Author: iandick

Weekly Digest

Life
An up and down week that ended better than it started. Starting to plot a 4K TV purchase in the not to distant future.

Media
Westworld is starting to hit it’s stride – really enjoying it. Also enjoyed the first of the new Black Mirror episodes on Netflix.

Battlefield 1 on the Xbox One is an excellent game. Operations mode on multiplayer is epic, some of the best multiplayer I’ve played on this generation of console. Coupled with a strong story mode and a range of multiplayer options make it a great purchase.

Mini Metro is a cracking game on iOS. It’s a subway building game which is just made for a touch interface. Just £3.99 but a really essential buy if you enjoy gaming on iOS.

Links

Playstation VR

It’s been over a week since the Playstation VR came out. I picked one up on day one thanks to a very early pre-order on Amazon along with a couple of move controllers, a camera and a copy of Rigs. I’d been really looking forward to this as the Oculus and Vive were just too big a purchase alongside a gaming PC and VR is of real interest to me. The Playstation VR is the affordable way to get into VR…but how good is it?

Unboxing
Opening the kit is the first surprise. Sony really have pulled out the stops and made it a treat to unbox. You lift open the main lid and there’s a box inside. Inside that box there are smaller boxes holding cables. Lift those off and you finally get to the headset itself.

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It felt like opening a Russian doll crossed with tetris. What was also slightly surprising was the amount of cables. A bit unexpected but Sony had done a good job of numbering them all to make installation pretty straightforward.

Design
The headset itself looks fantastic. It looks like something from the future in contrast to the Vive/Oculus headsets which are a bit more utilitarian. More importantly they’ve made it the most comfortable of the VR headsets to wear.

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The band on top of your head supports most of the weight and hence for me feels more comfortable than the other headsets. It also works better for glasses wearers like me. You press a button on the front of the headset to move the screens forward and press in a button on the back of the headset and then pull forward to extend the headband. You then place the headset on and press in the front button to bring the screens over your eyes/glasses and then use an adjustment screw to tighten the headband.

It sounds harder than it is but it’s very comfortable to wear.

The cables are unavoidable really as it’s an add-on to the PS4 and the bandwidth required to get data to and from the headset is more than wireless can cope with right now but there’s no getting away from the mess it makes. There is a audio out and some controls close to the headset so you can easily control volume and plug in some buds of your choice.

The camera and headset tracking leaves a little to be desired. The camera and move controllers are 6 year old tech and it definitely shows in comparison with the Vive. I found during use that the tracking would lose alignment especially during daytime so curtains closed/lights out are the way to go to try and improve reliability.

The most important factor of any VR headset is screen quality and performance/framerate. The screens are pretty good given the price. Not up there with the Vive but good enough. I’ve found watching a video on the Playstation VR pretty jarring but gaming is generally OK. Coupled with the comfort of wearing the headset then most folk should be OK when gaming with the Playstation VR.

Games
Despite some worries a couple of months ago I thought the launch lineup of games was really strong coupled with every headset having a demo disk so you can try a variety of games easily on day one. One tip – download the demo disk from the PS store as it’s the American version so has double the amount of demo’s compared to the UK disk. Anyway, some thoughts on my pre-orders:

Rigs – 3 vs 3 sports game in an arena where you are in a mechanised rig. Graphics are clean and detailed enough and frame rates excellent. I really enjoyed the game and reminded me of a VR version of Speedball.

Thumper – This is a fast paced rhythm game with great graphics and looks stunning in VR. Probably my favourite game of the launch titles.

Rez Infinite – A great looking and sounding game, if you liked Rez from 10-15 years ago you’ll love this in VR.

Driveclub – I loved Driveclub and was looking forward to playing this in VR but for me it was unplayable. Choppy and poor graphics and some real frame rate issues for me. Left me spinning!

I also enjoyed Battlezone and felt the graphics were well realised and fitted the style of game but that £50 was a bit steep for the game. In fact if there was one criticism of the launch titles it that some had a demo like feel to them so the pricing was a bit steep.

