UKmac.net - Apple news, tech views

A work milestone

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today marked the end of the main programme of work I was originally employed to work on in my current job. After three and a half years we have finally completed the transition to a single M365 tenant, a single IT support partner and a common Enterprise network (albeit that part is still two seperate infrastructures built to the same standard on the same Fortinet kit.)

After starting with half a dozen outsourced services we are now managing our IT service internally with the support of a primary IT partner, a field services partner and a managed security partner.

Now starts the next phase of our journey to build on this base layer and start to leverage what we have to get us through Cyber Essentials+ certification.

February 2026

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A moderately warm and sunny Sunday at the end of February and perhaps a light at the end of the Winter tunnel ?

The rain and chill of the last few weeks broke for a short time today providing a tempting glimpse into the not too distant future of warmer days as we head towards Spring. Can’t come soon enough

Mac Mini Upgrade

I have just ordered a new external NVMe dock as my current Beelink Mate mini has started making a fan noise which is annoying me. I have ordered a UGREEN Fanless enclosure which should of course be silent… Will see how it compares.

Daily Links

Link	Description
A website to destroy all websites	The modern web is a souless place. Henry suggests a better alternative, an alternative some of us who have been here a long time recall and aspire to… The personal blog site…

Aerospace Tiling Window Manager for macOS

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Aerospace is my new favourite macOS app….

My daily work involves a LOT of open browsers and applications (Word, Excel etc) and finding a way to navigate the many browser windows/tabs and applications has been an ongoing journey. Along the way I have used BetterTouch Tool, Keyboard Maestro, Moom, Apple Spaces and many other combinations of these and other applications.

My latest incarnation of these tools had been working reasonably well for me (to a point) but then I happened across Aerospace. After delving into a number of YouTube videos I found this one. This wasn’t the first YouTube video on Aerospace I had seen but it was certainly the clearest and easiest to follow.

After watching this video I installed Aerospace with brew and opened Aerospace.toml in VS Code and got to work on configuring for my needs. After a couple of weeks of tinkering I am now really happy with the way Aerospace works for me. I have a number of workspaces setup, Home, Admin, Personal, Code, Outlook, Word, Excel and Music, each with a corresponding ‘on-window-detected’ callback that sends the apps I have designated to the correct workspace. This works great and means windows immediately tile how I want them on the workspace I want them on.

Aerospace is certainly not the simplest window manager for macOS but it really is configurable to exactly your needs as long as a bit of ‘coding’ in the configuration file (aerospace.toml) doesn’t put you off.

Definitely recommended..

Moving Mac Windows Quickly.

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A new favourite utility app for MacOS is Moves by Mikkel Malmberg. Moves is a very simple app that allows you to move and resize windows without mousing to the corners of the app or the top of the app window. Just point anywhere in the app window and press the move or re-size hotkey set in the app (I am using Command+Shift for Move and Option+Shift for resize) and move the mouse to drag or resize that app. Simple but really nice.

Daily Links

Link	Description
Moves app	Quickly Move and Resize Windows.
$40,000 iPod	Sealed as new OG iPod sells for over $40K

Final day of CISSP course

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:01:00 +0000

Today is the final day of my week long training course (CISSP) with The Knowledge Academy. It has been a bit of a slog to be honest, 750 slides over five days means not an awful lot of time for interaction with fellow students. Add to that the fact that of the 14 candidates on the Zoom call only two or three of us have had our webcams on during the course meant that the discussion amongst the group has been pretty minimal.

CISSP is not deeply technical but is very broad in scope covering all aspects of Information Security from lighting of access to buildings to how crypto works. Practically I haven’t actually learned huge amounts that I didnt already know but the training has given me a good idea of the likely content of the exam, should I take it (the exam alone is nearly £600 in the UK). From the outset the trainer did explain that the course itself is probably not sufficient to pass the exam and I think after sitting through it I would probably agree. If you had little knowledge of the subject matter before taking this course you probably wouldn’t have learned what you need in the last five days and I think that is expected. To obtain the qualification you not only have to pass the exam but you also have to prove that you have at least five years experience in a field related to two of the eight domains of the course.

Daily Links

Link	Description
ISC2 - CISSP	Certified Information Systems Security Professional
The Knowledge Academy	UK based Training provider
Handshake	A short story with a twist from Matt Gemmell

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This site is brought to you by Hugo and Github Pages.

As much as I would love to be an expert in web design and publishing I have to admit I am not. The outcome of which is that I fairly regularly run into issues with this site as I did last night. The last two posts (before this one) on UKmac.net have involved a fair amount of tweaking to get them published due to my lack of detailed understanding of exactly how that publishing process works.

Last night I thought I would post a quick link to an article on TidBITs that turned into two hours messing about with github workflows and ultimately with me going to bed with a broken web site. Undeterred I have recovered and the site is now visible again. The issue last night was due to part of the github workflow responsible for publishing this site being deprecated on January 30th (actions/upload-artifact: v3). The solution was made possible in part thanks to Microsoft CoPilot which I am finding increasingly useful for various aspects of my work and personal life. I am fairly sure if needed I could have got to the same point by traditional web searches and trawling through a variety of blogs and Reddit posts, but CoPilot certainly helped to shortcut that process.

Now if I could just figure out why Bing refuses to index this site I would be really happy.

Today I am back in the virtual classroom on the pen-ultimate day of my CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) course.

Apple enable purchase transfer between accounts...

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The frustration of being an Apple enthusiast that doesn’t live in the UK means often missing out on the latest features, or getting them months or years after Americans do….

Daily Links

Link	Description
You Can Now Migrate Purchases Between Your Apple Accounts	TidBITS update on the new feature released today

Harvesting my data....

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Car parking payment apps are the worst… Or at least most of them are.

APCOA Connect is the latest example of crapware that I was required to register with earlier today. Arriving in Letchworth for business the only suitable car park I could find was outside the train station. After squeezing into the remaining space I then spent 10 minutes downloading and registering the APCOA Connect app in order to pay for the overnight parking.

Aside from the truly awful UI, the app requires you to provide address details AND payment card details before you are finally allowed to see the Apple Pay option ! There was no link or indication that Apple Pay is available until you have already provided APCOA with your personal details. I was spitting feathers… The trouble is what option do you have. The payment terminal was of course broken so the only way to pay is to use their crappy app. They have you over a barrel.

Unfortunately this sort of experience seems to be common place with car parking apps. I have come across a couple of apps that make parking quick and easy but these seem to be the exception not the rule. I suspect I am not alone in a loathing of this category of app ? What are your thoughts/experiences ?

macOS Calendar sync annoyances

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Came across this annoying bug with Calendar sync on macOS today. I use the excellent utility Dato on my MacBook to ensure I don’t miss any meetings, but this afternoon I noticed a meeting in my Outlook calendar that wasn’t appearing in Dato.

At first I assumed this was a repeat of an occasional issue I have run into where my Exchange calendar just decides to stop syncing with my Calendar so I went through the normal “fix” of removing my Exchange account from Settings/Accounts and re-adding it. The trouble is this didn’t fix the issue, the missing appointment was still missing.

The difference with this appointment though was that it was booked into my calendar using the Microsoft Bookings app. This it seems is the issue. After a bunch of digging I came across this entry on Microsoft Feedback which explains that the issue is with Bookings entries not syncing correct with EWS (Exchange Web Services) which is the older mechanism for calendar sync still used by macOS. Apparently this issue only affects macOS and not iOS (the missing entry appears correctly in the Calendar app on my iPhone)

I have added my vote on Microsoft Feedback for this to be resolved for what its worth, though I do wonder if the better solution would be for Apple to upgrade Calendar sync in macOS to use Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) which works correctly on iOS ?

Daily Links

Link	Description
Microsoft Feedback	Events booked with Bookings need to show up in Calendar.app on macOS

Scarborough

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am in Scarborough today for a site visit to one of our new services to spec out the requirements for their network. I arrived last night after a four hour drive and will probably be on site for half an hour today before starting the return four hour drive home. A long way for a short visit but better to see the site in person than to try and design the network from plans.

It was a nostalgic drive through York/Malton and the North Yorks Moors through which I have driven many times in the past. I love this part of the country, the villages are all very pretty and the landscape is rugged and open (and harsh in the winter).

My tooth ache is still really bad today, thankfully I have an appointment tomorrow afternoon so hopefully I will get it fixed and I can get rid of this nagging pain. To be honest I am dreading the actual dentist visit but at this point the thought of short term pain while the dentist gets in and sorts it outweighs the fear of the event itself.

Hello

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, I’m Scott Paterson.

Here is how I prefer to keep in touch, and why:

My favourite way to converse is email.
If you know me and have my phone number you can contact me on iMessage or Signal
I try to write on my website though not on a very regular basis
I have left Twitter or “X” because it is a cesspool.
I lurk on Mastodon and make the occasional comment or post
I am not a huge fan of LinkedIn, but use it to connect with work colleagues. I don’t use it for ongoing communication, I’d rather email.
I use Strava to publish my walks/rides and to check on my friends progress
I love Zwift and try to ride as often as I can
I have a Pixelfed account and really should use it more.
I don’t use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Threads

This is an example of a Hello page an idea by Alastair Johnston. I liked his template and this is mine…

Dudmaston day out

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today we had a day at our local National Trust property, Dudmaston Hall. The weather was pleasant for a change and combined with the Easter Holidays it meant that the grounds and the house were pretty busy.

Easter Sunday - New MacBook

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

New Macbook day

After much deliberation I finally ordered a new M3 MacBook Air from Amazon last week after I spotted a 16Gb/512Gb version going for £100 off list price. I am not sure why this model was available as Amazon typically only have the 8Gb versions available. There was only one colour available, Starlight, but for the reduction in price I decided I could live with something other than Space Grey for a change.

I was given Tuesday 26th as the delivery date but after waiting all day for a delivery up to 10pm the status of my order was changed to “We will email you when we have a delivery date”. This was more than a little disappointing. I waited a couple of days before contacting Amazon for an update and after a brief call I was told it would be with me this week but no precise date was given. I was surprised then to get an update on Friday morning to say it had been despatched and would be with me by 7pm, it arrived safely around 5pm.

I have been a happy owner of a 16" M1 MacBook Pro (which I upgraded to from an original M1 MacBook Air with 8Gb) for the last couple of years and really didn’t need an upgrade but I longed for something a little more portable than the 16" which is a wonderful powerful laptop but not exactly featherweight. Practically I am hopeful that the M3 Air will deliver similar performance to my Pro in a much more lightweight package, especially as my workload doesn’t involve a lot of processor heavy applications. I am also hoping that the second hand re-sale value of the MacBook Pro will pretty much cover the cost of the brand new Air.

I have had a couple of days with the new Air now and have mostly got things setup how I like them again and as expected it really feels no different to the Pro apart from when I pick it up from the desk to take it to another room. I don’t travel too much these days so carrying any distance is not a big issue but sitting with it on my lap feels so much more comfortable than the the 16" Pro.

Essential apps

For info the list of essential apps I have re-installed include :-

Obsidian Sync

One of the other things I have been changing in the last month is my Obsidian setup. Obsidian is an application that I have been trying to use for a long time but one of the main things that prevented my adoption was the fact that I wanted to be able to sync across Windows, macOS and iOS. Of course the simple answer to this would have been to subscribe to the Obsidian Sync service but I was loathe to start another subscription especially as I had yet to fully develop an essential workflow that relied on Obsidian.

Its fair to say that I am one of those types who prefer the configuration and setup of systems to actually using them and have tried and failed to make every type of note taking system and tool work for me. Having said that I have watched endless videos on note taking tools and Obsidian is the one that I have always thought should be able to serve my needs well.

Prior to this month I had been using the Obsidian Git plugin with a reasonable amount of success, but have had numerous instances of sync issues caused by opening my vault on my MacBook and iPhone or iPad when there were uncommitted changes which then required command line tinkering to rollback changes. This sort of irritation is a big negative factor in adopting a smooth workflow as you will appreciate, so last month I finally submitted to another subscription and signed up to the entry level $4 a month plan.

The impact was immediate. Sync now just works including plugin installations and configuration settings which didn’t sync at all with my Git based solution which meant I was constantly making changes to multiple devices to keep plugin settings synchronised.

I am very happy with this setup at the moment and will continue with it for a few months on the monthly plan and if it looks like becoming a permenant part of my toolbox I will sign up for the annual plan to save a few quid. If you havent tried it yet and have been testing across multiple devices with Git or iCloud sync then I would definitely recommend setting up a monthly Obsidian Sync subscription for a month or two to test it out.

58 years young

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

12th Jan means my birthday and another year under the bridge of life…

Today started with a walk to the Hundred Acre Kitchen for coffee and sausage and egg sandwiches with Vel. This evening we are going to the Red House for more food and probably a few drinks too. Tomorrow I am going to need to get on the bike and start the training for the coming 100k in June. I am still recovering from the cough and cold I developed after New Years so will probably need to take it easy but half an hour on Zwift should really be the minimum. With work as it has been recently finding half an hour at lunch time has been a non-starter for a while so my weekly mileage has dropped right down.

Today is the launch of Killers of the Flower Moon on Apple TV+ which I have been looking forward to watching for a while. Not sure I will find the time this weekend but its definitely on the list to see.

I have gone back to dabbling with Obsidian again, this time I have setup the Github plugin to sync to my Github account and so far its working great. I have setup on my iPhone and iPad and all are syncing nicely (for the most part, I have had a couple of issues but nothing major). I have not tried the pay-for Obsidian sync service and would expect it is considerably slicker than the process for setting up Github sync but at £8 a month the price is a little high for my needs.

I will continue testing and see how I get on.

Last Zwift Ride of 2023

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Ending 2023 with a longer ride and another route completion (Sugar Cookie in Watopia).

According to my Veloviewer account (which I had fogotten I had and noticed just now that it runs out in 3 days) this year was back to my 2019 levels which is to say the worst it has been for 4 years. Nothing I didn’t already know but it does show that I have been lax this year and need to make more of an effort in 2024.

Planning rides for 2024

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My first event of the year is now booked. I have a target to aim for, 2nd June and the 100k (Medium) Poppy Ride starting at Lilleshall. My event page is here if you would like to donate to a really good cause.

Daily Links

Link	Description
Poppy Ride	Whether you’re taking your first spin in the cycling world or you’re a seasoned pro, Poppy Ride offers three professionally designed routes - each catering to different skill levels.

Webcam draining my battery

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Tinkering today and I noticed that while my MacBook is asleep with power off the battery is draining pretty quickly. I have to admit that I did spot this a while ago but clearly didn’t do anything to trace the issue or try to resolve it. Today I am going to run a test and will disconnect my USB hub when I go out and see if this is what is causing the drain. I am fairly sure this will be it as one of the things I noticed was that my external webcam that sits on top of my main monitor was warm today even though my MacBook was still off. Hopefully this will fix it.

Another horrific day weather-wise here in the UK. Rain is currently hammering on my study window and the sky is a uniform grey.

2023 was a pretty slow year for my cycling adventures. I only managed one 100k+ ride to Ellesmere Lakes in June. This year I am hoping to do a bit more than that and have been researching organised events that I might be able to sign up for. TimeOutdoors has a number of events in the West Mids starting in April and running through to September listed on their site, a couple look like they might be worth signing up for.

Daily Links

Link	Description
TimeOutdoors	Cycling events in the West Midlands for 2024
iJunkie	Link to an old article I wrote that was the only time I was ever linked to from Daringfireball.net
The Verge	The Verge summary of the current dispute between Apple and Masimo over Apple Watch patent infringement

Xmas Hols

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

After all the effort and cost another christmas is now all but done and before you know it we will all be back at our desks into another year of work. Feeling over indulged I am starting to think about new years resolutions and in particular how to get back to regular exercise. The last few months of this year have been challenging and it has been hard to find time between the endless Teams calls to get out of the office. Intentions of 30 mins on Zwift at lunch time have very often fallen by the wayside.

