@iCloud seems very difficult without an iOS device
Umm .. try logging on to .. https://www.icloud.com/
from a web browser. The main Apple apps are there .. Mail, Contacts, Calender, Find My iPhone [and ipad and mac] and iWork documents.
Posts by Synonymous Howard
358 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Apr 2011
iPhone 4S: Our *hit list
Storage is ending in tiers
Ten... Androids to outshine the iPhone 4S
Wednesday 5th October 2011 14:03 GMT
The difficulty I have with the iphone 4 and now 4S is ..
its size and shape ... TOO boxy .. not curvy enough (it does not feel comfortable to hold for any length of time) and the screen (whilst very detailed and sharp etc) is not physically big enough for my old eyes.
So its not enough for me to part with cash for an upgrade ... now the afore-rumoured iphone 5 specs (curvy back ... much bigger screen) sounded much better for me .. Apple really need a new physical design and another spec bump to creep ahead of the crowded 'droid collection ... software ecosystem even with iCloud won't be enough to stop a market percentage decline (even with relative price cuts and 3 different handset ranges). Actual sales will obviously go up and up anyway because the whole market is growing as smartphones become the standard phone to buy (or get "free").
Wednesday 5th October 2011 12:25 GMT 
Yeah they are all okay but in a way there are too many choices now ...
So I'll continue to sweat my 'original' iPhone 3GS asset but I'll go for the free iOS5 update (the 3 -> 4 upgrade made a big difference and stopped me replacing it so 5 will probably do the same especially with the cloudy synchronization and usable notifications .. still miss androidic homepage widgets though 8-) .. and I've just ordered a £3 replacement (and 30% more mAh) battery and £7 for a new coloured back shell to give it a 'hardware' refresh.
Maybe next year if the 3GS gives up ... the mythical iphone 5 might actually be out and then there will be more choices from Samsung as well. Not interested in speed of games/graphics but I am interested in good camera optics and ready-to-shoot speed as I'm more likely to be carrying a phone than a DSLR or Bridge camera.
With tablets getting smaller and phones getting bigger I'm probably looking for a 5 inch tablet with 3G and skype/google talk ... rather than strictly a phone (as I spend < £5 year on calls 8-) and my main use is for mobile internet access.
Rogue toilet takes out Norfolk server
Google preps Chrome fix to slay SSL-attacking BEAST
DNS hijack hits The Register: All well
Monday 5th September 2011 12:27 GMT
turning your equipment on and off again may help
Works for a lot of things to reset to a pre-configured state and its good to remind people of the simple solutions. Sometimes its easier to say "Dad, turn it off at the mains, wait a few seconds and then turn it on again" then to drive a few hundred miles just to perform hands-on diagnosis and reach the same conclusion.
I'm sure lots of enterprises still run weekly "reboot server to clear memory leak" etc housekeeping actions ... its sad but true .. fixing the symptom is cheaper than upgrading the software stack. It used to be said that "Microsoft fix #1" was reboot/powercycle .. its the fix of last resort for Unix/Linux boxes though.
My Smart Car has lost its marbles a couple of times refusing to change gear using its tiptronic controls .. so it was time to pull over, turn off and turn on again to fix .. interestingly it worked regardless of the number of windows I had opened.
Monday 5th September 2011 11:39 GMT
@Just you wait..
I'm 45 and have just noticed the glasses on / glasses off issue with my new Macbook Air 11" ... so I will have to keep using the "applekey +" keystrokes to enlarge the text until I get the firm to pay for varifocals.
Still not bad for 32 years of VDU squinting and I've always been myopic .. just waiting until I get 20/20 vision when I'm 80+
Acer claims first Core-i7 Ultrabook
Saturday 3rd September 2011 08:05 GMT
So can the 11" MBA
Mine has a 1.8ghz dual core i7 in it .. the wife loves it and has appropriated it !
Acer clearly didn't see the announcement from Apple back in July ... unless its a different core i7 that is i7++ or some other minor difference like a different intel model number.
I so much of an Apple clone though .. watch out for their lawyers.
World ostracizes firm that issued bogus Google credential
Thursday 1st September 2011 00:42 GMT
And on Windows ...
Use the following on all your PCs and servers ... (ought to work on all OS versions >= XP)
# sha1 hash is for DigiNotar Root CA
certmgr.exe -del -c -sha1 "c060ed44cbd881bd0ef86c0ba287ddcf8167478c" -s -r localMachine Root
# sha1 hash is for DigiNotar Root CA G2
certmgr.exe -del -c -sha1 "43d9bcb568e039d073a74a71d8511f7476089cc3" -s -r localMachine Root
to expunge the offending CA root certs from the system wide trusted root list.