Reality
On my first nights play I ended up being physically sick. This was unexpected as I’d had no issues with the Oculus or Vive or with any motion sickness with games previously. Third corner on Driveclub left me feeling terrible so I instantly switched off, grabbed a sugary drink and waited for the feeling to wear off. It didn’t and 15 minutes later I waved goodbye to my dinner. I do suffer from migraines from time to time and do have some other health issues at the moment so wasn’t too put off.

The next day went a lot better, probably because I stayed away from Driveclub, but after just an hour I was left with a sore head and pain in my eye similar to a migraine kicking in. I tried one more session the following day with similar results.

Clearly the Playstation VR didn’t work with me.

I had checked the calibration, ensured it was setup properly but there’s just something about either the headset or me that was causing issues. After three attempts and having similar results each time without much sign of improvement I decided to return the Playstation VR to Amazon for a refund. I wasn’t prepared to train my brain or persevere to get to a point where it worked and in the meantime be repeatedly sick.

Overall
The Playstation VR is a great VR platform. Not as good as the Vive, comfier than the Oculus but importantly has a great launch lineup with the hardware available at an affordable price. Despite it not being for me I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending it to other PS4 owners.

Weekly Digest

Life
Autumn starting to kick in and you can see and feel the change – wonderful colours and carpets of leaves around Glasgow. It also means darker mornings and nights. Need to make a bigger effort to get out during the day.

Media
Playstation VR delivered this week but I’ll keep my thoughts on that for a future post apart from saying this – it’s very good. I’ve also been playing some Battlefield 1 and it is wonderful. One of the most atmospheric shooters yet.

Links

Weekly Digest

Life
Back at work and busy busy busy again. Health not great although weekend got better after a difficult Friday. Still enjoying the camera and the weather this week was really good for October.

Media
More Halo and Fifa and weirdly thinking about a gaming PC after 10 years of not having one. I blame VR though next weeks PSVR may kill the urge for the short term.

Links

10 Years on a Mac

Hard to believe but it’s 10 years since I moved from PC to Mac. 10 years! I’d been using an iPod for a few years when in 2006 Apple moved to Intel processors and updated their iMac design. It was all too tempting so I said farewell to viruses, tara to malware and hello to hassle free Mac computing. That was the plan and for the most part it’s been true. Here’s some thoughts on my Mac/Apple journey inspired by this post from Elaine Giles earlier in the year.

iMac up and running

Macbook ProI loved that first iMac and picked up an 80Gb iPod at the same time. The first three months was so good that at Christmas I bought a MacBook Pro. What a great laptop that was. Fast, quiet, quick to boot and the design was to die for. 2007 saw the release of the iPhone but it just wasn’t for me. No 3G, no app’s. It was a lovely first phone but not enough to make me move. So I stuck with my Sony Ericson, remember them, and waited for Apple to update their Jesus phone.

iOS
2008 saw Apple release the iPhone 3G, iOS 2.0 and the App Store. I jumped in and picked up a 16GB iPhone 3G and bought far too many app’s on day 1. Super Monkey Ball, MotionX Poker and Twitterrific were all stand out app’s even in those early days. The iPhone and success of the App Store started a shift in focus for Apple, developers and consumers.

Subsequent iPhones increased in power and performance and I lapped them up. The 3GS, the 4 and 5 all followed and unlike other phones they kept their value in the second hand market remarkably well.

In 2010 Steve Jobs revealed the iPad. I still remember myself and Shak both dismissing it as a big iPhone…and then a few weeks later queuing for one at the Apple store in Glasgow. For me it was definitely a consumption device. Magazines, books and comics all worked really well on the iPad especially the retina model which came out in 2012. At the end of 2013 I moved to an iPad Air which I still use today.