The answer will be to learn to set standards and to say no. No when someone puts a meeting in my diary that I didn’t previously agree to. No to dealing with urgent emails that can be dealt with after a break from the desk. No to taking on others issues to try to do the best for the service. Having said all that I do accept that this is difficult to do, I should know I have been trying for years.

This is my first post for nearly two months and another potential target for a resolution. Finding time to learn new stuff and to document that new knowledge needs to be higher on my agenda. Over the last couple of days I have started on this. I am trying to learn to touch type, which is REALLY hard after a near life time of typing very badly. Unlearning a life time of bad habits doesn’t come easily and will take some practice.

I am typing this post on an old laptop that I have installed Linux Mint 21.2 onto. Previously this laptop was running Pop OS! and for a short time Vanilla OS. As usual I am using VS Code as my editor and Microsoft Edge as my main browser. With this setup Linux is really not substantially different to Windows or macOS for my main uses. Most of my day is spent in Office web apps (Outlook, Teams) and I can function pretty normally on any modern OS as long as I can install Edge and a few extensions (Bitwarden, Raindrop.io etc).

Home Office Update

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Finished sorting my office today and am really happy with how it looks now. I spend a lot of time in here so its important for me that I have a nice environment to work in. The addition of a few led light strips and a clear out of some of the clutter has improved the aesthetic considerably I think.

I have included a link to my standing desk frame below. I procrastinated over getting a standing desk for months and now I have one I wish I hadn’t. I find that I spend at least half my working day standing now and feel much better for it. If you are sitting on the fence (or your desk chair) debating if you should move to a standing desk I would definitely recommend doing it. If you can re-use your existing desktop as I did the cost is pretty reasonable (this one was aroound £170). Do it, your back will thank you later.

Daily Links

Link	Description
Sleeve	Sleeve is a stylish now playing app that fills the gap left by Apple not providing a widget for the Apple Music app in macOS Sonoma. Sleeve is a paid app rather than a subscription and costs around £6 in UK. It can also share you played tracks to your Last.fm account.
MAIDeSITe Height Adjustable Electric Standing Desk Frame	This standing desk frame is the one I recently bought to replace my static desk. Not expensive and highly recommended if you want a solid standing desk frame.
USB COB Led Strip	USB lighting strip providing lights behind cabinets in my office

Morning Run (4 miles) - Scary Fast

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Morning Run

First longish run for a long time this morning. Dropped Vel’s car at the garage for a service then run home. Felt pretty slow but looking at the total time and distance it actually wasn’t too bad. I enjoy running when I am doing it regularly and I can get to a decent pace without feeling like my lungs are going to burst but to get to that usually means a prolonged period of regular runs and at the moment I am not getting out often enough. Oddly running is something I tend to find I do more of in the winter, I find running in the hot weather uncomfortable and would much rather be cycling through the lanes for exercise in the Summer. The big benefit of running though is that 30-45 mins gets me the same benefit as a much longer day in the saddle so fitting into the family life schedule is generally easier.

Scary Fast

As predicted the Halloween Apple Event happened last night was all about the M3 processor laucnch in new versions of the MacBook Pro. The M3 is another incremental improvement over the previous generations Apple Silicon so it was interesting that most of the performance comparisons that Apple made during the event were between the M1 and M3 processors rather than between M2 and M3.

I suppose the point of making this comparison is to encourage early Apple Silicon adopters who are on M1 machines to upgrade even though for most users those M1 based Macs are still going to be fine for almost all uses. This is also why the event repeatedly referred to high end/power users. Its very clear the M3 Pro MacBooks are targetted to heavy users (video, simulation, audio production etc). This will be a challenge for Apple moving forward. Whilst two year iPhone upgrades cycles are commonplace for many users MacBooks and Macs tend to be on longer upgrade cycles and the new Apple Silicon Macs are SO fast and powerful this cycle will potentially be able to stretch even longer. I know for me the ugrade of my current M1 MacBook Pro is likely to be some time away.

Daily Links

Link	Description
Bunch	Bunch is another great tool from Brett Terpstra that uses a plain text config file to define bunches of apps that can be lauched together from a simple menu. Think of the contexts of how you use your Mac (work, home, play) and the common apps that you use in each context, Bunch makes launching and closing apps to get you from one context to another simple.

A short break from work..

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am taking a few days leave for half term this week so today was busy busy busy…

This morning started with a quick ride on stage 5 of Tour of Watopia (Canopies and Coastlines). This route started with the Titans Grove KOM reverse before taking in the new Watopia coastal road and finally ending at Sasquatch Sprint all in just over 28km and about 245m of climbing. A nice route made nicer by having the garage door open to let some Autumn sunshine in.

Ride out of the way and onto chores, hopefully the last grass cut of the year followed by cleaning the roof panels from the gazebo ready to be stored away for the winter. Later in the afternoon when the clouds opened with a torrential downpour I was pretty glad I chose the morning to get these jobs sorted.

The afternoon was then spent in my office, sorting out shelving, listening to music and organising cabling ( a favourite pastime of mine ) on my new standing desk. Tomorrow I have some LED light strips coming from Amazon that I am going to use to brighten the office space a bit so part of Tuesday is already planned…

Daily Links

Link	Description
Keyclu	Simple and handy overview of applications shortcuts. Press Command key twice and hold to display the keyboard shortcuts available for the current application.
Dropzone 4	A menu bar utility to make copy/paste between apps easier. Great if you use Stage Manager

Climbing on Zwift - La Laguna Negra

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This afternoons Zwift ride was a toughy… At the start or the current Zwift Portal Climb for La Laguna Negra my estimated time to summit was hovering between 42 and 45 minutes. With that in mind I started spinning my way towards the top at a fairly consistent rate but with an eye on the segment details which showed the average gradient of the last segment as 10.1% !

As I approached section 10 I was feeling a little less than fresh but still on track for a time of around 43 minutes but this last section really was tough. In my lowest gear and standing up on the pedals I was slowed to crawl but at this point being beaten was not an option.

Its fair to say I was very pleased to see the summit banner and the pool of sweat on the floor was a good indicator of how hard this climb was.

Glad to have another portal climb in the bank though.

Online Safety Bill Climb Down

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday the Online Safety Bill was taken through the House of Lords for the final time. On this reading the contentious requirement for companies such as Apple, Meta, Signal to provide a “backdoor” into the end to end encryption of messages that would allow the government to snoop on messages sent and received by UK citizens was amended.

In a watering down that amounts to the government conceeding defeat they changed the requirement to only apply when it became “technically possible” for messaging providers to achieve it (there is no way this will ever happen…)

I don’t think this should come as a great surprise to anyone really, especially as Apple, Meta and Signal had all written to the government informing them that if the bill went ahead as planned they would remove their services from UK citizens. That would be a great vote winner for the Conservatives in the run up to the next general election now wouldn’t it ?

Building a 3.6kg bike

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

TriRig are an American company who specialise in aero parts for triathlon bikes but in this video they show off an amazing looking machine that weighs just 3.6kg. Quite a feat especially when you consider this is a fully functional bike, although I think that saddle looks a little less than comfortable.

Links

Link	Description
Tririg	Aerodynamic component supplier

Bing Black Hole

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Over my years working in IT I have enjoyed dabbling with building web sites, starting way back in the early days with Dreamweaver through the early days of Wordpress, Drupal and a few other CMS’s and more recently with static site generators such as Jekyll and finally Hugo which this site is currently using (in September 2023).

During this time I have always managed to get my sites indexed with Google so the random posts I created could be found, if only by me, but my latest iteration of ukmac.net seems to be unwanted by Google and more particularly with Bing. Google has a few odd pages indexed at the moment out of the approx 200 pages in this site but Bing stubbornly refuses to index any of the site and so as far as searches on Bing is concerned ukmac.net may as well not exist.

This is something I have been trying to fix for the last few weeks without any real progress and the more I dig the more I find other web site owners, some with much more popular sites than mine, who are also experiencing the same issues. What I can’t tell is why Bing seems to dislike my site. Microsoft have a set of guidelines which supposedly tell site owners how to fix issues getting their sites indexed but they really don’t help much.

Any site owners experiencing this issue will be very familiar with the screen shot above which is the error received in the Bing Webmaster Tools site when you run a URL Inspection against your site.

The odd and very frustrating thing with this is that if you select the Live URL view at the top of the URL Inspection screen you will likely see something like this…

The issue is the “quality checks” that it refers to that I assume my site is failing are not detailed anywhere. How do you know what needs fixing ? Read the webmasters guidelines apparently but this doesnt help to show which ones your site is failing on.

Last night I found a forum post which suggested emailing Bing webmaster tech support on bwtsupport@microsoft.com for advice. I wasn’t convinced I would get a reply but thought there was nothing lost in trying this. Amazingly I got a reply within an hour with a case number and even more amazingly within another 9 hours I had a reply from a real person. The response explained that the case had been investigated and my site had been manually checked and that I had been found to be in violation of the Bing Webmaster Guidelines and as such my site would not be indexed and I was referred to check out the guidelines for help in resolving the issue. Great. IF they would tell me what the issue was ?

At this point I am sort of losing the will to carry on with this. I’m sure there are people out there who can assist with this and perhaps most of them would suggest my site is not worth Bing indexing it, and they may be right, but my techie self is still annoyed and frustrated at being beaten by this.

To be honest, I think I will continue to dabble with this site despite the lack of traffic due to being in a black hole. The site itself I think looks better than it has done before and site building with Hugo is teaching me a lot about Git, Visual Studio Code and Markdown which is something.

In the meantime if any web gurus do happen across my site and can shed any light or offer any advice on how to get indexed by Bing I would be very grateful to hear from you.

Useful Links

Link	Description
Bing Webmaster Guidelines	Bing advice on how to get your site indexed.
Bing Webmaster Tools	Tools to analyse your site and submit it to Bing for indexing
Not awesome Bing bans and de-indexing	A thorough set of resources and articles about Bing bans and de-indexing

What a difference a week makes

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Last weeks ride couldn’t have been more different from todays. I wasn’t sure I would get time to go out this afternoon but when the opportunity of a quick hour circuit raised its head I didn’t wait for it to pass by.

I know I am really lucky to be near enough to quiet country lanes that I dont need to plan ahead to get my bike in the car and drive to a starting point and the North Shropshire countryside has some really enjoyable cycling.

My route today was only 40K but this was enough enough to blow the cobwebs away and get me ready for a week at the home office.

Gallery

Traws Eryri

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Traws Eryri is a new 200km off road across the North of Wales through the Snowdonia National Park. It starts at Machynlleth and ends in Llandudno and includes 4,000m of climbing. It looks fabulous and I would love to find the time to do this.

A lesson in how not to ride in the rain

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A wet ride

I should have gone with my gut this afternoon when I was planning a short ride. Just before I set off the clouds opened and it poured down. I had just checked on my weather app and it did say no rain so I decided it was just a short downpour and I should go for it.

The first 10 minutes were ok but by the time I reached Kynnersley it was raining again and slowly got heavier. I ploughed on as I hadn’t been out on the roads for a while and wanted to do at least 30k. By the time I reached the turn for Ollerton/Childs Ercall I was well and truly soaked and so decided to take the corner off the ride and not go to Ollerton and to head straight to [Childs Ercall(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child%27s_Ercall)] instead. This turned out to be the wrong choice. As I took the right hand turn to Childs Ercall I felt the back wheel go and before I knew where I was I was on my side on the edge of the road ! Not what I had planned.

Fortunately I was largely unhurt apart from my right arm having a nice bit of road rash. Thankfully it is a quiet country lane and there were no cars around.

After straightening my handlebars and brushing myself down I continued on with the rest of the wet ride home. This was my first spill on a bike for many years but it didn’t make it feel any less embarrassing that I had fallen off.

I suspect tonight I will feel the impact of this fall as the bruising comes through but at least I am in one piece and ready to ride again, albeit I will probably take it a little more gingerley on the corners when the roads are wet next time.

India Moon Landing

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A big day for the Indian space programme and a poke in the eye for the Russians who crashed landed their attempt earlier in the week.

Camping in the Shropshire Hills - Day 1

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Preparations

Camping in the rain can be a little disappointing but its something British campers tend to get used to. This trip was to be the first for my daughters who had never been on a family camping trip before despite both being in their late teens. They had camped with school but wanted to have an family camping experience so we had planned a one night trial run to see how they got on. I had been watching the weather reports in the run up to the day and was expecting light rain in the morning so it wasn’t unexpected when I woke to a grey and damp morning.

By about 9am the girls were up and we started to get our things together for the trip to the Shropshire Hills.

Cancelled

The drive to our campsite was only about 30 miles but the last few mile were down narrow lanes and the last mile along a rough and steep farm track. We got to the farm yard and there didn’t seem to be anyone around so I called the number of the farm. The guy I had spoken to yesterday answered and said he was sorry but there was no way we could drive to the pitches as the overnight rain had left the access road too slippery to drive, he said he couldn’t get up it in his Land Rover Discovery. He said he had text me earlier in the morning to say we shouldn’t come but I hadn’t seen the message.

The Hollies Farm

To say we were disappointed would have been an understatement. Our options were to abandon completely or try and find an alternative camp site. A couple of miles before the turn to lower Vellons farm we had seen a sign for a “glamping” site so we decided to head there and see if we could get a pitch for the night. When we arrived it was a flat field with a bunch of clamping pods on a very nicely laid out plot but no sign of tents so I wasn’t hopeful of getting a pitch. Sure enough the lady at the office said they weren’t allowed tents due to their planning permission for the site but she very helpfully rang another site, The Hollies, for me who told her they would take a tent. She gave me directions and told me to pitch up in the field and the owner would come and see us later. We would know we had the right place as there was one other tent there already.

Getting setup

A short drive later and we were on a small field overlooking a fabulous view of the Shropshire hills. The rain was still drizzling and there was quite a breeze blowing so I anticipated a struggle to get the tent up as we had only tried it twice before. The first time was also windy and Ria and I gave up as we couldn’t manage to get the hooped poles in place whilst stopping the wind from trying to blow us away. The second time we managed to get it up ok after a bit of a struggle pushing the poles into place. This time there were three of us and we needed to get the tent up quickly to get out of the rain.

Amazingly we had the poles in and the outer pegged down in just a few minutes and with barely a crossed word. Teamwork it seems worked for us.

Once we had the outer up we got the bedroom inners in place in a few more minutes and within a short space of time we were setup with camp chairs and the little stove boiling some water for tea and lunch. Perfect.

Walking the Stiperstones

Once we had eaten we set off for a walk up to the Stiperstones. A short walk up the lane took us through a farm yard which led to the gate to the Shropshire Way. We took a left aiming to walk to the West end of the ridge that leads up to the Devils Chair before descending back down to the Hollies Farm for the return.

The first part of the route was through a small wood with a brook running down the right of the path. Once we emerged out of the woods we were on a bracken and heather lined path which after a short walk turned right back on ourselves and headed up to where we could see the Devils Chair shrouded by low clouds. The wind was blowing pretty hard at this point and we were all getting pretty wet, but then as we reached the Shropshire Way the cloud cleared and we quickly dried out courtesy of the continuing strong winds.

The ridge across the top of the Stiperstones is strewn with irregular and jagged stones which makes progress pretty slow and quite treacherous, a twisted ankle would be pretty easy to acquire and would make the return leg of the walk very uncomfortable.

Descent

Despite the conditions the walk along the summit was enjoyable and the views by this time were spectacular, the panorama surrounding us reaching into Wales and across the Shropshire peaks. Soon we were at the point where we could turn back down the hill side towards the campsite and before long we were out of the wind and back onto much smoother terrain, crossing the fields in front of the Hollies Farm, complete with a herd of cows who mercifully seemed uninterested in us, before joining the short lane to our tent.

Stiperstones Inn

After resting at the tent for an hour or so we changed and headed in the car to the Stiperstones Inn for our evening meal. The Inn is a proper traditional English country pub with a menu that included steak and kidney suet pudding and apple crumble and custard for dessert… Superb stuff.

Once we had availed ourselves of the Inn WiFi and eaten our fill it was time to head back to the tent for a well earned night under canvas.

