new one. But it’s a cool new toy, so I’ve been playing around with it. (My friend also bought me a Nimbus game controller, which is kind of nifty, but I haven’t done anything with it yet.)

My main use for the Apple TV has always been to watch iTunes content, specifically Doctor Who. I don’t get BBC America, so I buy Doctor Who from iTunes and watch it through the Apple TV box, usually. For that simple use case, the new Apple TV might actually be a little less convenient than the old one. I’ve found the interface for browsing through purchased content is usable, but slightly less convenient than the old interface.

The new remote is interesting, but so far I don’t find the touch surface to be any more useful than just having buttons like on the old remote. The Siri functionality works well, though I feel weird talking to my remote, and I’m not sure how often I’ll use it. And I’m also not sure how I feel about having a rechargeable battery in it; it’s a nice idea, and maybe necessary to support the touch surface, but I’m wondering how often I’m going to have to recharge it. (And I’m wondering how long before it wears out, since it doesn’t appear to be user-replaceable.) With the old remote, I just had to stick a new watch battery in it once every couple of years.

The app store is a good thing, and I hope to see some interesting apps show up there, but so far, there’s not much I’m interested in, aside from stuff that was already available on the old Apple TV. The Netflix app is fine, and there are apps for the usual networks, like PBS, Disney, Comedy Central, and so on. I did use the Disney XD app yesterday to binge on a bunch of Gravity Falls episodes, and it worked well.

I haven’t tried playing any games on it yet, but I’ll get around to that eventually. I hear that Alto’s Adventure is pretty good, so maybe I’ll pick that up.

Fire follow-up

I thought I’d write a quick follow up on the Amazon Fire I got last week. I knew when I bought it that it would be locked-down to some extent, but I didn’t really research exactly how locked down it is. Out of the box, you can only install software from Amazon’s store, not Google Play, and Amazon’s store is missing a lot of stuff. I installed OneDrive, Evernote, Slacker, and a few other apps, but there’s no (official) Dropbox client (as far as I can tell), Instapaper app, or any alternate web browsers (Firefox or Chrome). I’ve been reading up, and apparently you can “sideload” apps pretty easily, but I haven’t played with that yet. And I’ve read up on how to get the Google Play store installed, but the process for doing that seems a little dicey, so I’m not going to bother with it unless I need to.

In addition to the $15 32 GB MicroSD card I bought for it, I’ve now also bought a $15 case and a $5 USB cable (since the one it came with is too short), so I’ve officially spent as much on accessories as I spent on the Fire itself. I find that pretty amusing.

Fire

My $35 Amazon Fire 7″ tablet arrived in the mail yesterday. It’s a pretty nice little tablet for $35.  (Even at the regular $50 price, it’s a really good deal.)  I bought a $15 32GB MicroSD card with it, and I’m thinking about loading that up with music, and using it primarily as an MP3 player. (My iPhone works perfectly well as an MP3 player, of course, but I’m always running out of room, since I’ve got so many apps and photos and other random stuff on it.)

I imagine that, for many people, it would make a good e-reader, but for me, I’ll stick with my old e-ink Kindle for that. The Fire does have a nice feature that I truly wish iOS devices had: it’s called “Blue Shade,” and it basically does the same thing that f.lux does. It changes the color and adjusts the brightness so that the screen is easier on the eyes. So if I had to choose between reading on the Fire at night, or reading on my iPad, I’d definitely pick the Fire. (Though some apps on iOS do have a useful “night mode” that’s easy on the eyes.)

Meanwhile, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″ Android tablet that I bought a couple of years ago at Costco is just gathering dust. Since it’s about the same size as the iPad, I really don’t have much use for it. It was useful for learning how to use Android, I guess, but I never really got in the habit of using it for anything in particular. I checked on Gazelle, and it looks like I can sell it to them for $15. Not great, but it’s better than just throwing it out.

I’m hoping that the 7″ Fire might fit into some use cases in between the iPhone and the iPad. Maybe as something to carry around when I need a screen that’s bigger than the iPhone but I don’t want to bring a full-size iPad. It’s small enough to fit into the pocket on my winter jacket, for instance, while the iPad is definitely not pocket-size.

Black Friday: Fixing Things

I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do with myself today. I had a nice Thanksgiving yesterday at my friend’s house. And I have today off from work. And I’m mostly healed up from my surgery last month. So I considered going into NYC to check out the Jackson Pollock exhibit at MoMA.

But I decided this morning that maybe I should see about getting the speaker on my iPhone fixed. There’s a local store called Batteries + Bulbs that, I recently discovered, does iPhone repair. I don’t know much about them, but they appear to be reputable, so I thought I’d give them a shot. Alas, the repair guy had the day off, so I’ll have to come back tomorrow. But I walked there and back, so I got some exercise at least.