I tried a couple of keyboards during the various iPad’s I’ve owned and went through a few different styluses but none really stuck. I did do a few work related tasks on them but the iPad remained mostly a media consumption device. When the iPad Pro’s came out I was close to picking one up but stuck with the Air mostly due to the cost and initially being unsure of the 12″ iPad Pro.

2014 saw me move to the iPhone 6 and this year I picked up an iPhone 7. It’s a fantastic phone but it feels the end of the line with a redesign likely next year. Competitors are using better components and catching up on the camera front…and many feel their phone camera’s are now better than the iPhone’s but at least the iPhone doesn’t explode.

Back to the Mac
So iPhone and iOS has become the focus for Apple but I still love the Mac. May 2011 and I upgraded to a new iMac. This was a great machine – 27″ screen, SSD and really fast processor. In fact it was so good (after a 16GB RAM upgrade) that over 5 years later I’m still using it. It still copes with most things I throw at it although there are two main shortfalls. It really struggles to process 4k video which both the camera and drone support and secondly it’s not a retina device.

This is also true for the MacBook Air I picked up in 2012. Non retina and not in any way a powerhouse but it does the job for me in a few key area’s that the iPad Air doesn’t. So apart from the iPhone my other Apple products are all getting long in the tooth. I almost forgot – 2015 and the Apple Watch. It’s been OK and Watch OS 3 makes a big difference but I’ve not moved on to the latest version until I see some app’s that will make a difference. I don’t need a faster CPU to get a notification more quickly.

The sorry state of Mac hardware
The sorry state of Mac hardware

The main reason I haven’t updated the Mac’s is mostly thanks to the slow progress that Apple have made with Mac hardware. Certainly the move to retina is great but if I look at the current Mac platforms, they are all old. Buy a Retina MacBook Pro today, which is probably their flagship Mac platform, and the hardware is over 500 days old. That’s shocking. How many people are buying a Retina MacBook Pro today not knowing that the inner hardware is that old. Same for the MacBook Air although I’m assuming sales of the Air are now very small – the bezel looks dated and it’s a non-retina screen.

The Mac platform is clearly secondary for Apple. The Mac App store is a mess in comparison to the iOS version. The latest Mac release, Sierra, has very little for Mac users. Compare Messages in iOS which saw a massive upgrade in iOS 10 to the Messages in Sierra. Crickets. And where is the hardware from Apple that would support any sort of VR headset? If you are in any way interested in the Oculus or Vive platforms then a Windows PC is the only option.

What’s Next
Over the next 18 months I’ll be replacing my iPad, MacBook Air and iMac…and probably my iPhone too! With iOS and iPhone I have no complaints and I love the platform. My current thinking is that I’ll replace the iPad and MacBook Air with an iPad Pro. No idea on size, but the keyboard and Pencil support of both Pro models will leave me needing only one device to replace the current iPad and Air.

As for the iMac, that’s a more tricky decision. My gut feel is I’ll update to the latest Retina iMac and sufficiently future proof it with fast CPU, SSD and lots of RAM. However I don’t think I can ignore Windows for much longer so I can see me also picking up a 4K second monitor (to replace the current non retina 27″ ASUS) for the iMac and plug in a Windows gaming PC that will allow me to play with one of the VR platforms. That purchase will wait for one of them to be seen as leading as at the moment it’s early days in the VR space.

I depend on my Mac, more than the iOS devices, and it’s where I get most of my work done. Unless iOS devices and iOS itself see’s some significant changes I won’t be able to shift to being iOS only so I do hope that Apple release updates to Mac’s soon – the platform needs some love! Despite my negativity I won’t be leaving the Mac though. Even some stale hardware and unloved Mac updates are better than Windows 10 and it’s woes. Here’s to the next 10 years with Apple.

Weekly Digest

Life
A week off from work taking a well earned break last week. All was going well until Friday when I had a bit of a health relapse but overall a good week. The change in season seems to have happened overnight…I’m sure I woke up on Thursday and it was all of a sudden Autumn. But it was good to get out and about with the camera for a few days. Hopefully get some more shots this week if the weather holds.