The evening air had already started to cool when we got out of the car and the girls commented on it being cold, but once we were in our campbeds and snuggled down the complaints soon stopped. I was certainly glad to be in bed and despite a slow puncture on my airbed that gradually deflated through the night leaving me on the floor in the morning I slept pretty soundly and the girls were quiet until 7am the next morning when we woke to a spectacular sunny morning…

TBC

First Zwift Portal Route Complete

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Crow Road

Today was my first proper ride for over a couple of weeks and also my first go on the new [Zwift Portal(https://zwiftinsider.com/climb-portal-list/)] routes. I was prompted to try Crow Rd on the Zwift rides home screen so I decided I would give it a go. At 6.9km this is not a particularly long climb but after not riding for a while and with legs that still felt a little on the weak side it may have turned out to be a bad idea.

The route is 251m of elevation and the steppest parts of the route are thankfully in the first km so you can get those bits over early and then settle into a slightly easier average gradient for the next 4-5km.

Thankfully my lungs and legs held out and I made it to the top in what felt like a fairly respectable time of just under 26 mins. Now I have the first one under my belt I think I will aim to try and complete the other routes over the next few weeks.

My reMarkable notebook

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Returning my reMarkable

About a month ago I purchased a reMarkable eInk notebook. I had looked at them a number of times over the last year or so but had never seen one in person until I was on site with one of the team from IT Naturally who was using hers to make notes during a site device upgrade that we were carrying out. When I spoke to her she was gushing with praise and said it was the best thing she had bought. I guess this got me interested, then a few days later I learned that my manager also had one and was also really impressed with it. That swung it and I went online and ordered a refurb to be delivered straight away.

reMarkable offer a 100 day money back guarantee which was one of the reasons that I decided it was worth a go, I could always return it if I didn’t get on well with it. The reason I went for a refurb was also due to this no arguement return policy. reMarkable obviously have people who return devices for whatever reason and re-selling these at a small saving with the same guarantee as a brand new one makes a lot of sense.

First impressions

When I received my notebook a few days later the immediate reaction was that there really was no difference from a brand new device. The box was shrink wrapped as new and when opened there was no way I would have been able to tell that someone had previously used this tablet, it was really mint condition.

Compared with most tablets the reMarkable is amazingly thin and light, it really is an impressive feat of technology. Once powered up the screen appeared crisp and clear and I was quickly through the setup wizard and having a go at the writing experience. I had opted against buying the reMarkable stylus and case preferring to go for the much more modestly priced Staedtler Noris digital classic stylus from Amazon which was less than £30 compared to £59 for the basic reMarkable Marker and a crazy £109 for the reMarkable Marker Plus !

reMarkable Connect

The new device comes with 12 months subscription to the reMarkable Connect service which promises to save your notes to the cloud and additionally sync them to apps on your phone/tablet or PC. I setup the required account and installed the app on my iPhone, Macbook and iPad. I then started testing, creating a few pages and trying out the solution. After creating a few test pages I deleted them from the notebook and created a real notebook ready to start using. After a few minutes I noticed the test pages I had deleted had re-appeared on the notebook… A little odd I thought and deleted them again only for them to re-appear again a few minutes later. Annoyed now I did a quick search for this issue and quickly found a number of threads that suggested it was the iOS apps causing the re-appearing pages, apparently the sync process is not 100% reliable. This was annoying as this was one of the things I expected I might use. I removed/logged out of the apps on my other devices and did some more testing and sure enough no further re-appearing deleted pages.

Further Impressions

Over the last month I have tried to use the reMarkable (without the mobile apps) and have been torn. On the one hand the device is really nice, slick, thin, light and the writing experience is extremely good, far superior to using a pen on an iPad. The problem for me though was the software. The sync issue was an annoyance but was compounded by the functionality of the device software itself. My main issue is search or the lack of. The notes you write CAN be converted to searchable text but once you do that they are now text not handwritten notes and you also have to accept any errors in conversion. You cant search handwritten notes, something that OneNote has done for years.

Further you cant name the pages of your notes to allow for searching by page name. This would be a major improvement for me. I create a page for each day in a daily notes journal and once created the only way to navigate or go back to a specific days notes is to use the thumbnail view of the notes pages. Each page is numbered but the thumbnail is too small text to easily spot a specific page so you end up having to open a page that you think then skip forward or backward until you find the required page. Given the slow refresh of eink displays this is not a quick process, certainly when compared to skimming through the pages of a paper journal.

And it is this limitation that has brought me to today when I have finally decided to return my reMarkable for a refund. Honestly if the device was half the price I might not have bothered but at £300 this is not a cheap piece of kit and given my difficulties using it in my wy of working I decided I would rather have the £300 back. I am a little disappointed but part of the original reason for buying was the knowledge that if it didn’t work for me I could return it so I am happy to have tried.

Maybe reMarkable 3 will rectify some of these issues when it is eventually released and I might be tempted to give it another go…

About

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Now

This is my now page. What I am doing right now(ish)

My name is Scott Paterson and I am an IT manager currently working for one of the UK’s largest social care providers.

I have been working in IT for nearly 40 years and have done most things from data analyst, software developer, infrastructure support and design, networks and much more.

My tech

I have been a fan of Apple products for the last 20 odd years starting with my first iMac (see below). My current setup is an M3 MacBook Air with 16GB/512GB which I absolutely love. The Air is really perfect and although a technical downgrade from my previous MacBook Pro, a 16" M1, it really does everything I need without breaking a sweat and is so small and light I just love it.

I have a bunch of other Apple kit including 6th gen iPad Mini, iPhone 15 and whole bunch of antique Apple kit (original Macintosh, eMate 300, Newtons, G4 iMac, Intel iMac… I could go on…)

Just bought a DJI Mini 4K but not had time to make real use of it yet, one to work on.

Interests

I am a keen cyclist (when I can) and use Zwift in my garage when I don’t have time to get out in the lanes for a “proper” ride.

I am reviving my interest in HiFi and have a pair of Kef LSX II active speakers on my office desk (in front of me) which are just stunning. I have a Pro-ject T1 BT turntable that hooks up to the Kefs for those days when I feel like spinning some of my old vinyls.

Entertainment

Rewatching Breaking Bad for the first time for many years and loving it all over. Still makes me wince in places even tough I know whats coming (the ATM scene !)

Family

Four grown up kids, recently grown in numbers to 5 grand kids.

History

UKMac.net has been around in many versions and using many web publishing systems since around 2005.

My interest in Macs goes back before the beginning of this site but really took off when I bought my first 17" G5 iMac.

Links

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

RSS Feeds

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Text content to be shown on the page.

Search

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Will Green - BritishMac

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I got a text out of the blue from an old friend, James who had just heard that another friend of ours, Will Green, had unfortunately passed away.

I hadn’t heard from Will or spoken to him in some time but the out of the blue call from James did leave me winded. James and I spoke for quite a while, reminiscing about things and I think both of us could not quite believe it. Our friendship came about through our love of Apple Mac computers and a strange coincidence of geography.

My interest in Macs started when I bought an 17" G5 iMac in 2005. At the time my work life was entirely Windows centric and I think I recall deciding to buy a Mac mostly out of curiosity. I was of course quickly sold by the elegance, slick design and polished software.

I think soon after I bought into the Mac lifestyle I registered this domain (ukmac.net) and started with my early blog focused on Apple and my new Mac. As a keen Apple fan I of course started consuming what I could from the Internet from various web sites/blogs and also from a number of podcasts such as Macbreak Weekly and the wildly eccentric BritishMac podcast.

BritishMac was a regular chart topper in the podcast Tech charts in those days and by a bizarre twist of fate was run by Will who happened to live only a few miles from me in Ironbridge, Shropshire. Through another weird coincidence I came into contact with James who had also recently started a Mac focused blog at Ukmac.co.uk, even more coincidently James lived in Broseley a few miles away from Ironbridge in the opposite direction from myself. It was meant to be I guess.

Suffice to say James, Will and myself ended up meeting in Ironbridge for a few beers and to talk about our favourite subject, Macs.

Will was one of life’s characters. If you ever heard any of his podcast episodes you will know what I mean. His blog and podcast were unique and eccentric, there really weren’t any like it at the time (nor since that I have seen at least). In addition to his irregular podcast postings Will used to host a Christmas get together in Ironbridge and would invite any of his listeners who wished to meet up for drinks and a curry at his local Indian restaurant, the Aftab.

On a couple of these meet-ups Will got us together at a little studio he had at the time to record a podcast episode before we headed to town for food. The resulting recordings were somewhat less than polished but that wasn’t the point and didn’t stop everyone enjoying being part of the process.

Will’s funeral was this Tuesday in Shrewsbury and I was fully intending to go to show my respects and also to meet-up with some of the group that used to go to Will’s Christmas events but in a cruel twist I have been laid up in bed all week with a viral illness and was not able to make it.

14 Peaks Nothing is Impossible

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible is a fascinating documentary about a group of Nepalese mountaineers led by the fearless Nirmal Purja who set out to conquer all 14 of the worlds 8,000+ metre mountains in under 7 months.

A staggering watch, well recommended. Watch out for the summit of Everest… Mind blowing

Been a while

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This week has been a bit crappy to be honest. I have spent most of it lay in bed, coughing and feeling weak and exhausted. My chest hurts and my head feels like its full of cotton wool and I am actually really tired of feeling this way. It’s only a week, nothing compared to what some people have to endure.

A lot of this week I haven’t felt up to doing much at all, I have watched a couple of films which is a bit of a first, I hadn’t watched a full film for a long time either. The rest of the time I have been trying to avoid looking at my work inbox/Teams because I know that I would (and did on Tuesday) get drawn into it and hours would quickly pass before I realised that I wasn’t doing as I have been told and resting but instead would have been getting stressed about the build up of “stuff” that I am going to have to deal with when I return to work.

This has left the remaining time to browse news sites and lurk on Mastodon, both activities that don’t do much to cheer you up. Doom, gloom and bad news… Just now I ended on a link to a YouTube video by Cal Newport titled The Perks of Living Without Social Media. In it Cal explains how he has never had social media accounts and the various benefits of living without social media (conveniently side stepping the fact that as a YouTuber he is very much using social media for his job, but we will let that one slide for now). It did make me think though and I realised although I haven’t got a Facebook account and deleted my Twitter account after Elon took that service down the toilet I still spend a lot of my time reading what others have to say either on news sites, Mastodon or YouTube. And its true there is a lot there that its better not to know or at least better not to let get into your head and affect your mood and how you think about things.

I guess there is a fine balance between keeping informed and letting the enormous deluge of information available to us all become overwhelming.

What I also realised this week is that when I am not working or thinking about work I don’t really have an interest or passion that I can spend my spare time on to help me to avoid doom scrolling. I guess this is how I ended up here writing this missive. Journalling is known to be good for helping to focus the mind and I have always thought that I would like to be able to regularly update this blog but never really manage to maintain any sort of inertia (if you look back at other posts on this site you will see what I mean).

Anyway the first task was to fix the site which I managed to break back in April while trying to change this blog from Hugo to Tina CMS. After a little fiddling around I managed to restore the previous “Deploy Hugo to gh-pages” workflow to working order and we are now back up and running.

Second step is to start updating here… Lets see if I can manage to do that

Resetting Apple’s Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 23:00:00 +0000

My Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad have been gathering dust in the office recently after I changed from using my MacBook in clamshell mode connected to an external monitor to using in front of the monitor, so I decided to setup them up on my iPad Mini. Trouble is they were paired to my MacBook so didn’t show up in Bluetooth settings on the iPad to pair them and I couldn’t remember how to reset them.

The solution for this was quite easy. Just power each device on and off five times, then go to the Bluetooth settings on the iPad and they appear ready for pairing.

Managing Trackpad on MacOS when using external mouse

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Following my desk space re-organisation this weekend I am back to using my MacBook keyboard again for the first time in quite a while. Having worked predominantly with an external mouse and keyboard with my MacBook in clamshell mode in a vertical stand I decided I would like to disable the MacBook trackpad.

Simple you would think? Apple do kindly offer a setting in the Mouse & Trackpad Accessibility preferences to do this very thing, however after switching on the option I found my trackpad was still fully operation even with my Logitech MX Master connected. It appears that Bluetooth mice don’t register as a mouse being present?

The fix I discovered was to use another Accessibility preference known as Mouse Keys, a legacy service designed to allow cursor control using the keyboard.

Firstly enable Mouse Keys by switching on the slider in the Pointer Control options, then click on the i next to the slider to reveal the additional preferences dialog below.

Switch on the two sliders to disable the trackpad when Mouse Keys is on and also enable the option to quickly enable/disable Mouse Keys by pressing the Option key 5 times. You should find that the trackpad is now correctly disabled. To enable the trackpad again just turn off Mouse Keys by tapping Option key 5 times.

Job done.

New Desk layout

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Turned out nicely I think.

Pre-Xmas Post

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Six months into the new job and things are starting to get pretty busy and I am certainly past the honeymoon period and into the time when people around the organisation know who I am. That’s both nice but also means free time to develop knowledge and do things how you would ideally want to do them starts to become a rarity.

My home office has recently changed layout again and I am back to working entirely on the Samsung M7 screen with my MacBook Pro configured in clamshell mode alongside it. With the upgrade to iOS 16/macOS Ventura bringing Continuity Camera support I have been using my iPhone as a replacement for the MacBook webcam and I have to say it works remarkably well, I have had no glitches/disconnects during use with Teams calls in many short and long meetings. My main issue has been finding a way to attach the iPhone at the top of the screen so I appear to be looking in the right direction. I have a fairly dodgy setup at the moment as I haven’t found the ideal tool to do this. I have attached a small L bracket to the VESA mounting on the back of the monitor and am then using a small tripod clamp around the iPhone to give it the necessary width and height to raise the camera above the top of the monitor. It works but is not ideal and I will have to try to rig something a bit more substantial in the New Year. There is definitely a market for a nice solution here, most of the stuff available is designed for MagSafe connectors ( my iPhone 11 doesn’t have MagSafe ) and for attachment by sticky pads.

If anyone has a good solution for this I would love to hear from you.

Daily Links

Link	Description
Continuity Camera	Apple guide on using Continutiy Camera
My Mastodon Profile	Try TWiT.social for a friendly and tech centered Mastodon instance

Feeling grotty and the sun is shining

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today finds me at home still full of cold after more than a week with a beautiful sunny day outside that would have been perfect for an Autumn bike ride. Gutted and grumpy.

It’s also been three months since I left CVT and therefore six months since I handed in my notice and they still haven’t recruited a replacement to my position. The two guys who worked for me have been struggling along and I think are starting to drown under the weight of tickets in the helpdesk and other work that they are now picking up that they didn’t previously have to worry about (because I did it). I do really feel for them, they are both nice guys and being left to flounder by the charities management team is really not good. I have continued to offer them support and advice and will continue to do so but what I can do for them isn’t a substitute for a permenant IT manager who can take some of the load from them.

Daily Links

Link	Description
Azure AD Admin shortcuts	A very useful list of shortcuts to variety of Azure AD Admin pages
Tangerine Dream - Logos	Currently listening to one of my all time favourite TD albums. Powerful memories evoked of this concert at the Odeon in Birmingham

New Zwift Hub Smart Trainer Announced

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This looks interesting.

Just £449 in the UK with 24 months interest free credit to boot !

May be tempted myself

Link	Description
Zwift Hub	£449 for a nice looking direct drive smart trainer

macOS Monterey QuickLook still flaky

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are probably only a month or so away from the release of the latest macOS version Ventura but the current latest version, Monterey, still has the same QuickLook issue that it has had since release.

Pretty regularly I will press Space on a file in the Finder to get a quick preview only to be greeted with a thumbnail image of the file. This has been a problem for me (and others) for some time now and whilst there is a quick fix (Force Quit the Finder) it really shouldn’t be necessary after five major updates to the operating system should it ?

To be honest I am not sure if it is something specific to some of the software I use but I have seen it now on two MacBooks (my previous M1 MacBook Air and my current M1 MacBook Pro) and I have found lots of references to others with the same issue so it does seem to be a pretty widespread issue.

