So I got an iPhone 6 the other day. Bully for me, I can hear you say, but this isn’t about that. It’s about the fact that Apple, in preparation for iOS 8, changed the limits and functionality on their cloud storage offering, iCloud. With all the iOS devices in the house, a while back I had to pay for extra storage to enable backups for them all. That storage was just upgraded at no extra cost to 20GB. Time, I thought to myself, to check on all the cloud storage subscriptions I actually have and, presumably, use. […]
READ MOREA couple of weeks ago, just before we disappeared off on vacation, Eury crashed. Before you start imagining car wrecks and the like, let me explain that Eury was our oldest cat. He was 18 years and 4 months old, which, for a cat, is way up there in terms of age. And by crashed I mean that, finally, all of his ailments – and let me tell you this cat had them all, pretty much – caught up with him and there was nothing more we could do. […]
READ MOREAs hinted a couple of blog posts ago (From ‘57 to 57), I’ve been resurrecting a stash of old film negatives from those halcyon days when I first started learning about photography after I’d bought an SLR. And by “resurrecting” I mean separating them from the stuck-together block some of them had become. A couple of people have asked me what I did, so a quick post is in order. […]
READ MOREBack in April this year, we went and stayed in Amsterdam for a few days. We were at the Hotel Pulitzer on Prinsengracht – although our room overlooked Keizersgracht at the rear of the hotel – and one of our pastimes was to look at the canal houses, which ones we liked, which ones not so much. On the last day we were there, I suddenly decided that I should photograph a whole bunch of them as we walked around, and create a collage of the best houses. Of course, it was that day it decided to rain. […]
READ MOREA couple of months ago I celebrated my birthday; it happens every year. This is not about that event particularly, but more about changes over time and how I’ve almost become inured to the wonder embodied in those changes. […]
READ MOREQuite a while ago (I was surprised when I looked it up: 2008) I subscribed to a backup app called Jungle Disk. The interesting thing about it was (a) it used Amazon S3 (then relatively new) as a backup store, and (b) you subscribed to it at a rate of a mere $1 per month. So, in essence, it’s an online backup program and it allowed me to keep documents and photos – about 6 folder trees in all – somewhere else than a local backup drive. It was the “house burns down” option: in the event of a catastrophe (like, say, if the Black Forest fire last year had been a little more ferocious and the wind from the north-east a little stronger) I’d have our decade’s worth of photos still around once we’d rebuilt. […]
READ MORESo, in the previous installment in this upgrade game I was crowing about how I knew how to boot from a USB drive on the Dell XPS 12 and therefore upgrading the SSD in it was going to be a piece of cake. Well, it turned out to be a piece of the heaviest, densest, fruit cake you’ve ever seen. Dropping it onto a wood floor would have dented the floor. […]
READ MOREThere are several possible reasons for wanting to boot from a USB drive, I suppose, but mine came from this thought experiment: I’ve been diligently making regular system backups of my Dell XPS 12 for a while and today I wondered if I would be able to recover from, say, a crashed hard drive or – a much better scenario – from upgrading the hard drive to a higher capacity one. In fact, this latter scenario is the one that interests me: I’m contemplating a 480GB drive (currently the Crucial M500 is $280 from newegg.com) to replace the 240GB drive that I bought a year ago for my Dell XPS 12. […]
READ MOREBack in November 2012, I ordered the first series of DCI Banks on DVD from amazon.co.uk, an ITV crime drama series starring Stephen Tompkinson as, well, DCI Alan Banks and Andrea Lowe as Annie Cabbot. For one reason and another, I really enjoy the traditional British police procedural: there’s some bizarre murder, after which proceeds a nicely drawn and perhaps drawn-out investigation of the crime, with lots of character development along the way. The epitome of this type of drama was undoubtedly Inspector Morse, with Endeavour following in those footsteps. DCI Banks was possibly not quite as well done as those, but it was nevertheless interesting to me because of the setting: somewhere in Yorkshire. Never really properly positioned unlike Morse’s Oxford, just assumed to be up there somewhere. Although I’ve never lived in Yorkshire, my parents have, and I consider myself a proto-Yorkshireman, having explored pretty much all of the Dales and most of the Moors. All in all, I enjoyed the episodes a great deal. […]
READ MOREThere I was, minding my own business, when I came across this article in ArsTechnica: “Dear Asus router user: You’ve been pwned, thanks to easily exploited flaw”. I read on avidly, because, well, I have an Asus router, an RT-N66U to be precise and the subject of this article. […]
READ MORE