I also gave Prime Now a go for the first time and it worked well although I was surprised at seeing a tip option in the order. Does this go directly to the driver? Are Amazon not paying full rates and hoping tips make up the difference?

Media
I’ve only recently joined Netflix (I know, how late am I?) and half way through Stranger Things and started on Luke Cage. I recommend The White Helmets which is a great documentary and back in on The Fall on the BBC.

After a few years gap picked up Fifa 17 and so far enjoying it. The new Bon Iver album, 22 A Million, is worth a listen and shout out to Deacon Blue and their new album Believers which came out last week too.

Links

Admin

Spent some time this week tweaking the blog, now into it’s 14th year!

  • New theme for the blog. Hemingway by Anders Norén. Pretty much kept with defaults and added in some widgets and my own photo’s for the site header.
  • Updated about page which had become a bit stale.
  • Tweaked the archives so it should be a bit lot faster to access.
  • I’ve enjoyed doing the backpocket posts every week but tired of the name. So from now on it they will be called the Weekly Digest.

So nothing to radical but I want to get back into posting more regularly and not just every Sunday with the digest.

The Devil’s Pulpit

The Devil’s Pulpit is somewhere I had never heard of until a couple of months ago when Shak mentioned that a work colleague had recommended visiting as it’s a magical place. Some of the photo’s online looked great so early Monday morning we set off to get some sunrise pics and pay it a visit.

Devil’s Pulpit is formally known as Finnich Glen and is only a couple of miles south of Drymen so less than a 30 minute drive from Glasgow. Devil’s Pulpit is seemingly the name of a rock within Finnich Glen but over time has become the common name for the location. Getting to it is easy although there aren’t many parking opportunities. There is some parking available on the junction of the A809\B834 (56.034243,-4.419551) or you can park at Queens View car park and walk for 2 miles. We chose the former and had a short trek through a field before clambering over a small fence to find the path.

The path takes multiple routes and while obvious in the daytime in the dark it was a bit tricky to make sure we were on the right one. It was also pretty muddy thanks to the recent weather in the West of Scotland. After 10 or so minutes we finally arrived at the top of the steps down into the Glen itself. We decided to wait until the sun was up as there was a chance of a really good sunrise and we wanted to tackle the steps in more light.

Steps

The steps were laid in the mid 1800’s and it shows. They are worn, sometimes missing and very slippy. We took our time going down and in a couple of area’s it was very tight. Someone has placed ropes to help but we never used them – not sure how safe they are. Once down we started to explore and take some pictures (video courtesy of Shak)

The area isn’t that big but ripe for long exposures. We had a couple of ND filters with us but it was pretty dark so didn’t really need them most of the time. I’m pretty pleased with the photo’s from the day and the full set can be found on Flickr.

The Fallen

Wispy

The Devil’s Pulpit is well worth visiting but make sure you are wearing some good boots especially if there’s been recent wet weather. If you want to get more unusual shots a pair of wellingtons isn’t a bad shout either so you can wade through the water. It goes without saying that if you arrive in the dark you will need a torch – luckily I’d brought my head torch so we had some light to get us there safely. Also be prepared for a steep decent and a bit of dirt and mud so a change of shoes for afterwards or a towel to get cleaned up is worth taking. Mid summer might also be a better time to visit to try and get some more light into the gorge as there was very little of that when we visited. Enjoy and good luck!

iOS 10, iPhone 7 and the Apple Watch

I’m a bit later than normal with iOS 10 impressions and iPhone 7 thoughts this year. I didn’t take part in any of the public beta’s so iOS 10 was new to me when it was released on September 13th and I wanted to use the new iPhone for a while before jotting down my thoughts. So without further ado…

iOS 10
iOS 10 features a number of updates, some big but most not so much. A few thoughts on the new features first.