Links

Link	Description
macOS Ventura	Apples latest release of the Mac OS

Sunday Morning Ride

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Muxton to Cheswardine

Starting an early ride in late August in the UK can be tricky when making decisions about clothing, too much and by the time you get going you are cooking and too little and the early part of your ride can be on the chilly side. This morning I went for a thin base layer, short sleeve jersey and shorts which turned out to be a wise choice. It was pretty cool at 7am as I headed towards Edgmond, the balloons from the Telford Balloon Festival hanging across the misty fields to my left

My planned route was a 50K loop to Cheswardine returning via Stoke on Tern and Childs Ercall. I have done this route a couple of times and it is a pleasant ride with very little traffic. In fact today during the entire ride I was only past ( from behind ) by 5 cars, three of which were in the final 3k of the ride as I got close to home.

The route is pretty flat with the only real uphill section taking you from the Chester Road after St Michaels Church, Chetwynd along Sustrans route 552 up to the Church at Cheswardine.

Bridge over the Shropshire Union Canal

Once I had passed Cheswardine the sun started to rise high enough to warm the morning and as I headed towards Stoke on Tern the Wrekin was visible in the distance.

Most of my routes around the local villages are rarely out of sight of the Wrekin

Daily Links

Link	Description
Komoot Route	Muxton to Cheswardine 50K Loop
Strava	Strava Recording

Tangerine Dream Live recommendations

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Against The Clock

Against The Clock is a series by Fact Magazine where artists are given 10 minutes in the studio and see what they come up with.

Fascinating.

Daily Links

Link	Description
Tangerine Dream - YouTube	My YouTube playlist of Tangerine Dream, mostly live concerts.

My Experiences with the Keychron K3 Wireless Keyboard

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I have had the Keychron K3 for a month or so now and my thoughts on this device are still somewhat mixed. After years of using laptop keyboards, the Logitech K380 and the Apple Magic Keyboard the K3 takes some getting used to. The keys have of course got more travel and sit higher than the other keyboards I am used to.

Whilst I’m not a proper touch typist but can normally achieve a reasonable number of characters per minute but with the K3 I am still finding myself making quite a lot of typos. To be honest when I first got the keyboard I was making so many errors that I temporarily went back to my Apple Magic Keyboard. Since then I have been trying to get along with the K3 again, partly because I dont want to admit defeat and partly because I think once I am used to it I will find it a better keyboard than the Magic Keyboard. From a practical point of view the other thing I have been a little disappointed with is the battery life and the bluetooth connection speed. Battery life is I guess to be expected due to the backlight which you can of course turn off to improve things but at the expense of one of the nice features of the K3.

The Bluetooth connection is not as easy to address however. The issue I have here is that when the keyboard goes to sleep to conserve battery the bluetooth connection to my MacBook obviously drops which is to be expected, however when hitting a key for the first time after this happens (when returning to typing after a short break for example) the bluetooth connection does not immediately reestablish and the first few keystrokes are lost. This is frustrating and because of this I have taken to connecting via USB C cable which doesnt suffer from this issue but of course means I now have a cable running from my nice wireless keyboard..

I am planning to keep trying the K3 for a bit longer yet but in the worst case I can always box it up and post an ad on eBay, I’m sure it will sell easily enough.

Links

Link	Description
Keychron K3	Hot swappable low profile wireless mechanical keyboard
Logitech K380	Affordable multi device compact wireless keyboard
Apple Magic Keyboard	Apple compact wireless keyboard

My Favourite Cycling Channels on Youtube

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Katie Kookaburra

	Katie is a long distance specialist who loves to climb hills. She posts regularly and has a large following of over 100k subscribers. One of my favourite channels and one that I look forward to new episodes of.

Adam Watkins

	Adam is not the most regular YouTuber but he is definitely my favourite. A seasoned Audaxer who covers huge distances a lot of which he does on a fixie ! He has a great sense of humour ( at least I think so ) and a unique style.. Watch out for gout !

Dave Noakes

	Dave’s channel is a mixture of gravel rides, BMX with his daughter, new bike builds and a variety of races and events. I have to admit when I first watched Dave’s channel I was a bit put off by his quirky style, but stick with him, he is developing his style and is actually quite refreshing

Juliet Elliott

	Juliet is the ex-partner of Dave Noakes and is another 100k+ subscriber channel that goes back over 12 years. Juliet is a bubbly presenter who was a pro-snow boarder, BMXer and cycle courier amongst many other things I’m sure. The channel is a mix of gravel riding, backpacking and competitive crit rides.

Leonard Lee

	Leonards channel is a little different to the typical cycling YouTube channel. Leonard is a 50+ year old who is “gravitationally challenged (quote)” and his channel is aimed more at the new cyclist or the returning cyclist who is perhaps not ready for 200km Audax’s just yet.

Ed Pratt

	Ed’s channel is as fascinating as it is quirky. From March 2015 to July 2018 Ed pedalled a unicycle 22,000miles around the world. Over that time he crossed 4 continents and performed over 12 million pedal rotations… Since then he has moved onto long distance tandem adventures with his partner Aishola.

Fernwee

	Fernwee is a dutch rider who covers his adventures on gravel and road alone and with his group of friends. High production value channel with some really good content

Darren Phillips aka Mendip Cycling Vlog

	Another high production value channel from Darren that was previously known as the Mendip Cycling Vlogs. Lots of rides around the Mendips but also covers other parts of the world too.

The Greatest Shot In Television

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

UKMac.net has moved to Hugo

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Ukmac.net has moved to Hugo CMS

I am currently doing a bit of tidying of old posts (fixing dates and youtube embeds) but hopefully this new iteration of my blog will be stable in the next day or so.

Ukmac.net is hosted on Github Pages, this article explains how to setup Hugo to work with Github. I am no expert on Github but it didn’t take me long to rebuild the site and replace the previous Jekyll version. Currently I am editing the site in Visual Studio Code which works pretty well thanks to the excellent built in Github integration.

Daily Post - 27/12/21

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Over the Christmas break I have been testing out a few different Linux Distros on a Microsoft Surface Go Laptop. This laptop was my test machine for Windows 11 but the experience was less than favourable, slow, unresponsive and noisy as the fan seemed to run pretty constantly.

After a brief test of Elementary OS then MX Linux I have settled on Pop!_OS. On this laptop Pop!_OS runs really well, performance is snappy and the fan rarely kicks in.

Testing this as a work machine for me means installing Microsoft Edge as my default browser. Unfortunately the Linux version of Edge is still missing Azure AD sign in and sync which is a real shame and surprising given that Windows and Mac versions have had this feature for a long time now.

Daily Links

Link	Description
Pop!_OS	Ubuntu based Linux

Daily Post - 11/09/21

Sat, 11 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Badminton at Oakengates Leisure Centre with the kids this morning then a trip over to eldest’s new house to help with sorting the garden which was a tad overgrown.

Still loving the iPad Pro and Apple Magic keyboard and so glad I finally overcame the reservations over price and bought one ( though it was helped by the fact that I got mine for half price as a second user unit through Amazon ). I am looking forward to the forthcoming release of macOS Monterey and the new Universal Control feature.

I finished the Stephen King’s new book, Billy Summers on Audible on the drive to Yorkshire this week. Unusual for King that there is no supernatural or horror element ( apart from a few very brief references to The Shining ) but I really enjoyed it none the less. One of those Audible books that I couldn’t wait to get into the car to carry on listening to and was gutted when it finished.

Daily Links

Link	Description
Get the fucking vaccine	Succinct !
How I Experience The Web	Try this, its not far from the truth…

Daily Post - 28/08/21

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

More Obsidian testing

Today I came across this article on MacStories in which Federico Vittici describes how he uses Working Copy and GitHub to manage his writing with iA Writer and Pretext.

While I have been testing Working Copy I have tried creating a synced folder with the local Obsidian app folders and also with the Obsidians folder in iCloud. Both seemed to work fine but I was a bit unsure whether syncing with iCloud was recommended and hadn’t found any articles to confirm this was something you should do (in the past this sort of approach would have been a recipe for duplicated files and other odd issues). Anyway I am pleased that Federico’s article confirmed that this was ok and in fact makes editing in-place with multiple editors easy (I am writing this in iA Writer and the file is in the Obsidian iCloud folder which is synced to GitHub with Working Copy so there you are…)

Daily Links

Link	Description
Custom email domains in iCloud Mail	This is an interesting development. I have been thinking about moving to a family subscription of Windows 365 from my current Google apps for Domains setup but now I have a third option for hosting the families email and this one comes free ( well as part of our iCloud subscription at least )

Blurred app

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GitHub - dwarvesf/blurred: A macOS utility that helps reduce distraction by dimming your inactive noise

There are a number of apps in the store that will blur the background windows that aren’t in focus as Blurred does. Unlike Blurred most of them are paid for apps. Blurred is free and does its job well.

Daily Post - 19/08/2021

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

St Albans

I am staying at the Jury’s Inn in Watford and just back from evening meal in the bar that was pretty rubbish. I ordered burger and chips for £15. The burger was overcooked, dry and tasteless and the chips had been covered in salt ( which I dont eat on food ) so were pretty much inedible. I should have taken myself out into town to find somewhere to eat but after an early start and a long day I couldn’t be bothered and opted for the easy option of eating in the hotel. I’ll never learn, hotel food is generally pretty meh and often worse than that. Would have been better off with a McDonalds !

Daily Post - 15/08/2021

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

New Komoot Route

This morning I did a 60K route planned on Komoot see this link for the full route. I really enjoyed this ride, most of the lanes were very quiet and I hardly saw any cars at all until I was quite close to home which was really nice. Komoot is a great way to plan a route into areas that you are not familiar with as it does a very good job of keeping you away from roads that have lots of those big metal boxes shooting up and down…

iPhone plans

I made the mistake last night of openly talking about my iPhone ( an iPhone 11 bought in October 2019 ) and saying I thought I would probably need to upgrade later this year. I think it heard me because when I came to take a photo of Norbury Junction during my ride this morning I was greeted with an error message informing me that there was not enough storage left to perform the operation. I’ve always been convinced of electronic equipments ability to know when its planned replacement is being discussed having fallen foul of this sort of thing on many occasions previously, todays event just confirms my suspicion ( they are listening ! )

Edge Grumbles

I like Edge ( the new one ). I started using it early in the beta and immediately decided it was the way forward for myself and my work ( I pushed it out to all PCs early too ), but on my iPad there are things that bug me. The big one is when I create a new tab and start typing a URL or search term only to look at the screen and see nothing has appeared because I haven’t selected the address field ( clicked into it or pressed CMD-L ). Not sure if its me but if you open a tab in a browser what else would you normally do but enter a URL or search term ? Why can’t it select the address bar ready without having to manually select it ? Come on Microsoft this isn’t really difficult is it ?

Testing Obsidian/Working Copy on iPad

Sat, 14 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

So this post was written in Obsidian on my iPad and synced to GitHub Pages by Working Copy.

A few weeks ago I happened across a previously owned Apple Magic Keyboard for iPad 12.9" on Amazon at a big discount. I have tried to justify £350 for a keyboard since I bought the 12.9" iPad Pro but just couldn’t find a compelling enough reason but when I saw this one I figured I would take a punt and if it was no good I could always return it. Well that was a while back now and I am still a happy Magic Keyboard owner. It really does make the iPad Pro into a powerhouse portable device. The keyboard is great and the trackpad works as you would expect from an Apple device, smooth and slick.

I am pretty much only using the iPad when not at my desk now, even though I also have the amazing M1 MacBook Air ( lucky me eh ? ) and now Obsidian is out on iPad I have decided to try to use it on the iPad for updating this blog. To do this does require something to sync to GitHub and this is where WorkingCopy comes in.

Working Copy is a full git client for iOS and at £17.99 is not a cheap app but it seems to be the only real option for this sort of workflow and is an established solution so if you have a need for git on iPad its a bit of a no-brainer.

Anyway, this is my first post using this setup and it worked first time which is great. Maybe I will finally start posting here a bit more ( how many times have I written that ? )

Day three of holiday in Llwyngwril

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday was fine and sunny but a little windy, today looks like being a little calmer. Again we have been lucky enought to bag a cottage with amazing views of the sea and as a result spectacular sunsets.

Our cottage is at the bottom of a seriously steep hill and yesterday I decided I was going to try to ride it (despite the gearing on my road bike not being particularly low). For a change I mounted my GoPro to the handlebars to record the event and set off… After a lung bursting and very slow climb (with two short stops to get air into lungs) I reached the gate to the gravel road at the top of the hill. When I stopped to open the gate my Wahoo decided to take that moment to remind me that I hadn’t yet pressed start ! Annoying…

Daily Post - 2/7/2021

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One of the things I lost the ability to do as I got older is concentrating/working while listening to certain types of music. I find ambient/electronic is best to listen to whilst working and Klaus Schulze is one of my regular favourites.

This week I managed to get hold of a copy of his Ultimate Edition 50 CD box set in FLAC format that I needed to convert to import into Apple Music for playback. Today I came across a nice conversion tool XLD that I have used to split the single .flac files into seperate Apple Lossless files. If you have flac files with accompanying .cue files XLD will open the cue file and transcode the source file into seperate files quickly and easily. Its a pretty basic application (when you launch it there isn’t even a gui interface displayed, just a set of menu options on the menu bar) but is still updated and the latest version even has native Apple Silicon support. There is also a command line version of the app for those who prefer to work in a terminal window.

Daily Links

Link	Description
XLD	X Lossless Decoder (XLD) is a simple tool for Macs to decode/convert/play lossless audio files. GUI and CLI tool
readme.so	Readme.so is a very simple web site for creating readme.md files quickly and easily. A generic version of this site with user definable blocks would be a great way of creating standard template documents of all sorts.
pandoc	Want to convert a markup file to a different format ? Pandoc is your tool

My New office layout ...

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Like everyone I am spending a lot of time in here these days so it makes sense to get it how I want it.

Sunny Sunday Ride

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Living in England you learn to take advantage of the good weather when it presents itself. Today is Bank Holiday Monday and as usual it’s pouring with rain. Yesterday however was perfect for an early morning bike ride so I made hay and got out first thing for a quick 50k around the Weald Moors.

It was a very cold start but I soon warmed up and was enjoying the clear air, lack of cars on the roads and the beautiful Shropshire countryside. Not a bad start to the day.

Moving to Signal

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

So you make the decision to abandon Whatsapp and want to move to Signal, but how do you convince family and friends (who perhaps aren’t as concerned about Facebooks control of the Internet as you) to move with you ?

Anyone have any convincing arguments that they have made to encourage their friends ?

WhatsApp forcing users to share data with Facebook

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been debating dropping Whatsapp and this announcement is definitely pushing me to make the move !

UPDATE: So it takes an insurrection to finally kick Facebook and Twitter into action to do what they should have done months ( if not years ) ago !

Twitter suspends Donald Trump Jr. for posting COVID misinformation

Facebook, Instagram ban Trump through at least Inauguration Day

Hidden Bar - menu bar management for macOS

Sun, 27 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Mac menu bar utiities are great for quick access to apps that perform simple tasks and that don’t need to sit in the dock or occupy space on your desktop however they do tend to proliferate and before you know it the list of little icons at the top right of your menu bar can get out of control.

There are a couple of utilities that aim to help with this. Hidden Bar is a simple and free to download app that allows you to quickly hide menu bar icons that you don’t want on the screen all the time but still want access to. Bartender is a pay-for app (currently $15) that goes quite a bit further in features but for my money (ahem) the free Hidden Bar app hits the spot. Worth a look.

Boxing Day or is it ?

Sat, 26 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A belated Happy Christmas greeting to anyone unfortunate enough to be reading this blog, hope yours went as well as could be given the world in which we find ourselves. For my part Christmas was quiet and fairly relaxed and as usual over quicker than you can imagine. The actual day this year did feel quite “christmassy” due to the morning frost and clear blue sky which was really nice. Today on the first Boxing Day of 2020 (the second official one is on Monday) was slightly less so although it did manage to stay dry here in Telford until after dark. Tonight we are in for a bit of a storm as Storm Bella makes her way across the country.

