Category: Computing

General computing with a bias towards Unix, OS X, Apple products, for use in Music and Photography

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Upgrading my Apple AirPort Extreme 

I purchased a new Apple AirPort Extreme this week. The idea is to move the old one into the end room recently decorated, which together with the two AirPort Expresses, covering my office and master bedroom would cover the whole house. 

As I often am with Apple I was very surprised at the ease at which things went. 

I plugged in and the AirPort Utility on the Mac discovered the new device and gave me three options. 

  • Migrate setting from Existing AirPort Extreme and replace
  • Add to existing network
  • Setup as a new network

I took the first option and after a few minutes it prompted me to transfer the cables from the external harddisk and BT router from the old AirPort to the new. This I did and after a few minutes everything was back up and running on the new device. 

I then ran the wizard and added the old Airport in to the existing network as a wireless extender. Once setup I unplugged the old AirPort and plugged it into the room. 

Easy. 

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On line Storage – in the Cloud

Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google, Adobe Creative cloud and of course Apple’s iCloud; not to mention all the other third party smaller solutions.

Currently I have 2.8 Gb of free dropbox, 5 GB free iCloud and 20 GB of Creative Cloud, but none of this is good enough for hosting current projects and keeping my five star images safe on line.

I have started to look again at online solutions as last week I had two disk fails, one hosting a current Wedding photographs I was editing and another hosting my live Master Lightroom library.

Now lucky I lost nothing, I always try and keep at least three backups at home and one off site but I was worried for a while.

Maintaining off site backups is a pain and there generally about a month out of date so I am sure you can see why I have started to look at online ‘cloud’ backups again.

Now usually these things are quite straight forward, if your a Microsoft user and/or MS Office users Microsoft’s OneDrive is the one to go for.  Google is fine if you trust them with your images but they are out to make money out of your by targeted advertising, possibly not for storing a clients images on.

As an Apple user then you may think I would suggest that, well up to this week that would have been a no, they were too expensive but with this weeks price drop they are now only a couple of pounds a year dearer then Dropbox with the new iDriveApp for the iPhone it may become an option but currently for me Dropbox is at the top of my list.

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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.

images

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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.OS X 10.10.5

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Last update for Adobe CS6

Levels
Levels

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.

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Mac Sound output

Audio Midi SetupI 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.

 

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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.

 

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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.