itunes madness

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Why? WHY?

I'm an Apple user, but an unwilling one. I love the iPhone for the hardware and what it can do, but I'm not very keen on how it does it. My situation reminds me a bit of a poker player who, when told that he is playing in a crooked poker game replies "Yes, but it is the only game in town". 

My iPhone doesn't have the graceful UI of my lovely Lumia 1520. And, now that Microsoft have pulled out of the music market, I'm forced to do battle with iTunes rather than the lovely and stylish Groove. 

I'm now using Apple music, but I've also made uncompressed copies of all my physical CDs and added them to my iTunes library. What I want is for iTunes to use the high quality copies where I have them, and "fill in the blanks" with streamed versions from the cloud. 

Instead iTunes just duplicates loads of albums, showing me the cloud and local versions for no readily apparent reason. And I can't find a way of using iTunes to get the high quality tracks off my computer onto my phone so that I can have portable high-quality music. The user interface is horrible, confusing, counter intuitive and badly documented, with the Apple help referring to options and buttons that no longer exist. 

And if I use my iPhone in the car, and try to play anything from Apple music, it tells me I've got lots of music in the cloud and then refuses to play any of it.

I really hate iTunes. I remember once saying that I thought that if the devil wrote software he'd probably have written iTunes. That was a few years ago. I've not changed my opinion. I tell people to reserve emotions like hate for things much more important than items of software, but for iTunes I'm prepared to make an exception. 

Cheap Inject Refills - wish me luck

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My printer has run out of grey ink. It's funny, because I don't remember printing many grey pictures. But there you are.

Like most printers, mine has a habit of waking up at odd times of the day and night, squirting a bit of ink out of the print head and then going back to sleep. Perhaps I should look for a grey puddle under the printer. 

Anyhoo, it was on to Amazon to find out how much a proper set of cartridges would cost. The amount is eye watering. At least it made me start to cry. So it was on to look for something a little more economical. As in, a whole set of six cartridges for around half the price of just a replacement grey one. They arrive tomorrow. Wish me luck.

In search of "A Map of the Floating City"

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I was very sorry when I heard that Microsoft were suspending their Groove music  service and migrating everyone to Spotify. The Groove player is a lovely piece of user interface design that makes everything else look a bit rubbish. And the Groove music catalogue seemed to include quite a few records that I really like. 

Take "A Map of the Floating City" from Thomas Dolby for example. Love it. Listened to it a lot on Groove. Not available on Apple Music. Or Spotify. I can't even find anywhere I can buy the digital download. Amazon have the CD. But it's 45 quid.....

It seems that there are a bunch of tracks and artists that I can't play any more because I'm just too far down "the long tail of musical taste". Perhaps I should get my record deck down from the loft......

Properly Broken Device

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Last week I wrote about "The Broken Device Dilemma", when something you hardly use breaks. Do you try and fix it, or do you throw it away? Of course, if you're me you try and fix it. It's all about the journey. Right?

Anyhoo, my lovely little Sony audio player failed. The battery refused to accept any charge.  It was as if the cable was broken. Of course, being Sony, it's a special cable, not a standard usb one. The good news is that replacements are very cheap, so I got one. 

It didn't work. 

However, playing with the device left me thinking that the battery was broken. This happens with Lithium Ion batteries. So, it was onto eBay to source a battery. I managed to find one, ordered it and it arrived today. Fitting it was great fun. Number one son found the service manual and I had a happy half hour this evening undoing sticky fixers and soldering the replacement battery in. 

It worked. Yay!

The player woke up and played some music at me. Great stuff. But it did seem to get very warm. And then the WiFi stopped working. And then the battery failed. And now it behaves just like it did at the start of this story. Oh well. It looks like something in the player has failed and is taking so much power that that the charging circuit can't keep up. So I think it is properly broken. 

Oh well. Now I have to ask myself the question "If a device you hardly use breaks, to you replace it?....."

Fireworks

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We don't usually have fireworks on November the fifth. But this year we did. In the old days we used to buy a box of "Standard" fireworks that contained one dud (which varied from year to year) and a taper thing to light the fireworks that you couldn't actually get lit yourself. The family would spend forty five minutes standing in the garden freezing to death while I tried to light the blue touch paper on a succession of cardboard tubes that I'd stuck in the lawn. Sometimes it would rain.

All the fireworks had different names like "Golden fountain", or "Emerald Shower" but when one eventually lit we'd just just get a shower of sparks followed by nothing. Things were slightly enlivened if the Catherine wheel set fire to fence. And we'd force the kids to hold sparklers which would also fail to light.

Anyhoo, today we didn't do any of that. Instead we bought three little boxes that each contained a bunch of fireworks that were wired together using some cunning fuse technology. We just lit one corner which fizzed merrily and then the box generated a ten second display of quite impressive proportions. I even managed to get some pictures. 