I did manage to get out on my bike this afternoon for a quick 25k before dark which was nice especially as the roads were really quiet (almost like being back in the first lockdown again). My route tonight didnt take wind direction into account though so after an quick assisted outbound ride the return was a little slower as I battled into the early part of Storm Bella.

Daily Post - 09/12/2020

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Visual Studio Code is now my preferred text editor for updating this Jekyll blog. The built in Github connectivity and excellent Markdown plugins for previewing posts before they are committed combine to make it one of the simplest ways to create new content.

I have tried Prose.io a lovely simple to use web editor for static content Github hosted sites such as Jekyll. The main limitation of Prose for me is the lack of any way to upload and link to images in my posts. This may or may not be an issue depending on the type of content you need to post but personally I do want a way to upload and link to screenshots within my posts.

Daily Links

Link	Description
Teams Breakout Rooms	Microsoft have announced that Teams will be getting breakout rooms feature starting this week
Whatsapp unhappy with Apple privacy labels	iMore article regarding recent complaint from Whatsapp. As much as I dislike Facebook and Whatsapp I tend to agree with the author that they do have a point here. Update… Apple has confirmed the privacy labels will apply to built in apps as well so that steals Whatsapps thunder a little (link)
Xmas Gift Guide for Cyclists	Some gift ideas for the cyclist(s) in your household

Painting with Strava

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have seen this guys Strava rides online before and am amazed at how he manages to “paint” pictures by cycling routes on Strava. Very cool.

Daily Post - 08/12/2020

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Email Pains

Today has been a painful day trying to resolve an issue with Mail rules in Exchange Online. Yesterday I switched on a Malware Policy to block certain files types after reading this article. All seemed fine but then first thing this morning I received a number of calls from users unable to email Helpdesk calls to our Helpdesk system (Freshdesk). It seems as though the change I made yesterday had triggered a mail rule setup to block users autoforwarding emails externally into action that must not have been working before.

To log calls with Freshdesk by email you send to a specific email address that is created when Freshdesk is configured. To make things easy for my organisations users I had setup a shared mailbox with the email address support@xxxx and instructed them to log calls by emailing this address. The shared mailbox was then set to autoforward to the Freshdesk email address. This autoforward was now broken and so users were unable to log calls or reply to existing ones.

Unfortunately trying to fix mail rules in Exchange is made more difficult due to the very long time it takes for changes made to become operational. According to Lance Cal in this Microsoft Community thread changes can take up to 12 hours to become active. Thats a whole working day before I can see if the change I made to fix our issue works and during which time our IT Helpdesk that relies on email autoforward rules to operate remains unusable.

Update

It seems that Exchange mail rules is not what I should have been looking at after all. What I discovered was that the mail rule I thought was blocking the autoforward was not being triggered at all. I found this by running the mail rule report ( shown highlighted in red in diagram below )

Once I could see that no emails were matching the rule I started looking for other places where autoforwarding might be blocked. I had suspected there was probably something in the 365 Security and Compliance site that was responsible and the obvious culprit was in the Anti-Spam settings. What I found here was that the “Automatic forwarding” setting was set to “Automatic - System-controlled”. Changing this to “On - Forwarding is enabled” immediately resolved the issue I was having but of course at the same time changed the default policy for all users to allow auto-forwarding externally.

To fix this I needed to add a new Outbound policy that blocked all users from autoforwarding but excluded the Helpdesk shared mailbox. The rule below does this and the best part is changes are effective immediately so no waiting for 12 hours for mail rules to take effect.

A long day but hopefully one where I learned something about the way that mail policies work.

Daily Post - 07/12/2020

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

MacBook Air Update

Loving the new MacBook. I have it mostly setup as I want it now and Photo Library sync seems to have finished so I should be able to start to see the real world battery life. Currently I don’t have any great need for long battery life as I am working at home like most others but knowing that there is no rush to get plugged is nice and so far the lowest the battery has gone is 50% ( at the time I am writing this blog post).

Last night was the first time I felt the bottom of the case get warm. I had just helped my son set up a Zoom call when I noticed it. It may have been Zoom, though I didn’t investigate it at the time and since then its been cool cool cool…

Mimestream Beta

Whilst setting up the apps I wanted I decided to try to find a decent mail client for my home Gmail account. I have used the Gmail web interface for a long time more out of laziness than anything so this seemed an opportune time to look for a better alternative. Mimestream is free to download at the moment during the beta period. It has a very Gmail-like layout and supports all the Gmail features such as labels that typically don’t work well in standard email clients. I will post an update on my thoughts when I have been using it for a while but so far I am quite happy.

Daily Links

Link	Description
A little bit more security	A quick guide on how to enable default malware policy for Office 365
16GB of RAM and 75 open apps	Stress testing an M1 MacBook Pro…

Images of Prototype Apple Macintosh With Clear Casing Shared Online

Sun, 06 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This would look really nice alongside all my old Macs…

New MacBook day

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

OMG !

New MacBook Air ( M1 Edition ) arrived this afternoon and just wow…. I am so glad I was tempted by the Amazon Black Friday £100 off and 5 months interest free credit deal now. Before I saw the Amazon deal I had been toing and froing for a few weeks since the new M1 Macs were launched.

Now I am setting it up and synching photos etc and after an hour and a half on my lap its not even warm ! Amazing stuff.

Of course its hard to say anything that hasn’t already been said far more eloquently that I can. Universal acclaim has been laid on these new Macs from all corners of the Internet and it really does seem like a new standard has been set, it just remains to be seen if anyone is capable of meeting the challenge of creating machines that come anything close to what Apple have done with their new Macs.

Interesting times indeed.

New MacBooks...

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t had a MacBook now for the last couple of years (after I selflessly handed my 13" MacBook Pro onto my eldest daughter…). My Mac computing needs have been handled by a 2018 Mac Mini which is a super little machine, quiet, powerful enough for my needs and very unobtrusive. I have still been hankering after a new MacBook though but the promise of new Apple Silicon based hardware has kept me from shelling out. I fully expected to not be able to resist buying when the announcement happened last week and have to admit I have been close to pressing the buy button a couple of times but have so far not succumbed.

On the one hand I think I am waiting to see what the early reviews have to say, though I think its pretty clear they are going to be all good. On the other I do wonder about the version 1 product and whether I should perhaps wait until release 2 and see what that has to offer ? I guess for now I will wait and see, though I am pretty certain that if money was no object I would already have dropped the cash and would be patiently waiting for the delivery right now…

Microsoft Edge history and tab sync

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I converted to the new Microsoft Edge browser what seems like an age ago now and one of the things I was eager to see rolled out was the history and open tabs sync between devices (which you can of course already do with Firefox… ).

As an Office 365 user and system admin the new Edge browser is clearly the way to finally get a single managed browser across all of my organisations devices, and to be honest I can’t see any good reason for other organisations like mine to still be using Chrome/Firefox other than industry inertia. So I rolled out Edge to my users many months ago now and am happy to report no real issues at all, but I have still been a little frustrated at the slow pace around the completion of the sync options.

Well it looks like I won’t have to wait much longer as the Edge Insider - What’s New page has announced that the feature is finally rolling out to Dev and Canary channels. Good news at last.

Tour of the Bridge Towns

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier in the year long before lockdown (that seems such a long time ago now) one of my co-workers at The Camphill Village Trust asked if I would be interested in doing a sponsored bike ride for the charities 65th anniversary which is this year. I was of course up for it and we originally planned on an early Summer event riding from our offices in Stourbridge to one of our sites in Gloucestershire (Taurus Crafts) which was coincidentally 65 miles away (105k).

Shortly after making these preliminary plans we went into the first national lockdown and the plans got parked for another day. Yesterday we finally managed to fit the ride in and so far have raised over £1000 as well.

The ride we undertook was planned on Komoot and is available here if anyone is interested. Our full Strava recording is here. No records broken as you can see, but that wasn’t the point of the day and we did enjoy a glorious crisp and sunny autumn morning (although the afternoon wasn’t quite as favourable).

Daily Links

Link	Description
Veloviewer	Veloviewer is a great site for visualising all your Strava activity data

Daily Post - 03/11/2020

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Printers !

Don’t you love remote support ? Today I have spent a couple of hours on and off trying to identify why a copier at one of our sites had suddenly stopped sending scans to email. The configuration on the copier was all ok and there had been no changes to our network so I was more than a little stumped until I finally got the user who had reported the issue to admit they were trying to scan a large pile of pages and that the one page scan they had tried had worked.

Lightbulb moment, checked the copiers maximum attachment size that was set to 2Mb, changed to 8Mb, asked user to retry and hey presto 3Mb attachment arrived in their inbox. Hurrah !

Daily Links

Link	Description
https://oliverkieselbach.com/2020/11/03/new-edge-sync-policy-in-action/	Intune - Manage Edge sync settings

Daily Post - 02/11/2020

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Probably doomed to failure before I start but I am going to try and start a daily blog post again ( I know seen it before ! ).

Powerapps

Today I tried to go back to a Powerapp I had setup a little while ago but was politely refused by my Edge browser due to blocked third party cookies. Now I am certain this setting was enabled when I was last updating the Powerapp so I am not sure why it allowed me in before but now doesn’t ? Anyway after a bit of faffing about I have temporarily re-enabled third party cookies in the Configuration Profile for Edge so I can get on, but I am going to have to come back to this later.

If you have any ideas on this one please let me know.

Daily Links

Link	Description
Intune - Uninstalling default Windows Apps	This is one I am testing at the moment. Many of the staff in my organisation end up using the Windows Mail app instead of Outlook or OWA and I would like to prevent this so I am planning on using this approach to remove Mail app from all PC’s

Re-scheduling my sponsored ride

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

So last nights announcement by Boris of Thursdays national lockdown has probably scuppered our chance of re-scheduling the sponsored bike ride for next weekend. Instead I think Dean and I have agreed that we will both do a solo ride in our local area on Wednesday this week. I have planned a route on Komoot of around 112km which goes from home, out to Ellesmere Lakes (not Ellesmere Port) and back. The weather is currently expected to be ok but I will aim to do it regardless as I would be embarrased to re-arrange yet again.

Microsoft Surface Duo - Preorder

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This actually looks pretty nice. Expensive but nice….

A 50k Loop around Newport

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today I took a break from Zwift and headed out early to do a ride round the lanes near to home. I had planned a 50 loop on Komoot parts of which we familiar to me but a few bits that were new. The new bits turned out to include a couple of short off road sections, the first of which was easy enough, but the second not so much. After taking a left onto a farm track at Howle and riding about 1km up a steady hill the track just disappeared into a mass of hedgerow, nettles and brambles. Despite my best efforts and the fact that I could hear the road that I was trying to get to behind the fields to my right, I couldn’t find a way through and ended up re-tracing my steps down the track and back onto the main road. I suppose this is part of the risk with planning a route on Komoot, the paths may not always be what you expect, but it does make for an interesting morning.

Zwift Knickerbocker Route Achievement

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

One more Zwift route complete tonight, this time the New York route Knickerbocker

At just over 22km its not a hard ride but it does include the fairly painful New York KOM that tops out at 17% right in the middle of it, so there is that ! Fairly sure I have ridden this route multiple times before as well though seemingly not to the end as I hadn’t got the achievement in the trophy cabinet but now I do.

Zwift Planning - Route Achievements

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last few weeks I have been working my way through the Zwift Achievements and so far have managed to complete 61% of the routes ( 46 out of 76 ), obviously not all in the last few weeks….

Until recently I hadn’t seen an easy way of tracking progress on Zwift without actually sitting on my bike, launching Zwift, starting a ride and then navigating to the achievements section. The Zwift companion app does a fairly poor job of showing you historical activity other than the chronological list of activities completed. Then I came across this video from GPLama in which he explains how to use a third party web site called Zwifthub to keep track of all your Zwift badges and achievements. You can setup a Zwifthub account or login with a Google account (unfortunately there is no direct link to your Zwift account) and manually update your profile with all your achievements to date. After that you can use the simple filters in the web site sidebar to show you which routes you have completed, which are still to be done, which are available to ride today and then further sort the lists by distance, elevation, gradient etc.

The site is simple in focus but very well executed and fills the gap left by Zwift extremely well. I would imagine that many other Zwifters would find this service useful or at least interesting, even if they are not aiming to complete all the routes and badges on Zwift.

Zwift Tron Bike at last !

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday was a big day on Zwift for me. Finally after about 18 months of rides I passed the 50,000m climbing needed to be awarded the Zwift Concept Z1 better known by Zwifters as the Tron Bike !

Prior to my ride yesterday I had around 800m of climb left to do so decided what better way to knock off those last metres than to do it on Alpe du Zwift. I was about 3/4 of the way up when the notification popped onto the screen to say I had been awarded the Tron bike. As you can see from the picture I took the opportunity when I got to the top to quickly change over to my new steed for the ride down again (with suitably large smile on my face!)

Happy cyclist :)

RSS Struggles

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As is often the case when learning something new I have run into a problem and the fix for it is alluding me at the moment. In this case it is RSS feeds in Jekyll. The [Minimal Mistakes[(https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes)] theme already had jekyll-feed gem installed which appeared to be working but when I checked my feed in Feedly I could only see posts that were previously posted on my Wordpress blog and none of the new test posts on Jekyll were showing up.

Since then I have been searching in vain for a solution to this issue. Oddly if I add a new feed to Feedly and use https://ukmac.net/feed.xml the recent posts show up but Feedly says I only have one subscriber to this feed rather than the rather embarassing 20 or so that I had previously.

If anyone does have any experience of this issue with Jekyll and can offer any sort of clue to a fix I would be very grateful, meanwhile I will continue my search.

Minimal Mistakes Blogs

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Now I have got a barebones Jekyll site running, DNS sorted and old Wordpress posts migrated its time to do a bit of personalisation. Like a lot of Jekyll blogs I have started with the Minimal Mistakes theme which is a nice starting point.

As a non-expert in the field of web development I know what I want to do and roughly how to achieve it but working out the detail of how to make the changes I need, especially where the theme is a remote Jekyl theme, is a challenge. This post includes a number of sites that I have found that have helped me to find the solutions to this.

How to sites

Nice Minimal Mistakes Themes

Jekyll Go Live Day

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

UKMac.net is now live on Github Pages !

If you are lucky enough to be reading this post today (21st July 2020) then you may have received warnings that the page is not secure from your browser. This should clear itself within the next 24 hours as Github Pages sets up https on my custom domain.

My current Wordpress site hosting renewal was due in August so this seemed a sensible time to move the blog over and save myself some money.

Cheers

Moving to Jekyll!

Sun, 19 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

After many years of on and off dabbling with Wordpress blogs I have decided to make the move to Jekyll and Github Pages for hosting. Jekyll is very different to Wordpress and requires a completely different skill set to implement. It is easy enough to pickup if you have a good understanding of IT but probably not a simple job if you don’t…

Typically I spend more time playing with setting up blogs than I do actually blogging. I always have good intentions which quickly fade after the fun of setting up the site is done. Perhaps this time will be different ? I have managed to import the few posts I had on Wordpress into Jekyll, albeit some of them needed manual tweaks and possibly some are still a little broken, but again this was more for the fun of doing it than the need to retain the posts.

At the moment I am using Visual Studio Code on my Mac Mini for content editing and testing changes by running Jekyll locally ( there is a short delay after pushing updates to Github for the changes to reflect on your site so having a localhost version running is an essential configuration for most purposes.)

This site is currently (at the time this post was written) using the Minimal Mistakes theme by Michael Rose. This theme is relatively basic compared to many Wordpress themes but has the functionality I need for this blog while still offering a degree of customisation, which is where I have got to at the moment.

So far I am enjoying learning Jekyll and will aim to carry on developing this site, though I can’t guarantee I won’t get bored with it as I have done many times in the past. We’ll have to wait and see.

Cheers

Working from home - Apples take...