  • The first noticeable change is to the lock screen. Raise to wake on iPhones changes the reliance on the home button. It means you can see notifications or interact with widgets with ease. There’s also a lot more information on the lock screen than before which I like. It also relies on swiping which may infuriate some people as features seem lost now – where’s the camera shortcut from before? No icon instead swipe to the right pane to access camera.
  • Today view is better as well, and widgets seem far stronger from app developers. Hue and Dark Sky are just two app’s that take great advantage of the Today view allowing me to see information far more quickly than I could in the past.
  • Control centre now has three screens/cards instead of one. Control, Music and Home. All makes sense and combining Raise to wake and accessing control centre makes Hue light control so simple. One weird button on Control screen – Night shift. Does it really need that massive button? Also nice to see 3D touch to alter settings like torch brightness, bulb brightness and camera options.
  • Siri supports third party app’s but hard to see much other improvement. Still lags to Google and Amazon.
  • Photo’s seems a bit broken. A couple of nice new features around creating video’s based on location, photo’s and it does a good job. However machine learning has now been added (surely just enhanced and not added) but it does this per device. So I’ve got 7,500 photo’s scanned on the iPhone but the iPad has only 6,000 photo’s scanned asking me to plug in and switch of the device to resume scanning. Seemingly when all devices have finished scanning a comparison is done via iCloud but this approach seems bonkers compared with Google. The intelligent searching, so asking for photo’s of tree’s, summer, dog’s etc, isn’t as good as Google’s. Apple made some big claims about computation on the devices as compared to computations on a cloud service but Google wins this pretty easily.
  • Third party dev’s can now take photo’s in RAW format which is impressive. Lightroom and a few other app’s have updated to allow this and it does help with editing.
  • Maps – still worse than Google Maps.
  • Music has seen a big UI change. Bold fonts, simplifying options and I prefer the new look. Makes getting to my music more easy. Playlist creation still sluggish, or is that just me?
  • News – similar UI change to Music. Nice.
  • Home – an app specifically for HomeKit applications. My only devices that support it are the Hue lights and they work really well with Home. A great update over previous iOS versions.
  • iMessage is now a platform. Massive emoji support, animations, effects, gif’s and it’s own app store mostly for stickers. I like it.
  • Upgrading to iOS 10 on my iPhone 6 was a pain. I use encrypted backups which helped but after upgrading my stored music had gone, my app’s aren’t installed so you have to wait a couple of hours for them to download and on day one the Apple server’s can’t really cope with demand so you get iCloud errors. Not the great user experience that it should be.

There’s some other small features elsewhere but overall a solid if unspectacular update. Performance on my iPad Air is a bit sluggish but other devices are all working fine.

iPhone 7
Tick-tock. Apple have followed the tick-tock model for phone design for a few years. iPhone 4 then 4S, 5 then 5S, 6 then 6S with each new number bringing a change in design while the S models were refinement. The iPhone 7 should have seen a new design but instead we got the ultimate refinement which see’s a slightly tweaked 6 design but given the iPhone 7 name. Most noticeable design changes were to do with colour finish of the phone. Jet black and black were the two stand outs for me. As I hadn’t upgraded in a couple of years I went with a black 128 GB iPhone 7. Some thoughts after 10 or so days with the phone…