Elgato readies iPad 2 TV tuner dongle
Tuesday 30th August 2011 16:31 GMT
Come on Elgato .. give us a DVB-T2 HD tuner PLEASSSSSEE!!
Its a question that gets raised on Elgato's forums regularly over the last few years and there is pent-up demand, so I don't know why they are not doing something about it ... they won't even say whether they are working on one 8-(
I have 4 Elgato tuners running in parallel under EyeTV and they are excellent .. just need a Freeview HD one and I'll be very happy.
Ofcom mulls smackdown for rogue religious TV channel
Here lies /^v.+b$/i
Profit-disaster CEO at Blue Coat: I'll get my coat
HP murders webOS tablets, phones
COMET WILL DEFINITELY NOT HIT EARTH – NASA
Giant iPhone 4 brings Mac OS X to the table
Smartphone images can hijack BlackBerry servers
Thursday 11th August 2011 22:05 GMT
Yet another reason...
For ensuring that the BES 'rendering' component is isolated on its own server(s) firewalled away from the rest of your BES infrastructure. Because the rendering service is on the BES infrastructure it is a potential backdoor on to a enterprise network.
This is not the first time the 'rendering' service has been a security hole .. PDF rendering has been an issue a number of times.
Tablets will overtake consumer PCs, says Fujitsu CTO
Tuesday 2nd August 2011 11:47 GMT
@We aren't all mindless zombies
You might not be but there are billions who are ... I've seen the movies and its not going to be pretty when they rise up. Now if it means giving them all slabs to stop them ripping my arms off then I'm all for them (slabs not zombies).
I could never be a zombie, I'm a vegetarian.
TV goes home, even when mobile
Is Facebook worth more than Google?
Entering a storage jail
Saturday 9th July 2011 18:47 GMT
iTunes music is DRM free
and has been since Jan 2009. Now try get the "rights owners" to drop DRM from films (since VHS macrovision the owners have imposed DRM on distributors) or the Book publishers.
So don't blame the distributors (Apple, Amazon, BBC, 4OD, etc) for the owners' licensing schemes.
The lending analogy does not work in the digital world as you are not lending your only copy, you are giving them a copy.
The right answer is to pitch the price low enough to make illegal copies a pointless risk .. Honest people would rather pay something for something.
I would rather pay for a DVD, rip a digital copy and keep the physical as a backup. The cost differential between physical and digital delivery (package design, manufacture and distribution) should be reflected in the purchase price but it's typically cheaper to buy the DVD rather than the digital download. And they wonder why piracy is rife.
Tablet fever cools as e-readers heat up
Ballmer leaves investors speechless in Seattle
Bluetooth goes 3D with Apple
Wednesday 22nd June 2011 12:32 GMT
3D Wellness?
3D Illness Shirley?
Beep beep .. incoming bluetooth connection .. heart monitor says you have just died .. either that or the sensor cable fell off.
I read "Wellness" as "Wellbeing" .. ahh give us a hug and a light a smelly candle and we will all be okay.
Oh well(ness), back to the high stress IT stuff; sitting in a sunny garden makes working on a crappy T61 laptop slightly easier to bear .. [note to self: where's my Pimms? Wimbledon's on soon 8-]
Does a flash motor make a man more desirable?
Apple iMac 27in
Friday 17th June 2011 14:20 GMT
@ it’s too good for you
Well that depends on whether you have kids or not .. if you have then you can neither afford nor have the time to appreciate it but if, like me, you are free of money-draining-dribbling-poo-bundles then this beautiful beast is a joy to behold. It also has an off-switch and adjustable volume, two things that ankle bitters could do with.
If my G5 croaks then I'm in the Market .. pity it keeps soldiering on though.
A sysadmin's top ten tales of woe
Thursday 16th June 2011 16:06 GMT
SMS alerts
Or when auto-raising alerts via SMS try to ensure you don't send out duplicates 8-(
My "quick hack" to dial-up the SMS message centre and send alerts to peoples' on-call mobiles went down a treat until one night hundreds of alerts were raised due to a mail queue overflowing .. said colleagues were deleting the messages from their phones for days after [10 years ago phones only held something like 10 SMSes at a time and so deleting a few hundred took a while we had to wait for them to be received in batches ... beep beep every few minutes 8-]
Suffice it to say another quick hack later and duplicates alerts were ignored for an hour or two before SMSing only one out !
iCloud: Big step for content management, but not for the cloud
Cloud iTunes DESTROYS music business FOREVER!