I read an interesting article on Vice this week about iFixit, and about computer repair in general, called How to Fix Everything. I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot lately, since all of the trouble I had with my MacBook recently, and since I’ve been on the fence about geting a new iPhone vs. repairing the old one.

I almost managed to replace the hard drive cable on my MacBook, but had to give up and let someone else do it. But, if not for those two pesky screws, I would have been able to do it, no problem. For the iPhone, I did check out iFixit’s page on speaker replacement. It looks a little too complicated for me to handle on my own, especially if I can get someone else to do it for a reasonable price. But I appreciate, in general, the idea of repairing existing hardware, and keeping it useful for as long as possible. It does seem like Apple, and other manufacturers, and going out of their way to make end-user and third-party repair and upgrades as difficult as possible. But Apple gear is still a good choice, since it’s so populat that you can always find instructions and parts via sites like iFixit.

I’ve managed to avoid blowing any serious money on Black Friday sales, so far, but I have spent a few bucks here and there. I ordered one of the 7″ Kindle Fire tablets that are currently on sale for $35. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, but for $35, I’ll find something semi-useful. And I bought Commander One Pro from the Mac App Store for 99 cents. I’ve been using the free version, since I got my MacBook set up again, and I like it. I had needed to find something to replace Total Finder, which doesn’t really work with El Capitan, and Commander One seems to fit the bill.

It’s really nice out today, so, in addition to the walk to Batteries + Bulbs earlier, I also walked to Bridgewater Commons and back. I didn’t buy anything while I was there, but I wandered around and looked at what was on sale. I didn’t see anything I really needed, nor did I see anything I really wanted to buy for anyone else. (I really don’t need to buy many Christmas presents these days anyway.) But all this walking put me over the 7500 step threshold for the first time since the hernia issue arose. So I feel pretty good about that. And I now feel like I can spend the rest of day binge-watching Jessica Jones, if I want to, and not feel guilty about it.

The MacBook is back

Tekserve fixed my MacBook on Wednesday, so I decided to run into the city after work and pick it up, rather than waiting until the weekend. I got there about a half-hour before they closed, but I didn’t have any problem picking up the machine and getting it back home. And it turns out that it was just the hard drive cable, as I’d hoped. It seems to be working fine now.

Last night and tonight, I’ve been working on getting it set up again. I restored a bunch of stuff from my old drive, which I’d swapped out back in December. So I lost anything that I had on the machine since then, if I didn’t have it anywhere else. That turns out to be not much, really. I’ve been keeping important stuff in Evernote or Dropbox, or on my desktop PC, so there wasn’t much that was only on my Mac. (And I’m now looking at consolidating a bunch of stuff in OneDrive.) Still, I really need to get a better backup strategy going.

As part of the setup, I upgraded to El Capitan. I’m not having any problems with it so far. I’ve got the newest versions of all my applications installed, and they all seem to be compatible. The one app I haven’t reinstalled is f.lux, as there appears to be a minor issue with that.

So I’m hoping for no more problems with this MacBook for at least another year. I may think about getting a new one next year (2016), but not until the end of the year, if I can manage to keep this one going until then.

a trip to Tekserve

After thinking through the various options I had for getting past the issue I had with the hard drive cable in my MacBook, I decided that handing the whole thing off to someone else was my best option. So I dropped off my MacBook at Tekserve yesterday. I had to take a half-day off work to do it, but if I waited until Saturday, that would be another whole week gone, and then probably another week before I could pick it up. I’ve now been without a working MacBook for a whole month, so I decided it was worth burning a half-day of PTO.

I’d never actually been to Tekserve before, though I’ve known about them for a long time. When I got there, I had to take a number and wait about a half-hour. Then, I explained the issue to a nice young man who took down all my info, then consulted with a tech, and came back with an $80 estimate. If all goes according to plan, it should be ready on Wednesday. I’ll probably go back into the city on Saturday and pick it up.

I feel like a bit of a failure for not being able to replace the hard drive cable myself, but heck, I’m old and I’m really more of a software guy anyway.

So if I get the MacBook back on Saturday, then I can pick back up on all the stuff I had to put aside before things went south. Like upgrading to El Capitan, getting a new iPhone, and doing some more work on straightening out my music library. Oh, and setting up a better backup plan too.

MacBook trouble, OneDrive, and other stuff

My replacement hard drive cable for the MacBook showed up yesterday, which is great, but I had no luck whatsoever extracting the two tiny screws that hold the old cable in place, which is not so great. There are a number of MacGyver moves I could try to get them out, but I’m not feeling really confident about any of them. So I think maybe I’ll be taking the thing into Tekserve next weekend and let them figure it out.