  • Matt black looks really good. Love the finish of the phone although it does pick up fingerprints
  • It is so fast. App’s launch quickly, web pages render without issue. I’m still loving the speed increases after a number of days and considering the iPhone is my most used device this makes for a great reason to upgrade on it’s own.
  • Screen is slightly better than the 6 to my eye. The reviews talk endlessly about why it’s the best screen yet but it feels like diminishing returns with the current screen technology. Next year finally a move to OLED for Apple?
  • Crucially the battery is lasting longer than the 6 for me with everything running as it was before and my extra usage with the new device.
  • The camera is great. OIS (Optical Image Stabilisation) is so good on video’s. The first video I took to show my Hue lights working for a friend was so good compared to what I could shoot on the iPhone 6. The pictures out of the 7 are also getting closer to some really high end camera’s. I didn’t go for a plus as I find the size just too big (I have a plus as a work device) but the dual camera support on the 7 looks to be great as well.
  • Removing the headphone jack. So in the grand scheme of things it’s not that big a deal I guess and Apple did include an adapter in the box so you won’t be stuck with £1000 headphones that no longer work. People will lose the adapter though and bluetooth isn’t as reliable or as good (yet) as a wired connection. I’ve held off upgrading my headphones for the last year as I expected this was coming so some form of wireless headphones will be bought soon…not sold on the Airpods though so who knows what I will pick up.
  • The home button is no more. It’s a pretend button with your brain tricked by the Taptic engine that a button has been clicked. Does it work? Sometimes. I’m mostly used to it although it does feel weird switching between 7 and 6S, from Taptic button to real button. There are times though that it feels like the whole bottom of the iPhone is clicking, not just the button.
  • Use of Taptic engine through the rest of the O/S though is great. Neat little touches as you resize an image, scroll through a list are much improved thanks to the new engine and iOS 10. An unexpected win.
  • 3D touch is much improved compared to the iPhone 6S. Much better feeling and used in many more places. Another win.
  • Live photo’s are improved compared to previous iOS/hardware and there’s been a couple of great gif’s create already 🙂

The video above was from St Rules tower in St Andrews on a pretty windy day and apart from me taking the video in portrait I thought the OIS did a really good job of keeping things stable. On Monday I took a trip to Finnich Glen and despite some challenging conditions the iPhone performed really well.

Panorama from Finnich Glen
Panorama from Finnich Glen
Finnich Glen
Finnich Glen

Overall I’m delighted with the iPhone 7. Fast, great camera and the haptic and 3D touch improvements are unexpectedly good. Shout out too for the Apple leather case which is a step up on previous versions. Metal buttons make all the difference.

Apple Watch
The Apple Watch has been out for around 18 months and the biggest step change is watchOS 3. It’s made my watch actually usable for third party apps and killed some of the other features like it’s focus on messaging to provide a dock which contains frequently accessed app’s. The change in day to day use is pretty startling. I can now access weather and news without waiting for 30 seconds while it refreshed. Activity stats are also readily to hand and messages is still there but as an app alongside the others not in its own unique place.

It’s also easier to swap watch faces so you can have one setup for work, one for activity, one for travelling. Along with the easy switching there’s a couple of new faces. One focussed on activity and one which is Numerals and a very simple display. Extra customisation with regards complications and third party watch faces are clearly for a future watchOS version.

The upgrade wasn’t without issue though. The first few days it felt like the display would take slightly longer to switch on. I also had a lot of hassle with third party complications but it looks like they were all third party developer issues as subsequent app updates have resolved all the issues. Overall watchOS 3 is a great update.

Apple also launched Apple Watch Series 2. It’s interesting to see Apple focus on sport and activity over timepiece and luxury which the first editions were all about. The new watches have far brighter displays, are now water resistant to 50 metres and now have a dual core processor which is twice as fast as the previous watch. While important upgrades the biggest for me is built in GPS. This means a run or walk no longer needs the iPhone to track it accurately. If I was running right now it would be an instant purchase but for now I’ll stick with my current watch.

The Future
Apple iPhone 7 and the Apple Watch Series 2 are great devices. iOS 10 is a strong mature platform and watchOS 3 proves that Apple isn’t scared to rip it up and start again. The reimagining of the device thanks to watchOS 3 is fantastic. However it’s clear that exploding batteries aside, Samsung have caught up and in many ways overtaken Apple from a design perspective and pushing new technologies out to consumers. Apple really have to pull out the stops for next years iPhone or risk seeing more people shift to Samsung and Android.

It also needs to up it’s gain with regards Siri as it looks tired when compared to it’s competitors. I also wonder if next year is when Apple shows it’s AR hand? 2017 feels like a year when Apple needs to knock it out of the park. Can it?

Backpocket