Computing – Page 16 – Richard & Caroline's Blog

September 17, 2015September 19, 2015

iOS 9 is out

Well its out and on the whole for a maintenance release I am quite pleased, some nice improvements and it seems to be working fine on our iPad2 and iPhone6.

What I am not happy is about is the update of our iPhone5. I basically hung at the slide to continue screen. No matter what I did, reboots restores etc, nothing could get it working except to setup as a new phone, not something I wanted to do.

Apple have suggested a fix on their support site but it did not work for me.

In the end the fix was to download iOS 8 and restore that then restore the data. So now I am back to OS8 on the iPhone5 until Apple come up with a fix.

Instructions from https://www.reddit.com/r/ios9/comments/3l7nt8/slide_to_upgrade_freeze_iphone_5c/

To go back:

Step 1 – Backup your pictures! Even though you can’t get to your phone and use it you should still be able to backup your pictures

Step 2 – Download IOS 8.4.1 for your iPhone or iPad from this site –> https://ipsw.me/8.4.1

If you are confused which file to download check the model on back of your phone and use site below to determine the version you need.

https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Models

The file was taking a while to download for my phone so I searched the filename on Google and downloaded from Mega.

Step 3 – Reboot phone into DFU mode – hold down power button and home button – when it reboots let go of power button – still hold home button

At this point it will ask you to connect your phone to iTunes – will have to connect phone to the computer.

Step 4 – Hold down the Option (Mac) or Shift (Windows) and and then click restore.

Step 5 – Browse to the 8.4.1 file you downloaded and select it. This should restore to the previous IOS version. Note: This will wipe phone.

Step 6 – Restore from backup. Hope that you backed up before attempting to update.

September 15, 2015September 15, 2015

Apple Pay Comes to a few more UK Banks

I see that HSBC Halifax Group cards are now working with ApplePay. We are now less then a day away from the release of OS 9 so the banks have taken a year before the majority of UK customers can use Apple Pay and we still have some of the big players like Barclays holding out.

September 11, 2015September 13, 2015

Apple News

So we got the expected updates for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, i’ll not be upgrading as my 6 Plus is fine.

The iPad Pro looks interesting, it will be dependent on what Adobe do on whether I finally upgrade my old iPad2.

August 14, 2015August 14, 2015

Apple’s been busy with updates

If your an Apple household like ours then this week its been a busy week backing up our devices and applying the latest updates.

There was a new report recently of a new vulnerability found in the MacOS, in fact there was one recently that affected all devices with a USB controller.

Well this week we had patches for the Mac OS, the iPhone and the iPad. We updated all our devices and we also had an iTunes update with a few nice improvements and bug fixes for Apple Music.

August 3, 2015July 31, 2015

Last update for Adobe CS6

Its been expected but now Adobe have announced that the latest update for Adobe CS6 is the last, if your a Photoshop user and need camera RAW updates your either going to have bite the bulet and buy an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription or use Lightroom to render the RAW’s to another format and then open in Photoshop.

July 28, 2015April 12, 2020

Mac Sound output

I love good music and HiFi, since getting my new Mac setup the sound quality was not quite as good as I thought it should be. It was then I remembered that the default output was not as good as it should be. You need to go into the Audio Midi setup program and configure it to the best settings.

See above.

Having the new Mac Desktop I now have the line out direct into the active speakers giving me better sound quality then Apple AirPlay.

July 17, 2015April 12, 2020

Hifi in the Office

So with the new Sonos speaker in the kitchen I got for my birthday last year, we have decent music in the house again that is until I finally get my separates system setup in the room we are currently decorating.

Enjoying the Sonos made me think about my office, how to get decent quality sound from the PC without too much cost.

I wanted stereo so another Sonos was not going to cut it, purchasing two would be more then a quality set of active speakers, plus I also wanted to stream from other sources not just using the Sonos app.

Quality wise, CD was good enough, most of media is either vinyl or CD and also sat in my iTunes library at 16 bit at 44 kHz which is CD quality. I do have a few other audio files which are at studio master quality 24 bit and 192 kHz but thats just over kill for a simple budget office system.

I am lucky enough to have an Apple AirPort Express in my office, as well as providing wireless internet I have my large format Epson 3880 printer plugged into one of the ethernet ports. The device also supports Apple Airplay at 16 bit / 44 kHz so it could act as the music source for the speakers.

So first I set a budget, then looked at small desktop active speakers that fitted that budget. By active I mean with built in amplification. Basically it would be a simple setup. Apple Airplay sending my music collection from laptop, or iPhone to the AirPort Express and direct into the speakers. This meant I could keep my current cheap computer speakers and have the computer sounds come from them leaving just the high quality audio of my music streamed to the speakers. Longer term I might upgrade and add a high quality USB DAC into the system, driving that from the USB port in my computer.