The whole thing was over in about ten minutes and we retired to the warm indoors and had hotdogs. 

Broken Device Dilemma

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Here;s the thing. Something I hardly use has broken. Do I:

  1. Take it as a sign that I don't really need this device in my life any more and move on.
  2. Take it as an opportunity to investigate the problem and try to get the thing working again, even though I'll hardly ever use it when it is fixed.

I think you know the answer to this question. I've ordered a replacement cable, just in case that is the cause of the problem....

Jurassic Kingdom Tour

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Today finds us at the Jurassic Kingdom Tour in Leeds. Apparently they are going all around the country setting up their dinosaurs in different venues. I bet they look awesome on the back of lorries as they zoom down the motorway. There were lots of dinosaurs of various sizes, most of them moving around a bit and making sounds. Some exhibits were a bit spoilt by plaques stating that "actually this combination of dinosaurs could never happen" but at least they didn't have any cave men fighting with them, which even I know would be quite beyond the pale. 

It was great fun and they also had someone selling 21st century donuts. Which was really nice. 

Building shelves

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Today I spent a while building some Ikea bookcases (it's always like this when I finish writing something - I have a frenzy of DIY followed by an abrupt return to usual levels of torpor).

I've a lot of respect for Ikea stuff. I get the impression that they have really thought about process whenever they put together their kits. I guess it is really Lego for grown-ups. Or perhaps Lego for people who want to think they are grown up every now and then. 

Sofa so good

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If you've ever wondered whether an Ikea Vilasund sofa bed will fit in the back of a BMW i3 it turns out that the answer is yes. But only just. However, beware. It turns out that buying a sofa can be just the start of a chain reaction of effort. At least it was for me. 

  1. Dismantle old sofa.
  2. Take old sofa to tip.
  3. Move large sofa out of way.
  4. Build Vilasund sofa in place of large sofa.
  5. Empty other room.
  6. Remove carpet from other room.
  7. start laying laminate flooring in other room.
  8. Find out you've not bought enough flooring.
  9. Buy more flooring. 
  10. Lay it. 
  11. Find out that you've still not bought enough flooring. Question arithmetic skills where area calculations are concerned. 
  12. Buy more flooring. 
  13. Finally complete the floor.
  14. Put large sofa in other room. 
  15. Take more rubbish to tip.
  16. Rebuild other room.
  17. Buy nice rug and fit same.

We've finished now. By a process of considerable effort and expenditure we've just about got back to where we started.

My points are expiring and I don't care

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Internet companies seem to be getting increasingly desperate in their marketing. The latest trick seems to be to award me some discount coupons and then send me loads of emails telling me that they are about to expire. Just FYI folks, I neither know nor care about your coupons. If you happen to be selling something that I need right now and you've got coupons that make it cheaper, then great. But there's no way I'm going to rush out and spend money on stuff just because you're giving me some discount. 

I've a horrible feeling I might be growing up...

Journey from Hell

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Well, that was fun. In retrospect signing up for the 10:40pm flight home was not a great plan, but it did give us one more day away. We arrived back in the country at 2:00am all bleary eyed, but just about up for the two hour drive back to our house that I was expecting. After all, the roads would be nice and quiet, right?

If only. All the motorways were shut. And I mean all of them. And the diversions seemed to send us from one shut motorway to another. And another. And there was fog. 

Apparently they are working on "installing smart motorway technology". And adding dumb diversions. The diversions were so bad as to actually feel insulting. We lost track of the number of different symbols we had to decode in our fruitless quest to find "the one open road over the Pennines".

We got back at around 5:30 in the morning, unplugged the radio and slept 'till 10:00am. 

It was a great holiday though. 

Curse you, Windows 10

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I tried something a while back and it worked when I didn't expect it to. Always a bad sign. Of course, today I wanted to do it again and it failed. Nothing much has changed in my system. Except, oh yes, Windows 10 Creators Update.  Not much use if what you want to create is printed pictures from your Polaroid Pogo printer. Used to work fine over Bluetooth. Now I get this masterpiece of an error message. Useless at pretty much every level. I've done some searching, but nothing so far has worked. It looks like my little printer and me might have reached the end of the line. 

Oh well, such is progress. 

Sock neurosis

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These are definitely wrong

Some time ago number one wife bought me some socks. Very nice. With days of the week on. Arrgh. I've had them a while, and always had a problem wearing them. If there's one thing a chap with a mildly obsessive nature really gets problems with, it's things like these. And never take them on holiday. Especially if you're flying over time zones. 

To make matters even worse, number one son got a set as well. And he came to see us. And the socks got mixed up, so that I have two left hand Tuesday socks. Which I'm wearing today. If you're going to be wrong, do it properly I reckon.