Meanwhile, I wanted to do something useful yesterday, so I decided to move a bunch of my personal files on my desktop PC into OneDrive. Microsoft announced last week that they were dropping unlimited storage in OneDrive, which annoyed a lot of people. But seeing this in the news reminded me that I have a lot of OneDrive space that I’m not using. I have an Office 365 Home subscription that formerly had unlimited storage, but now has 1TB of storage, which is still quite a lot. So I moved most of the files out of my local documents folder into OneDrive. Now I’m using about 3GB in OneDrive, and I have all of those files backed up to the cloud, and available on both my desktop PC and laptop. I also moved some files out of Dropbox and Google Drive into OneDrive. I have a free Dropbox account, so that’s only good for 2GB, and Google Drive is good for 15GB, but that’s shared with Gmail. So, for anything I can keep  in OneDrive, I think I’m going to try to standardize on that as my default cloud storage.

I’ve found that, while Microsoft hasn’t been great with multi-platform support in the past, they’re currently doing really good with that. Their Mac client and iOS client are both quite good. And they have an IFTTT channel, which might come in handy at some point.

I’ve been thinking about how far I can go with moving stuff into OneDrive. A terabyte seems like a lot of storage, but I could use that all up if I tried. If I were to move all my photos into OneDrive, that would be about 15 GB. A lot, but manageable. And if I were to try to move my iTunes library (music, videos, and audio books) in, that would be another 500 GB or so, which would be a bit too much, I think. But if I limited it to just music, it would be about 50 GB, which might be ok, though it would be a bit of a mess. And I have quite a lot of random DRM-free audio books, comic books, ebooks, and videos purchased through various Humble Bundle sales and other places. The total size on all of those is quite large, but, for most of them, I can re-download them if they get lost. Humble and Big Finish, at least, allow you to re-download past purchases easily.

I’ve also been thinking about other ways that I could get more use out of the services included in the Office 365 subscription. One odd thing that’s included is 60 minutes of outgoing calls via Skype each month. This doesn’t really help me much; I have plenty of minutes on my cell phone plan, so there’s no reason to use Skype for outgoing calls on my cell phone. If I could replace my home phone with Skype, though, that might be useful. But I looked into that, and it seems like that wouldn’t be worth the trouble. First, I’d have to sign up for a Skype phone number, so I could receive incoming calls. That would cost $5/month. And I can’t port my existing home phone number into Skype, so I’d have to deal with having a new phone number. Then, I’d have to figure out how to hook up a phone to use with Skype. Stand-alone Skype phones (and adapters to hook regular phones up to Skype) were a thing for a while, but it seems their time has passed. Looking for any of them on Amazon generally shows them all as being discontinued and only available from third-party sellers. So, in a nutshell, those Skype minutes are pretty useless.

I miss my MacBook

I was hoping that the replacement hard drive cable for my MacBook would show up in the mail yesterday, so I’d be able to get my MacBook back together this weekend. But there was nothing in my mailbox when I got home from work. So now I’m hoping it will show up today.

The weather has been great in NJ this week, so it would be a good day to forget about computers and go for a long walk, but I’m still recovering from my hernia surgery, so I’m stuck with short walks for now. I guess I’m going to continue catching up on my comic book reading today. If I was in better shape, I’d be heading out to the Superheroes for Hospice show today, but I’m probably better off skipping it this time around.

replacing a MacBook hard drive cable

So it’s Sunday morning now, and Monday will be one week since my surgery. I’m feeling good enough now to do some walking outside, back and forth to the bank or grocery store, but I get tired a lot quicker than normal. And I’m starting to feel like I can pick up on some projects, like trying to get my MacBook working again.

I’ve figured out, through trial and error, that I most likely have a bad hard drive cable. I’m going to try replacing it, using these instructions from iFixit, and see if that works. I ordered the cable (and a couple of tools) from iFixit today, so I’ll likely have them by the end of the week, and try to do the replacement next weekend.

Just for laughs, I called Apple and verified that they won’t touch my MacBook, since I replaced the stock HD with an SSD, thereby violating the sanctity of their precious hardware. If that wasn’t the case, I’d be really tempted to take it to the Apple Store and let them take care of it, even if it would cost a lot more than doing it myself. And if I had enough energy to take the train into NYC, I’d probably take it to Tekserve, and let them do it,  but I don’t think I’m going to be able to handle NYC any time real soon. So I’m going to hope I have enough manual dexterity to remove and replace the cable myself.

My MacBook is about two years old, and I’m hoping to get another couple of years out of it, so here’s hoping this works!

another busy week

My company’s upgrade to Dynamics AX 2012 R3 over the past weekend went well, all things considered. We’ve been having lingering problems all week, but we expected that we would, and we were prepared for it.

My hernia surgery is still scheduled for Monday, so I’ll be out all next week. I still have some open issues at work that I’ll have to close out or hand off to someone else today, but I’m sure they’ll get along fine without me.

Meanwhile, my warranty replacement SSD arrived from Samsung yesterday, so I can spend some time this weekend rebuilding my MacBook, hopefully. I have a tentative plan for doing a clean El Capitan install on the new drive, and then migrating my user data over from my old backup drive, but I’m not sure if it’ll work or not. Either way, I should have plenty of time to work on it next week.