Hello everyone,
I must stop apologising for it being a while between posts and actually post some more :-D. Last time, it was near the start of a week off and I’d been fighting new laptop issues all day. And I have to admit, getting a little stressed about it. Especially about the iTunes thing. If you’re here about iTunes not talking to iPhones, skip ahead a bit (keyword “victory”). Or hopefully enjoy my rambling too :-D.
Buyer’s remorse and all that. I get that a fair bit.
There’s been a birthday as well …
Yep. Added another bit of age again. An away trip happened last week and I’m definitely still feeling that now, even after a chilled out weekend. It was only 1 hour of time difference but that meant getting moving at an equivalent 5.30am for a few days, plus travel followed by highly disrupted sleep times.
I can’t talk much about work trips though, things like the location you went to can give far too much away about what you’re working on and who you work for. And we have to protect that kind of stuff from the weird people on the internet.
Yep, I know, I’m a weird person on the internet but I don’t inflict anything bad on anyone on the internet, I just have fun drawing chuckles out of people. Must do more of the art again, to add to the memes. The memes still happen, if a doable idea pops into the head the memes quickly follow. It’s like having a toolkit that you can apply as you need it. Turning a photo into a meme can happen very rapidly especially if the photography cooperates. Drawing a new sketch, that takes a while even with the rapid style I was going for.
Buyer’s remorse ?
Hmm. Looks like they’ve updated the WordPress editor and it’s a small change where instead of there being a + button to press when you’re adding a picture, you need to press /. I’m not a fan of changes like that, they seem like changes for change’s sake. Unlike twitter where the changes seem to be to set a record on how quickly you can burn down a multi billion dollar business.
Laptop ? I think I mentioned that it’s an Acer Swift 3 this time around. I went down a little on spec with a smaller hard disc than ideal in order to take advantage of a bigger discount. It’s also a little smaller at 14 inches. The important spec bits are 1.2kg, 14″ screen (IPS), 16GB memory and 512GB SSD. And all that is working very nicely. The catalyst for buying was to drop from the 2.7kg Asus gaming laptop (which I never gamed on) to something more suitable for travelling around. Oh and the screen in the Asus laptop was dull and terrible, this one is far superior. The keyboard is nice too. That’s the things that made me go for the Acer in the end, it felt nice in the shop (although I bought from the Acer online shop)
It’s Windows 11 too, which honestly isn’t too bad. It’s another unnecessary change from Microsoft in order to relieve more money out of people for updates but it feels like the switch is necessary in order to introduce cyber security architecture in the Operating System which is vitally important in today’s increasingly dangerous online environment.
Apart from that – the Settings area is more confusing than before. It appears to be another extension on what happened to Windows 10, with its awkward mix of old Windows 7 era controls and the newer style. I haven’t found the settings yet to enable different power modes for on battery and on mains power. I just did a check and apparently it does have these. You can tell in the Task Manager, which gives an accurate frequency meter. It’s 2GHz on power and light loading, down to 1.3GHz on light loading. Less speed = less power draw = more battery life.
Time for a disclosure note – I bought the laptop, although I did get £150 off on £800 value via the discounts you can get on the Acer store.
The SSD makes it much smoother than the Asus. Either that or Windows 11 performs better than Windows 10. Not sure there, it could be a change from 8GB up to 16GB, that extra memory gives breathing room for Windows. Taskbar behaviour is different. Windows 10 gives you more options. Handy tip – Windows key + X is a shortcut to many very useful features like Task Manager, Device Manager, Run, Search etc.
I used Device Manager to fix an iTunes issue … I insist on using iTunes 10.7 because it was the last one with the iTunes DJ feature. (Auto generated playlist which adds tracks if it runs out). This means I also have to keep my iPodPhone (iPhone 5) on old software … Anything above iOS 6 won’t talk to the iTunes. Apparently it can’t take anything past iOS 8.3 anyway so that exphone won’t be getting any data again from anywhere that isn’t the iTunes library. Long story short (and popping a search engine optimisation in !)
My iTunes 10.7 was not detecting my iPhone because the iTunes 12 driver was causing a conflict. If you’ve come here via a search engine and have the same issue, here you go : The Portable Devices entry for Apple iPhone didn’t fix it. I needed to go down to Universal Serial Bus controllers where (if it’s not working), you’ll see an entry for “Apple Mobile Device USB composite driver”. This is the one that doesn’t work. Reinstalling the “Apple Mobile Device USB driver” (yep, is subtle) has gotten the iPodPhone talking to the iTunes again. VICTORY
I haven’t sorted out the Homeshare system yet though, I’ll keep that one for another day. I’ve managed to listen to 1642 unique tracks so far, which puts the chance of a repeat being randomly chosen down to around 1 in 10.
I think the exhaustion is starting to really hit now though, so it’s time to wrap up.
Still here, hanging in there after realising that the burn out probably hit around Mar/Apr 2020 when the world changed a lot. Been looking to try and recover from that, although it might need more of a reset to do so.
It has been good being out and about more though. It seems like the pain that follows the out and about is lessening as I do it more, although it has definitely caught up to me today.
Anyway – time to close with : looking forwards to the run in to Xmas. Lots to do. Things to see. The markets are open, so I’ll look to visit those at least a few times. Hopefully the cookies are back ! It’s been good seeing people more regularly again. Work situation is way better than before I changed last year, I have the confidence again to own what I’m doing and be able to make stuff happen with it.
Be safe and well everyone, see you again sometime soon.