So what did I pick, well first job a trip to the website WhatHiFi and look at what they liked, then a web search to find the best prices. After that it was a trip to my local Hi Fi shop who offered to price match. We had a listen, using my iPhone as a source and I picked the Ruark Audio MR1.

July 16, 2015July 15, 2015

Harddisks and structuring your data

I have been shooting digital now for nine years. In that time I have a growing collection hard drives.

From a fairly early stage I standardised on LaClie Rugged Firewire drives, ranging from 160 GB to 1 TB, as up to now I have always had Mac Laptops.

I also have three mains powered desktop drives, A old 1 TB LaClie which I now keep my best photographs on as DNG format. A Drobo Array used as a backup target, and my new drive which is a G-Tech EV Thunderbold2 with two 1 TB drives configured at RAID0.

I still have a few things to consider and thats where I put things on the new machine. At the moment my main Lightroom Library is on the internal storage and I have placed all the photographs on the fast Thunderbolt2 external array, and have a 1 TB USB3 drive split into two partitions, one as a Time Machine target for backup and the other holding my iTunes Library.

My oldest LaClie drive is also attached and is set as a Lightroom import backup target and also as a catalogue backup target.

With just the G-Tech and USB drive my office is now silent and I can hear the birds out side.

The Drobo is quite noisy and but gets used once a month for backups.

Interestedly before I bought an extra Thunderbolt2 to Firewire converter and the new Thunderbolt drive; I connected directly into the Drobo and daisy chained everything off that. It definitely slowed things down and I also thought I had a finder issue and spent sometime trying to diagnose the issue.

On boot up my finder would hang for about two minutes before I could use it. It turned out only to do this when the Drobo was connected, so I do wonder if the Drobo is ready for replacement.

A couple larger cheap USB drives also have a copy of all my photographs on, one of these I keep in the office in Lincoln and the other at home, they get swapped and updated monthly so if the worst should happen I still have my work.

Cloud storage also plays its part. I tend to use Dropbox as its available on all the platforms I use from Linux, Mac and Window, plus my phone. I stick a copy of my Lightroom library here.

July 9, 2015July 8, 2015

Scanning 35mm Film

Canon A1 Fujichrome Slide Film Taken in the late 1980's — Canon A1 Fujichrome Slide Film Taken in the late 1980’s

I am slowly getting the hang of film scanning. Getting everything clean is the first and major step, after that is relatively simple.

I am using SilverFast which came free with my scanner.

The way I am working is as follows.

Step One clean and mount the film and scanner plate
Select Frames and delete all to get rid of the old frame settings
Select Pre-Scan, at this point it does a basic scan

Select Frames, Find Frames and select the appropriate film holder, in this case Filmstrip 35mm

SilverFast 35mm Film Settings

I then select my resolution 6400 ppi for film and then select the film Vendor, film type and ISO.
Then its a tweak to the Midtones to make the files a little flatter and easier to working on post production, I use +5.
Select Copy settings to all frames

Now for the time consuming part.

Zoom into the first frame and adjust the frame to capture all the image
Tweak the histogram if necessary
Go to next frame and repeat

Once all frames are done I then select batch scan and have it uniquely number each file and place them in a watch folder.

Its then over to Lightroom where I configure Auto Import. I have found the the default developer settings I use for my Nikon DSLR are a good starting point and I have Lightroom add the current date to the scans filename.

I now go off and have a cup of coffee and leave the computer to do its stuff, the scanner putting the images into the watch folder and then Lightroom automatically importing them, adding some developer settings and meta data and adding them to my main Catalogue image store. If you have a lot of images to scan you can then use this time to prepare your next batch of scans. The Epson V850 came with two sets of holders for each main type of film, 35mm mounted slides, 35mm film, medium format and 5 x 4 large format.

July 6, 2015July 4, 2015

First weekend of July – Time for those backups

Well the weekends are getting back to normal now and photography is coming back to the fore; I have some wedding photography coming up and hope to get into town with the Leica for a bit of street photography again as well as some medium and large format landscape.

For this weekend it was backups first. Updating the external Drobo with all my Lightroom data, and also copying it to a big portable Lacie Rugged drive to take down to the office on Monday. I have one down there all ready with all my data except for this months work.

I like to have a copy off site just in case the worst should happen.

I have also been having a go at batch scanning 35mm Black & Film which I may blog about later.

While my disks are getting worked hard i’ll be popping round to the local school as there having a school fate to raise money. I’ll be taking the Leica M8 and ‘street shooting’ round the local stalls.