Sun, 19 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Fab spoof from Apple on the whole “working at home” thing… Must see.

Customise the Office 365 encryption Message

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Customise the Office 365 encryption Message

This is a useful guide on branding the messages sent out by Office Message Encryption (OME). I will be coming back to this one in the New Year.

A huge pile of new Teams features !

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

What’s New in Microsoft Teams- Ignite 2019

This is a LONG list of new and improved features for Microsoft Teams. Excited to see a lot of these, especially things such as Private Channels and Planner/To Do integration

New AirPods Pro noise cancellation

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Ryan Block on AirPods Pro vs. Bose QuietComfort 35 Headphones

Have to say I am impressed too. Loving them !

Apple warns HomePod users of potentially fatal iOS 13.2 flaw

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Apple has pulled the latest HomePod update and is warning users not to reset their speaker, lest they render it inoperable.

www.macworld.com/article/3449239/apple-warns-homepod-users-of-potentially-fatal-ios-13-2-flaw.html

Found this after an hour of trying to work out why new multi-user support on HomePod didn’t seem to be working. My HomePod is still on 12.4 so hasn’t been updated fortunately.

What about Win 10 Pro ?

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

So I just came across another one of Microsofts seemingly arbitrary limitations in using policies to manage Windows 10. This one is another example where there is a policy setting that only works if you have Windows 10 Enterprise or Education editions and not for Pro.

If you want a policy to lock down the Windows Store to only show applications in your organisations Store then you are going to be out of luck…

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-store/manage-access-to-private-store

If anyone knows a way to block the Windows Store for Pro editions I would be interested to hear from you.

Edge Insider - New Tab for Enterprise

Sun, 13 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The latest Edge Insider release includes a new feature for users to configure the default new tab to include the Recommended and Recent sections from the default Office.com landing page.

This is a nice addition and will be a great way of giving staff quick and easy access to their Office files without having to specifically navigate to the Office home page. The new tab page also provides a Search box that defaults to searching the users Office 365 tenant ( Sharepoint sites etc ) as well as the web.

Now if Microsoft would just switch on synching in Edge Insider for macOS I would be a very happy bunny…

Customise Room Resource work hours in Office 365

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have recently started setting up Room Resources in our Office 365 tenant and quickly discovered that that rooms are only available Monday to Friday 08:00 to 17:00 by default.

Fortunately there is a Powershell command to modify this to suit your room requirements.

First connect to Exchange PowershellSet-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -Identity -WorkingHoursStartTime 00:00:00 -WorkingHoursEndTime 23:59:59

This is for an individual room resource. Alternatively if all your rooms have the same availability schedule you can change all at once with the command below

1

Get-MailBox | where {$_.ResourceType -eq "Room"} | Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -WorkingHoursStartTime 00:00:00 -WorkingHoursEndTime 23:59:59

Setting Lock Screen Wallpaper with Intune

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Just found this article on the Lazy Administrator that describes how to enforce a Windows lock screen wallpaper on Windows 10 for all editions ( not just Enterprise and Education which is all Microsoft allow you to do with Intune out of the box ! )

I will be using this script. Thanks Brad.

CarPlay in iOS 13

Sun, 25 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

CarPlay in iOS 13 is a huge upgrade

Having recently upgraded to beta 7 of iOS 13 I have to say the single biggest improvement for me is CarPlay.

Thanks Apple !

Teams Tip - Zooming shared screen

Sun, 25 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

How to zoom into a shared screen contents in Teams meeting

Adaptive Cards for Beginners

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Teams and Flow

Regarding365.com has this very neat how to article on creating an Adaptive Card in Teams when someone sends a specific Tweet.

I’ve not seen the adaptive card designer mentioned in the post but will check it out as this looks pretty useful.

Adaptive Cards for Beginners- Monitor a Hashtag on Twitter

Add attachments in PowerApps

Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This Microsoft guide explains how to add attachments in a PowerApps form to a Sharepoint list.

Add attachments to SharePoint lists

Microsoft blogs of note

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A quick list of some of the blogs I have used recently for guides and how to’s on Microsoft products.

Creating desktop shortcuts with Intune

Fri, 09 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have previously setup a script to push simple shortcuts to Desktop with Intune but this guide from Nicolonsky Tech is much better. Will re-create mine using this approach.

Source: Intune create desktop shortcut

Powershell connection from MFA Account

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is a Microsoft guide I need to use fairly regularly ! Wish connection to Exchange Online and Sharepoint Online from Powershell was a little easier to configure.

Interestingly when I tried this today if I ran Connect-EXOPSSesion with parameter for my UPN it didn’t seem to work. If instead just ran the command with no parameters the standard login dialog appeared fine and I could enter my email address and authenticate with my Authenticator app ! Odd one…

via Connect to Exchange Online PowerShell using multi-factor authentication | Microsoft Docs

PowerApps

I definitely need to come back to this one ! One of the tips here is to enable permissions to Sharepoint lists for PowerApps. The bit I need for my current project is to enable row level permissions so that users can only see entries they created. Very useful tip..

via 3 tips you need to know when using PowerApps forms on SharePoint lists - European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference, 2019, Prague, Czech Republic

ARGHH !

So I have created an app that uses the AzureAD connector to find the logged in users account details (Office location) only to find that when deploying this app to actual users ( who aren’t Azure AD admins ) it doesn’t work ! The user needs admin rights to query AzureAD so the connector is effectively no good for what I want to use it for.. Ah well.. Back to the Drawing board ! See article below for more.

via Solved: Issue with Azure AD Connector - Power Platform Community

Louisiana declares emergency over cyberattacks targeting schools

Tue, 30 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Louisiana declares emergency over cyberattacks targeting schools

Things seem to be going pretty badly for a lot of small states in America at the moment. As a regular listener to Security Now it seems there aren’t many weeks that go by at the moment where one state or another isn’t being crippled by ransomware. As they have discussed there is money to be made and it seems some governers are paying the ransom rather than trying to recover manually. Either way there are some significant sums of money involved in responding to this events and it seems that cyber insurance policies may not continue to be the way out in the future.

Sunday 28 July 2019

Sun, 28 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

PowerApps

So I am making some progress with learning PowerApps and have the start of a new app for the charity to use. Just came across this resource which will be worth having a look through, a showcase for what others have done with PowerApps

Community Apps Gallery - Power Platform Community

A useful quick link to the PowerApps function reference on Microsoft Docs

Wednesday 24 July 2019

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

##Microsoft Forms

One feature that would make this process work a lot better would be to enable the initial Form to have some of the information pre-populated so when it is submitted the information can be linked to existing data in Sharepoint. It seems this is a requirement that others have found lacking in Forms at the moment

Discussion at Pre-populate fields in Microsoft Forms via URL parameter? - Microsoft Tech Community - 113803

Vote for this requirement at Uservoice for Forms

Daily Log - Tuesday 23 July 2019

Tue, 23 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Powershell

Following a recent re-brand of our charity the Marketing team distributed a number of new template documents to various teams throughout the organisation and it wasnt until after this had happened that I discovered the blank Word template they had issued was over 26MB !

Basically they had dropped a full page high resolution image onto the document to create the header and footer that resulted in a huge template. I immediately recreated ( my version was 80KB ! ) using compressed versions of the graphics cut out from their original and sent back to them, but of course the big template was already in the wild. I did manage to track down a few areas who had already created their own templates based on the huge original by running a quick Powershell script to filter out Word documents over 2MB. The script is reproduced below if you are interested

Get-ChildItem *.docx -File -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Where-Object {$.Length -gt 2MB} | Sort-Object length -Descending | Select-Object Name,Directory,@{n=‘GB’;e={"{0:N2}" -F ($.length/ 1MB)}} | Format-List Name,Directory,GB

Intune

This is something I have been waiting for… Adm template deployment to Windows 10 PC’s by Intune. I will definitely been looking at this more closely tomorrow

Microsoft Intune announces general availability of administrative templates - Microsoft Tech Community - 737412

Software

One of the little utilities that I use ALL the time on Windows is Ditto a nice small and unobtrusive download from the Windows Store that provides clipboard management and saves me loads of time. If you are a Mac user then check out my previous post on Copied.

If you work on a PC or a Mac you should look into clipboard managers, one of those tools that you come to rely on and miss when you are using a PC without one.

Anyone with suggestions on how to manage clipboards across Windows AND Mac please let me know in comments…

Monday 22 July 2019

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

PowerApps

*PowerApps: Submit multiple forms at the same time — SharePoint Simply

##Teams

Just discovered that you can change individual folder permissions in Sharepoint Groups Document Library using the Manage Access panel. I had been under the impression that to make changes like this you needed to drop into the Advanced Permissions settings ( something that most of the users in my organisation would not cope with easily ).

This Microsoft article shows how to do it. I will definitely be making use of this now I know about it, and helping my users to use it too.

Cloudflare rolls out its 1.1.1.1 privacy service to iOS, Android

Sun, 11 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

TechCrunch

— Read on

techcrunch.com/2018/11/11/cloudflare-privacy-dns-service-ios-android/

Using Siri with the Reminders app

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Siri: How to add an item to specific Reminders list AND set a reminder time? - Ask Different — Read on apple.stackexchange.com/questions/235719/siri-how-to-add-an-item-to-specific-reminders-list-and-set-a-reminder-time

iCloud Upgrade Day

Sat, 08 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A long time coming but I have finally had to make the jump to the next level of iCloud storage ( 2TB ). The 200Mb subscription has lasted a while but has finally been absorbed by the families Messages, Photos and others. At least I have plenty of head room to grow into now.

Show Me Yours

Fri, 06 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Show Me Yours is a wonderful tongue in cheek video featuring comedian Olivia Lee in which she is seen walking up to strangers in the street asking to see whats on their mobile phones. The video was produced by Liberty a Human Rights Group to highlight to the public the potential far reaching consequences if the so called “Snoopers Charter” is passed.

The video is shown below along with the press release from Liberty that explains in more detail what the group is doing to raise awareness of this critically important issue. Please share this video widely. Thank you.

LIBERTY LAUNCHES FILM TO BRING HOME TRUE SCALE OF NEW SNOOPERS’ CHARTER

Human rights group Liberty has today launched a short film highlighting the unprecedented, unnecessary and deeply intrusive spying powers handed to hundreds of public bodies by the latest incarnation of the Snoopers’ Charter.

The video created by Liberty and creative agency Don’t Panic, sees comedian Olivia Lee take to the streets demanding a look at strangers’ most personal and sensitive information – the same information to which a broad range of public bodies will gain unfettered access if the Investigatory Powers Bill becomes law.

The team who brought you ‘The Revolution Will Be Televised’ got together again to bring you ‘Show me yours….’. Joe Wade, MD at Don’t Panic notes:

“We used hidden cameras to pick up people’s reaction caused by Olivia’s invasive baiting which highlights that people do and should care about their privacy. The use of hidden cameras was to reflect the very nature of how the government plans to pass this bill, hidden from the public and to convey a sense of unwarranted invasiveness that will come with the Snoopers’ Charter.”

Liberty is calling on the public to sign up to its No #SnoopersCharter campaign and urge their MPs to reject the Bill when they vote on it this summer. This is one of the most intrusive and least accountable surveillance regimes in the world. There is a consensus from service providers, tech experts and three cross-party parliamentary committees that its plans are unclear, unworkable and potentially unlawful.

The Bill, currently being rushed through Parliament, will force telecoms companies to store everybody’s communications data for an entire year, this includes every site we visit, every communication programme and app we use, every system update we download and details of any device we use to go online (at huge cost to the public purse).

The Bill would also legalise:

Mass hacking of phones and other devices by the intelligence agencies, capable of dangerously undermining Britain’s digital infrastructure.
Bulk interception of calls, emails, online exchanges and texts.
Acquiring vast databases containing personal information on millions of people – potentially the whole population.
Powers to force telecoms operators here and abroad, from Gmail, Facebook and Twitter to offices, businesses and law firms, to remove encryption – and ban them from revealing they have been forced to do so.

CALL TO ACTION:

Please watch and share this video to encourage people to join the and help protect our human rights.

For campaign page: http://www.nosnooperscharter.org.uk

Video link: https://youtu.be/szN7DlmMLYg

Hashtag: #snooperscharter

Quotes from team:

Bella Sankey, Policy Director for Liberty, said: “As this film shows, people in Britain value their personal privacy – even Home Office staff are unwilling to reveal their phone records for no good reason. But the Government’s latest Snoopers’ Charter would make everyone’s online activity available to the authorities to speculatively trawl through without good reason and without us ever being told.It will all but end online privacy, put our personal security at risk and swamp law enforcement with swathes of useless information. People need to make it clear to MPs – we don’t want the Government building profiles of our personal lives with no justification and this Bill must stopped.”

Joe Wade, MD, Don’t Panic: “We are delighted to have worked with Liberty to make this video. Many people are complaisant about the surveillance bill, and so we wanted to highlight how invasive it will be! For this video we used a political satire format that has hugely successful for other videos we have created. Our aim was to create something that would tackle this challenging and very relevant subject in an honest way. Our team worked very closely with Liberty throughout the process; from establishing the initial hidden camera concept to developing the tone/messaging, to filming and the final delivery.”

Thanks,

Jon

CassetteBoy vs Jeremy Hunt

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Enjoy…

An Alternative Approach to Preventing Ransomware ?

Sat, 23 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The rise in the prevelance of Ransomware hasn’t really impacted on Mac Users as it has with the Windows community so far… Of course the Mac has benefited from a secure design and being a smaller (relatively) target over the years, but with the growth in use of OS X and the maturity of the tools used by unscrupulous elements this security by obscurity can no longer be guaranteed.

When the official downloadable version of the popular BitTorrent client, Transmission, was infected with a Ransomware client ( KeRanger) in March year it seemed that the reality had come home to roost. The fact is Ransomware poses one of the biggest risks to everyones personal data so it is exciting to hear of a company who are trying to tackle the issue with a form of early detection and blocking for this type of computer virus.

Objective-see is a company created by Patrick Wardle to publish security tools to protect Mac users and one of his products recently released, RansomWhere?, aims to mitigate the impact of a Ransomware infection. It does this by monitoring for activity that looks like Ransomware, notably the rapid modification of multiple files. When it detects suspicious access it identifies and stops the process responsible and prompts the user to warn them that there is a potential ongoing infection. It then offers the option of killing the process or if the alert is a false positive triggered by some known bulk update process for example, to ignore it.

This approach is not infallible and of course there may still be a small number of files encrypted before it detects what is going on but if it prevents hundreds or thousands of documents from being irretrievably encrypted (without handing over cash to the Ransomware creators) it is certainly better than nothing, especially when you consider that this is not a pay monthly service or even a pay-for app but is in fact free to download. It should be noted that this is not a fully developed solution and is more of a working proof of concept so you may chose to wait for future more stable version arrives.

Patrick’s site goes into quite a bit of detail which might put off less technical users and I wonder if this program works well whether it should be launched in a more user friendly package ? It’s great to know the detail behind a solution such as this but most users are not that interested, they just need to know what it does and how to install. The low level information can be presented in technical specification page or a blog post. Speaking of which Patrick has a really interesting article on his site titled ‘Towards Generic Ransomware Detection?’ that is worth a read.

I have bookmarked Objective-see and will be watching this project with interest.

Upgrading OS X issues

Sat, 23 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

My normal approach when a new version of OS X is released is to backup ( create a Carbon Copy Cloner image of my main drive ) and then do a clean install ( erase the entire drive and install from scratch ). Obviously this takes a little more time and effort than a normal upgrade but I tend to prefer knowing that any legacy cruft built up over the life of the previous version is washed away.

When El Capitan was released last year I decided not to bother with a clean install on my MacBook and ran an upgrade and everything has worked fine since then until the last week or so. Firstly disk space has been getting low on my 256GB drive which is never great but then I started to experience a problem with the App Store taking a long time to load which deteriorated to the point where no matter how long I left it running the content in the main panes failed to materialise at all. As I wanted to load a particular new app this was a bit of a problem to say the least. I looked for solutions to the issue without much success ( admittedly I didn’t look that hard ) before deciding to do a re-install to freshen up my OS.

Roll forward a couple of hours and I have a clean install of El Capitan, my essential data restored from backup, apps reinstalled and App Store fully working. I also now have 140GB of my 256GB drive still free which shows how much disk space can get swallowed up by working files and general detritus in the course of a year. Granted there are a few things I have chosen not to restore but nothing that would account for 100GB of disk space.

Anyway, all this brings me to the point of this article which is how to enable three finger drag of windows in El Capitan ! When the re-install had finished one of the first things I did was to go to System Preferences to sort out my Trackpad settings. By default my three main tweaks to the standard configuration are to switch off natural scrolling ( I know old habits die hard ), switch on tap to click and finally switch on the option to drag windows with three finger gesture.

This time around the first two options were setup as normal but when I looked for the three finger drag option it seemed to have been moved. I was sure it used to be on the Scroll and Zoom section of the preference pane, or was it under More Gestures ? Nope, not there… I must admit I looked for an embarrassingly long time going from one tab to the next in the vain hope that somehow I would see it where I hadn’t before, but it was gone…

Thankfully it only took a minutes Googling to uncover the answer to the missing setting, Apple in their infinite wisdom have decided in El Capitan that this is not a Trackpad setting now but an Accessibility option ! To find the setting now first go to Accessibility in System Preferences, click on Trackpad Options and on the popup window tick to Enable dragging and select three finger drag from the drop down menu.

Of course the other thing I should have done was to just type “three finger drag” into the search field in System Preferences which would have instantly told me I was looking in the wrong place !

[gallery ids=“479,480,481” type=“slideshow”]

Monosnap - Free Screen Capture for Images and Video

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Monosnap is a free utility for OS X and Windows that can quickly and easily capture screenshots and save them for editing and annotation, ideal for grabbing images for documentation or publishing to social media streams.

The included editing tools are basic but adequate with the usual circles, rectangles, crop, line capability but also and importantly for screen capture a blur tool for obscuring passwords or other areas with sensitive information.

Example Screenshot showing editing tools

Unlike most of the apps of this type though Monosnap has a power feature for bloggers and potential YouTubers, the ability to record a video of the screen including a lower thirds capture of your webcam to add narration with video to give your video tutorials a personal touch. The area captured can be adjusted to cover just the window or application required or expanded to record the whole screen if required.

Monosnap supports a variety of options for storing images to a number of cloud storage services including Amazon S3, Dropbox, Box.com but this requires a $4.99 in app purchase. Depending on your needs and workflow this might be something you would find useful but personally I am happy to save to my desktop for subsequent upload to Wordpress and don’t see much benefit in this facility. YMMV.

All in though this is a decent app and if you are looking for a way to dip your toes into creating video tutorials its really a no brainer to try out before spending on the more complex and costly solutions such as Screenflow and Camtasia.

CassetteBoy Vs The Snooper's Charter

Sun, 10 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Not directly Apple related but when I saw this excellent @CassetteBoy video cut to the music of the Police and Every Breath You Take I couldn’t resist sharing !

Enjoy

Spoof Letters Published In Metro Newspaper

Sun, 10 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This article from Mashable is a few days old so apologies if you have already seen it. Definitely worth a scan !

Sam Haysom covers some of the spoof letters of Seamus O’Reilly that have been published in the Metro free paper here in the UK. Seamus has made an art out of sending up the anonymous letters posted in the Metro magazine by creating what I assume are accounts of fictitious events ( though I guess they could be prompted by real life ) experienced by the authors.

Maybe my sense of humour but I thought these were hilarious.

TextExpander Alternatives for Disgruntled Smile Customers

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last couple of days there has been a lot written about the Smile Software decision to move to a subscription model for version 6 of TextExpander, their popular text snippet app for OS X and iOS. Most of the words have understandably been pretty negative with users feeling that the change is purely a money grab by Smile. Obviously the economics of making a niche product like TextExpander pay its way are not simple and I really don’t know if the change was actually an unavoidable option, but regardless of the reasons behind the decision it is fairly clear that a fair number of Smiles previous customers will be thinking twice about the upgrade and looking at alternative options.

There are a few alternatives to TextExpander and one of the main ones, Typinator from Ergonis are offering a discount to existing TextExpander users to move to their product during April.

The app is normally EUR 24.99 for a single user or EUR 37.99 for a family pack so the reduction makes it EUR 18.75 and EUR 28.50 respectively. To access the offer go to this link before the end of the month.

If you are not happy spending this much on an alternative then a cheaper option is aText at just $4.99.###UPDATE:

So it seems that the reasoning that Smile have given for the decision is based on the sharing features added in the updated version of TextExpander. They state on this page that the iCloud/Dropbox services would not allow them to implement the Group Sharing features that are the key new element of TextExpander.

Group sharing in the new TextExpander is quite different than syncing via Dropbox or iCloud. Sharing, as it stands, couldn’t work using either sync service.

Copied app for iOS and OS X

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Copied has recently become one of my favourite apps for iOS and OS X. It is a slick and useful clipboard manager that makes cut/copy and paste on iPhone,iPad and Mac much more useful and when combined with multiple devices introduces a new capability that was previously only possible by emailing or Messaging between devices. That feature is the ability to copy something on one device then jump over to another and paste that data on another device !

The iOS version has a free to use version that allows you to save up to 10 entries into the clipboard and to recall any of these to paste into another app. The entries can be free text, images and links and importantly can be edited after being captured into the clipboard.

In Use on iOS

Pasting an existing entry from the clipboard can be done in a number of ways. Firstly you can load the app and scroll through the list of entries to find the one you want. Once located tap on the entry and it opens in an editor where ( if the entry is text ) you can edit the contents of the clipboard if required. From here you also have a standard iOS Share button which allows you to send the entry to a suitable app as a new item ( document/tweet/Message etc ).

Alternatively you can click on the three dots icon to either copy the entry into the current clipboard ( so you can paste it into another app/document ), Share using a template or Transform the text if applicable. Transforming text gives options to convert to upper/lower/title case, removing whitespace etc.

Copied Keyboard

The other method for accessing clipboard entries is through the Copied keyboard. This is accessed in the same way as other third party iOS keyboards by tapping the globe key on the standard keyboard to cycle through any additional keyboards you have installed. The keyboard replaces the normal keys with a grid of clipboard entries which you can scroll through ( sideways ) to find the entry you wish to paste into your document or text. Just tap the entry to paste the data at the cursor. Simple.

Copied+

For a small in-app purchase ( £1.49 in UK ) the basic free version can be upgraded to Copied+ which increases the clipboard size to 1,000 items and also includes the ability to organise clippings into Lists for better organisation. For example I have is a list of clippings for my address, mobile phone number etc which I can then use to quickly enter these into web forms. Copied+ also enables iCloud sync of the clipboard between devices as mentioned at the beginning of this review.

Copied for Mac

The synchronisation doesn’t end with iOS though, when used in conjunction with the OS X version of the app data can be easily transferred between Mac and iPhone/iPad in just the same way. This is an incredibly useful feature and one that would really fit into the core operating system on these devices if Apple ever saw fit to develop this, however for now Copied fills this space very nicely. It should be said that the OS X version of the app is £5.99 which isn’t free and there are other apps that provide similar features, but in my experience using Copied is a smooth and effective way of improving the way in which I can transfer data between apps on my iPhone and also between iPhone and Mac and I believe the overall benefit is worth the small outlay.

Copied for iOS

Copied for OS X

Copied Web Site

Kickstarter - Pixo magnetic Tablet Mount

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The Pixo is an interesting looking Kickstarter project to create a magnetic mounting for iPads/tablets to attach to the side or top of your desktop screen/iMac.

Currently they are quite a way off reaching their target of £60,000 but it still has some time to go and may still be able to get funded. I wish them well as this does look like a nice solution.

Checkout their site for more details.

Near Lock

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Near Lock is a new pair of apps for iOS and OS X that allows you to unlock your Mac with your iPhone or Apple Watch. Once installed and configured the app can be configured to lock or unlock your Mac as soon as it detects the presence of your iPhone. The sensitivity of the detection can be adjusted from as little as 1m to as much as 10m so you can optimise the point at which it locks or unlocks your Mac according to your requirements.

The app works with recent iPhones and Macs that support Bluetooth LE and as a result can be left switched on all the time without it causing a significant drain on iPhone batteries. Furthermore the currently free in app upgrade to the Pro version on iOS allows the app to work even when in the background so there is no need to unlock your iPhone or run an app to unlock your Mac. If you are worried that just being able to walk up to your Mac with your iPhone is a little insecure ( think someone gets your phone and can unlock and access your Mac ) then the iOS app can be setup to require Touch ID authentication before it will unlock which is a nice but still convenient way of accessing your Mac.

Wonderful stuff… Get it now while it is free !

Web Site : Near Lock

Game of the day - 2 Cars

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favourite quick-fix games at the moment is 2 Cars from Ketchapp. It is a very simple top to bottom scroller where the objective is to steer your 2 Cars around the oncoming square blocks whilst at the same time intercepting the round blocks. Any collision with a square block ends the game. Any round block missed also ends the game. Each car can drive in one of two lanes and the only control is to tap the screen on the right to move the right hand car to the alternate lane and the screen on the left to move the left hand car.

Sounds simple doesn’t it ? Well give it a try and see how far you get, I can pretty much guarantee it will take you quite a few goes before you progress to double digit scores and after that progression is likely to be slow as the speed of the oncoming blocks increases pretty quickly once you get into the 40-50 score bracket.

An enjoyable game for passing a few minutes !

Swapping Between Hardware and On Screen Keyboards on iOS

Sun, 03 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I recently bought the excellent Logitech K380 Multi-Device Bluetooth Keyboard to share between my iPad, Work laptop and iPhone. It’s a great little keyboard, light enough to carry around with a decent layout and spacing that suits my typing style well ( your mileage may vary ). There are however times that I need to switch to the on screen iOS keyboard, typing emojis for example, and I recently discovered this quick tip to bring up the iOS keyboard.

All you need to do is double tap on a text field and the on screen keyboard will pop smoothly into view. Once you have completed using it just hit any key on your Bluetooth keyboard and the hardware device will take control again and the on screen keyboard will slide out of the way.

Free Markdown Video Tutorial Series

Tue, 29 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Markdown is the plain text markup syntax developed by John Gruber of Daring Fireball over 10 years ago to help bloggers write in a readable format that could be easily converted to HTML. Since then it has grown in popularity and spawned a whole ecosystem of applications and tools for the easy management and production of Markdown formatted documents.

The syntax is simple to learn but if you want a nice concise set of quick video tutorials then Wes Bos has put together a set of 11 short ( between 1 and 6 mins long ) guides that take you quickly through the basics of Markdown to get you up and running with minimal effort.

link : Mastering Markdown

They just don't make 'em like they used to

Tue, 29 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Macworld writer Christopher Phin takes a fond look back at what is probably one of the most iconic Macs ever made, the iMac G4.

This was, and still is, Apple at its best: Producing something daring, novel, and utterly desirable. Nobody at the time could fail to be impressed almost to the point of shock by the sheer chutzpah of Apple’s vision for a modern computer, and even today it strikes you as a fresh and exciting design.

The G4 was a stunning piece of industrial design and despite all the innovations of ever thinner and more powerful iMacs since it will almost certainly never be bettered.

Rumour - Ultra-thin 13" and 15" MacBooks due in June-July

Sat, 26 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting rumour from MacRumors.com

iPhone unlocks

Tue, 23 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Not at all surprising to hear reports coming through that there are buckets of iPhones being held by US authorities in readiness for the potential flood gates opening if Apple are forced to back down and provide the FBI with access to the contents of the San Bernadino case iPhone….

I imagine this is exactly what Tim Cook was hoping to pre-empt by taking the stand that he has against the FBI. It will certainly be interesting to see how this all pans out.

Fresh Background Wallpapers for your Mac

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

FreshBackMac is a small utility written by Arkanath Pathak, a Computer Science student from eastern India, that refreshes your Mac desktop wallpaper at regular intervals using images from some of the best photo sites on the Internet.

You can choose from a range of categories such as Animals, Nature, Technology, Paintings and more and can set the refresh rate from as little as 2 minutes to 12 hours.

If you would like a fresh look to your Mac without the effort of searching for new images and setting up as desktop backgrounds this is the app for you.

TarDisk Pear

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A little while ago I looked at a device called the Nifty MiniDrive a neat little MicroSD card carrier that fits completely snuggly into the SD slot on MacBooks adding disk space for photos/documents and other temporary files. They are relatively cheap and can be used with whatever size of MicroSD card you have available. The downside is that the disk space provided is a separate volume to the internal drive and as such you have to manage which files and folders go where. It is certainly a neater solution than plugging a USB drive into your MacBook but if the internal drive is struggling for space it doesn’t immediately solve that issue.

Then last night I came across a product called TarDisk Pear which uses the same idea of plugging extra storage into the SD card slot in a completely flush carrier but extends it to the next level. With the TarDisk Pear instead of the extra disk space being presented as an external removable volume the additional storage is magically used to extend the space available to the internal drive ! The web site doesn’t give many details on exactly how it does this but there are a few hints on the FAQ’s page where it talks about the risk of data corruption and loss if you remove the drive after it has been setup. Clearly the magic comes at a price.

Despite looking I couldn’t find any information about the impact on the performance of the built in drive either. I would hope that it manages the data in a way that optimises the performance of the internal drive but this isn’t clear from what I have seen.

Pricing starts at $149 for 128GB rising to £399 for 256GB.

Itsycal for OS X

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Itsycal is a tiny menu bar application for OS X that gives rapid access to a pop up view of the current month of the calendar.

Just click the menu bar icon (the current date by default) and a compact view of the current month is displayed. This is really handy when you want to work out what day a particular date falls on for example. In addition you can configure it to show events from the next few days of your calendar rather than launching the Mac calendar app.

One of my favourite little time saver apps.

Microsoft to release curved keyboard for iOS

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Ars technica has this interesting article about a planned new keyboard from Microsoft that will potentially make one handed typing on larger iPhones more practical.

Looks promising and seems to be yet another sign that the Microsoft of old is long gone and has been replaced by a very different animal…

Stocard for iOS

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of my pet peeves is the number of plastic cards I have to carry in my wallet. Most of the time I tend to strip the contents to the essential debit cards that I use all the time but this sometimes means that I miss out on discounts or other benefits by not having a particular stores loyalty card with me.

Stocard solves this little problem by providing a simple way of importing store loyalty cards into your iPhone allowing you to leave the plastic at home without having to pass up on the discounts or loyalty points. Adding cards is very quick, just search for the store name from the extensive list then scan the card bar code using the iPhone camera and the cards details are captured. Now you can present the bar code on your iPhone to the cashier when making a purchase and they can scan this instead of the plastic. The app can also store card details for shops/companies not listed including adding a photo of the card for easy reference. I have used it to import my library cards for example.

Stocard do acknowledge that some older scanners aren’t able to read the iPhone screen but in these cases the bar code can be entered manually by the cashier.

The app is available for iOS and Android and is a free download.

Using Duet Display As A Primary Monitor

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Duet Display is a slick app developed by ex-Apple employees designed to allow your iPad to function as a second monitor on your laptop or iMac using a lightning or iPad 30 pin cable ( for older iPads ). The application works extremely well with none of the lag or latency in display refresh experienced by some of the alternative apps that use the iPads WiFi connection to transfer screen updates.

As the Duet name suggests the intended use for the app is to create an easy to use portable secondary display for MacBook users ( or in fact Windows laptop users as there is a Windows version of the server application as well as one for OS X ) but it isn’t limited to this use case. My main use of Duet is as a primary monitor on my Mac Mini media server.

I have used my Mac Mini in a headless ( no monitor ) setup for a long time and use Screen Sharing from my MacBook to login and manage it, however it recently struck me that the Duet Display appthat I had purchased some time ago would be perfect for creating a tiny compact keyboard/monitor setup. Combined with a small bluetooth keyboard from Anker and bluetooth mouse I now have full access to my Mini in a compact little setup that looks pretty slick on the shelf in my study.

Duet Display is £7.99 in the UK iOS App store which I admit is probably at the high side of many peoples acceptable budget for an app of this type, however this app is extremely good and provides amazing functionally and performance. For people who travel with a MacBook and iPad the benefit of being able to setup a usable dual monitor setup whilst on the move can be liberating, and for home media servers like mine it can create a slick, compact and usable alternative to a bulky VGA/HDMI monitor.

Apple TV Updated

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

One of the big missing features of the new Apple TV was the inability to play music from Apple Music using Siri. Clearly Apple held this back for good reason when the new device launched a few weeks ago but thankfully they have plugged the gap today with a new tvOS update that allows you to search for music by Siri.

The new update also fixes the other glaring omission of the iPhone Remote App not working with the new Apple TV.

Amazon Removes Apple TV From Store

Fri, 30 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It seems that Amazon was serious with recent threats to pull ads for media streaming devices that don’t support their own Prime Video service from the Amazon Store as today they have removed both Apple TV and Chromecast devices.

Searches for Apple TV on Amazon now list only Amazon’s own Fire TV plus devices such as the Roku which already provide access to the Prime Video service. Amazon have released the following statement in response to questions about this change.>“It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion.”

It seems somewhat coincidental that this should happen on the first day that the new Apple TV is available to buy in stores.

Apples requirement for a share of the revenues from subscription services accessed by their devices has been an issue in the past and it may be that this is a play by Amazon to try to force a better deal from Apple. It will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out and what the response from Apple and Google is to this.

Animated History Of Steve Jobs

Fri, 30 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The team in the marketing department at Quartsoft have produced this lovely animated video timeline of Steve Jobs life. Click on this link to go to the Quartsoft page to read the rest of the teams tribute to Steves life. There is also a nice infographic version of the video that is worth a look.

New Apple Force Touch Table

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Too Many Podcasts, Not Enough Time

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This article (the coming podcast surplus ) by Seth Godin describes a problem (of the third world variety) that I have experienced for some time and I suspect you may have too, that is the growing number of streams of entertainment competing for my attention and time.

I have been a regular podcast listener since my first iPod many years ago when MacBreak Weekly and the BritishMac Podcast were my routine companions on the drive too and from work. Since the early days of podcasting there has been a rapid growth in the number of podcast networks and shows within those networks which is great to a point. The problem comes in deciding which ones are worthy of attention and how to sample new ones whilst at the same time keeping up with the regulars.

Many of the shows I listen to average around 2 hours per episode which for me is a whole days commuting ( 1 hour in each direction ). With only 4-5 working days drives a week ( I work at home on average once a week ) it doesn’t leave much room for new podcasts to find their way onto my playlist, especially as I tend to also have an Audible title on the go most of the time as well. The result of this is that I tend to continue to listen to mostly the same content and only occasionally change or add new podcasts to my player.

My current playlist looks something like this :

[table id=2 /]

In addition to the regulars above I have a small list of irregular shows that I sample when I feel like it, mostly from the same podcast networks as the list above but with the odd variant thrown in for good measure. One that I dropped on a while ago that turned out to be so gripping that my regular playlist went out of the window until I had finished it was the Serial Podcast. This is a fascinating series of 10 episodes following a murder that happened in Baltimore in 1999 hosted by Sarah Koenig and was a spin off of This American Life. Not my normal techie faire but I really enjoyed this one and am actually looking forward to the forthcoming follow up series.

I suppose like Seth I have to accept that the reality is that I will never be able to listen to all the content that I might want to, there is simply too much to handle. It is also good news for anyone who has not yet ventured away from broadcast radio into the world of podcasts, believe me once you start you will continue and will probably not bother with commercial FM/DAB radio again !

UPDATE : Will Green ( BritishMac ) is back ! Episode 149 posted yesterday after a gap of 1 year since episode 148…. Keep it up this time Will ?

Dual Screen Wallpapers for Macs

Sat, 24 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Twelve South are a brand well known to Mac users for their laptop and iPhone/iPad stands amongst other products.

While browsing their site tonight I came across this page of wallpapers specifically designed for dual screen setups. There are wallpapers in resolutions from 11" MacBook right up to 5K Retina iMacs. There are 8 different sets, 4 of Scottish landscapes and 4 of San Francisco skylines.

Worth taking a peek if you are looking for high quality wallpapers to show off your dual screen setup ( or even just for a single screen setup… )

New Apple TV Starts Shipping Next Week

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The new Apple TV announced at last months iPhone and iPad Pro event is due to start shipping next week. UK pricing is still not available on the Apple site so this may mean that availability is going to be limited to the US at first.

Price in the US will be $149 for the 32GB version and $199 for the 64GB version.

Think Same !

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Missing post

Wed, 02 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Sorry this page is missing

Try elsewhere on UKMac.net

Apple Music has 10M new subscribers but will they stay ?

Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

According to many popular sites it is being reported that Apple Music has already reached 10 million subscribers ( Appleinsider ). This is of course an artificial number as none of those customers have yet to pay a penny for the service as it is free for the first three months of use.

The question I guess then is how many people will pay to use it beyond the trial period. My own experience so far is that I will continue to use it as I am finding the new music recommendations far superior to Spotify and the fact that the whole family can use it at the same time ( for a small increase in cost ) just seals the deal.

Facebook App Draining iPhone Batteries

Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

According to this article on TechCrunch Facebook have confirmed that they are aware of a problem with their iOS app causing excessive battery drain even when the app has background refresh disabled.

If you are experiencing issues with decreased battery life recently and have the Facebook app installed you could try deleting the app and using Safari to access the site until a fix is released.

How do you backup your digital data

Sun, 26 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Unless you have a background in IT the chances are that the only time you have ever considered backups of your information was just after you found out you had lost something precious ? Perhaps it was a bunch of irretrievable photos lost when your hard drive suddenly and inexplicably died ? Or maybe it was your lifetimes collection of music or movies, carefully downloaded and collated onto that 4TB external hard drive connected to your desktop computer that you hadn’t noticed had been accidentally deleted ?

Whichever it was, when the day arrives and you suffer that unrecoverable data loss the chances are you will be asking yourself why you hadn’t taken the time to backup to another disk.

My preferred and recommended backup solution is an online service called Backblaze. Backblaze is cheap ( as little as $5 a month ), reliable and easy to setup and better yet, once configured you can forget it is there and relax in the knowledge that should the worst happen your data is safe and easily retrieved.

Unlike most Internet file storage solutions ( Dropbox, OneDrive etc ) the cost for Backblaze is the same whether you are backing up 100MB or 20TB ! The only difference will be the amount of time it takes to complete the initial backup, something that is getting easier as home broadband speeds steadily increase. This initial “seeding” of your backup may take some weeks to complete but it happens in the background and is carefully controlled by the Backblaze software to not interfere with your Internet access too much. Once the first backup is complete the software then only has to update the backup when anything changes to your local data, again a process that happens in the background without manual intervention.

Backblaze will backup any of your hard drives, not just the internal drive in your PC or Mac. Just plugin your external USB drives, configure the application settings and wait for the data to be secured. One thing to note here though is that if you do this Backblaze needs to “see” that drive at least once every 30 days or it will assume the data does not need to be retained and will delete it.

Obviously paying for backup services is not sexy, it doesn’t really give you anything other than piece of mind, but it is something that everyone who has any amount of data in digital form should consider putting in place.

If you would like to try out Backblaze you can sign up for a months free trial by clicking on this link.

This post is not sponsored by Backblaze it is purely my personal choice of backup service and something that I recommend to friends and relatives when the subject arises. Please try it out, you may thank me one day !

For You Disappearing from iTunes after recent update

Wed, 15 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Last night my MacBook’s iTunes was updated with the latest release ( 12.2.1.16 ) and when it restarted I was prompted with the invitation to Join Apple Music trial. As I had already signed up I ignored this prompt and clicked through to iTunes assuming it was some sort of error, however what I noticed then was the For You and New sections at the top of the iTunes window were now missing.

Restarting iTunes didn’t resolve this, nor did logging out of the the Store and back in again. After a number of attempts to recover the missing sections I went into the iTunes Store and clicked onto the 90 Day Trial link ( at the very bottom left of the store ) and hey presto the missing sections re-appeared again !

Anyone else experienced this or was this a one off for me ?

Infinite Loop - Lovely Relaxing Game for iOS

Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Infinite Loop is my latest go to iPhone game for instant gratification or the gamers equivalent of meditation. Jonas Lekevicious has created a beautiful puzzle game that requires no instructions and is suitable for young and old. Whats more he has created an iPhone and Android version so everyone can play.

Grab it now its free to play.

How to Access Magazines on Zinio for Free

Wed, 24 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In the days before the Internet I was a regular magazine subscriber and the shelves in my home office used to groan under the weight of all those glossy pages. My magazine buying days have long since gone, replaced by a diet of online news delivered first by USENET followed by online forums, web sites and most recently RSS feeds read through services like Feedly.com or apps like Flipboard.

Earlier this year I started a volunteer role at my local library to show local residents how to use the library computers or if they prefer their own devices to get more out of the Internet and PC and tablet applications. It was during my familiarisation with the library services on their web site that I came across this page ! Basically library members can register for FREE to access a range of magazines through the popular service Zinio.com. Zinio has been around for a long time and I had looked at the magazines available through the service over the years, in fact before I spotted the library link I had been debating subscribing to National Geographic for cash ! So glad I didn’t now as the Nat Geo is one of the magazines available through the Telford library service for free.

All that is needed to take advantage of the deal is a library membership card ( available for free to local residents ). Once you are a member you can register through the link on the library web site which gives you access to select from the range of magazines that the library make available ( currently 31 titles at Telford ) and download to your tablet/desktop Zinio reader app or to read online through the Zinio web site.

Since signing up for this service I have spoken with a variety of friends and work colleagues and told them how I can access magazines online for free. When we have looked at the services available from their local libraries ( Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Walsall etc ) we have discovered that they also offer the same sort of service. In fact most of them have a wider range of magazine titles available than my library in Telford !

If you would like to subscribe to this service head over to your local library web site and do a search for Zinio, I am betting that you will find there is a free service available to you that you didn’t know was there !

Enjoy,

Calls To 0800 Numbers Free From Mobiles Starting 1st July (UK)

Fri, 19 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I just happened across this tidbit and though its not really Mac or Apple related I thought it was worth posting a quick note about it because I expect many people in the UK may not be aware of the forthcoming changes to telephone call charges that come into force on 1st July 2015.

All the information you need can be found at http://ukcalling.info. There are a range of changes being made to make the charges for 08 numbers clearer to UK residents amongst which is the change that makes 0800 and 0808 calls free to mobiles as well as landlines.

Good news for many people I would think.

Say no to Pakisaurus - Hilarious Rant by Guzzy Bear

Fri, 19 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: I should apologise in advance for the non-Appleiness of this post, it seems I am in a sharing mood today !

I have a friend who shall remain nameless who constantly sends me awful Youtube clips but today he out did himself when he sent me this one ! This is an hilarious rant by Youtuber Guzzy Bear Oh Yeh! about a section of the new Jurassic World film that somehow got through editing without anyone spotting the fairly obvious racist connotations !

In case you wondered the friend who sent me this is asian…

Watch this, I was in stitches.

Hackers find way of breaking out of Apple's sand box ( OS X and iOS )

Wed, 17 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Just this afternoon I was involved in a discussion about how hackers exploit the most difficult to find holes in operating systems, networks and hardware to gain a way in or in some cases out of the protections wrapped around our technology by the people who developed them.

These protections are increasingly complex and sophisticated but as this article from Ars Technica shows the bad guys ( or good guys if they are doing this to expose weaknesses to the vendors rather than using for personal gain ) continue to find ways around and through the barriers.

Apple have long claimed that their operating systems and software are best in class as far as security is concerned, but as we all know these sort of claims are only going to encourage hackers to prove them wrong, more so over recent years as Apples market share has grown.

Hopefully steps are already in place to fix this latest vulnerability.

How to Take Funny Travel Photos - The Right Way

Tue, 16 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you have a Facebook or Twitter account you can’t have missed seeing this article or one of the many variants reported all over the web in the last week or so. A Dutch food blogger named Sid Frisjes made the mistake of posting his failed attempt at the classic photo of himself pointing at the top of the Eiffel tower on Reddit and asking for some help to fix the original. The resulting stream of hilarious mickey takes quickly spread and was widely reported.

If you want to avoid becoming the subject of world wide ridicule like Sid you might be advised to check out this article from Lifehack.org which was put together to help travellers to make the most of their photo opportunities and nab those funny pics first time, without the use of photo editing tools ( or Reddit ! )

ImageOptim

Mon, 11 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

ImageOptim is a small free utility for Mac OS X that does one thing well. It compresses image files but without reducing image quality. On test files I have found that compression rates vary between a few percent up to over 50% and the resulting images look exactly the same.

ImageOptim is only available through the developers web site and NOT the App Store (although the author does note that copies have been sold through the app store so buyer beware).

If you are looking for a quick convenient app to reduce image file sizes without sacrificing original image quality ImageOptim is a recommended download.

Apple Clothing Collection from the 80's

Sun, 10 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to imagine Apple producing anything quite like these now, but apparently according to this article on HUH thats exactly what they did back in 1986. Be sure to click the link to see the full article…

Making money on the App Store

Sun, 10 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Sam Soffes released a small app onto the Mac App Store this week and was shocked to find it quickly elevated into the top grossing apps list, so you can imagine his shock when he checked how much he had made the next day and found he had made only $302 on sales of 92 units !

Read his article here for the full details.

Redacted for Mac Launch

What I find strange about this article is the fact that he has 538 votes on Producthunt.com. Presumably these people are voting for an app they haven’t actually used ?

Where can I buy one of these ?

Sat, 09 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

iMac Desk Lamp

This is so cool… Would love this for my desk.

Capture Animated GIFs using free GifGrabber

Wed, 06 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

GifGrabber is a free utility available from the App Store that lets you easily create animated GIFs by capturing a user definable area of the screen. It is the perfect tool for creating a snip of your favourite movie or video clip or recording a quick screen cast to send to friends or colleagues to demonstrate how to do something on your Mac.

South Park Mac vs PC

Wed, 06 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates - Walt Mossberg Interview

Wed, 06 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Your time is limited...

Wed, 06 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Steve Jobs delivering his famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech. This video is worth watching to the end, powerful and though provoking message from a famed motiviator of people.

Sweet and Wide...

Thu, 30 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have looked at these ultra wide screens and have to admit this looks enticing.

iWork resources and templates

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The iWork suite of applications ( Numbers, Pages, Keynote ) comes with a number of really well made templates designed to get you producing superb quality, impressive looking documents in no time at all. But what if the pre-installed templates aren’t quite what you need for your current project or task ?

There are a surprisingly small number of sites where you can find additional templates for the iWork applications. The list below contains the best ones that seem to be available at the moment. If you know of any better ones please drop a comment on this post and I will gladly update it to include them.

iWorkCommunity.com:Template Exchange - This site is probably the most comprehensive currently available. At the time of writing there were 225 Pages templates, 5 for Keynote and 15 for Numbers. All the templates here are free to download and use.

iWork Templates - This is a slightly more recent free template site which currently only has about 18 templates to offer.

Number Templates - This site specialises on free templates for Numbers as well as providing hints and tips on how to use the application.

Jumsoft is a commercial site providing high quality templates for iWeb, Pages and Keynote as well as clipart and animations. The Pages templates product is $39 and provides a range of 20 different templates.

Keynote Pro is another commercial site that offers a range of templates for Pages and of course Keynote. Their themes are exceptionally elegant and stylish.

Oneeyedgoldfish is a UK based company who provide a range of templates for Pages at £10 per theme or all of their themes for £40. They also have a small number of free templates for download as a taster of their full offerings.

So there you have it. A small list for now but hopefully of help anyway. Please do tell me of any other good resources for iWork by leaving a comment below.