Friday 10th June 2011 15:26 GMT
"For me, rsync across my home network does just fine. ®"
And that's the great thing about Apple's iSync umm iCloud ... you get good syncing for various things for free and 5G of usable remote backup or application buffer space ... and all of that is opt-in and does stop you using other peoples' services. Plus if you lose network access then who cares as you have a local copy and any changes get resynced next time you get back online or plug in. It's a good strategy and will drive more Apple hardware purchases either directly or through halo effects. Apple may not be the first to do syncing (although they've done syncing on the Mac for years) they will probably execute it very well this time.
It's slightly surprising that web publishing is left off of the iCloud service list ... maybe there was no real uptake of it under MobileMe or earlier incarnations .. and there are loads of free self-flagellation servers readily available elsewhere.
Personally I can't wait for Lion + iOS5 + iCloud .. it's all looking very interesting .. convergence. Hopefully AppleTV will get a software boost and then all I want is a backlit MacBook Air to complete the set ... unless there is an iPad 3 retina display.
Smart Fortwo Electric Drive e-car
Friday 10th June 2011 08:41 GMT
In the boot obviously
Clearly you have never used or owned a Smart .. it has loads of room for shopping and two people and it turns on a six-pence.
It's ideal for Germans, Americans and an increasing number of Brits ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpFB56OB9gI
Or for Smart Arses ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi_CgGGDglY&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDU5BU_qSJU
Tuesday 7th June 2011 12:51 GMT
Mmmm .. nice
When my 8 year old smart 4 2 gives up I'd love to replace it with one of these ... not sure I could use it for holidays like I do now though (up to 400 miles per tank verses 84)
Agree with the idiot pedestrians bit, they jump out even when only 10 feet from a light controlled crossing (bring in Jay-Walking laws and book 'em Danno).
Also agree with the rear view mirror .. okay if you are 5 foot girly but not if you are 6 footer .. after 8 years its still the only thing I really dislike about the Smart (my wife hates the wimpy horn though).
Overall a Smart is a quality car and apart from the usual expensive parts (£500 for a steering wheel, £230 for a headlight unit), its a cracker of a vehicle and is really good at getting up country hills as well ... with ABS and Traction control it has been fantastic during the snow of the last two years.
Apple iCloud: Same old cage, new height
Thursday 9th June 2011 09:45 GMT
At last Matt gets it...
I have rarely agreed completely with Matt's essays but he is spot on with the iCloud analysis. iCloud is Apple's next generation lock-in and is primarily for the driving of sales of Apple hardware and it is a very clever one (AAPL will go north of $400 next year I'm sure B-). However, the lock-in is definitely voluntary (for extra utility) and really is about selling devices with memory in them to sync to and not about streaming and not about storing all your stuff in the sky (bits and pieces to aid in sharing and off device backups).
If the cloud goes down then you may not be able to auto sync or share new docs with colleagues and you might be without a me.com email address for a while. Certainly not the end of the world unlike GoogleApps.
Apple opens iCloud to world+dog
Tuesday 7th June 2011 13:27 GMT
Its for the 99% of everyone who don't have huge quantities of legally acquired media
Whilst 5Gb of FREE space is not enough for some people (like you and me with terrabytes of digital media) ... it will be more than enough for most people.
Plus remember that this 5Gb does not include ANY media (videos/music/tv shows) that is available from iTunes because when you subscribe to the iTunes Match service ($25/year) it checks your iTunes media and gives you a link to Apple's copy of the same media (albeit at 256Kbs AAC non-DRM). If you only buy media from iTunes then the Match service is not needed and (assuming I didn't mishear Steve Jobs) it also does not eat in to the 5Gb anyway.
So iCloud is really iCache or iBuffer or even just iSync; its not a big disk in the sky its a big device content synchronization service .. it should solve a number of frustrations with current mobile device management ... what it is not is a just big data bucket.
The Photo Stream is just that, a Stream of the last 1000 photos (or last 30 days) synced to the cloud .. its a big cut and paste buffer for photos (I think I'm right in saying it also does not come out of the 5Gb 'disk' space) ... its there to perform auto-sync between devices and if you want to permanently keep them on a device just move it to an on device album.
So Apple have thought about how the majority of users want to work with multiple devices and it does look very good ... the devil will be in the implementation detail .. however after the moanathon of MobileMe, I suspect Apple have learnt a valuable lesson and have been beta-testing this for months already. By saying "It just works" they have a lot to live up to this time.
The iWorks suite integration looks like Google Docs done right, i.e. with a thickish client but with seemless backups / cloud syncing and group sharing. I suspect iCloud will drive a big take up of iWorks apps.
The "No PC required" element of the setup and use of iDevices is excellent and is again all that is required for a large number of people who won't buy a mobile device because of the need to have a PC for backups/upgrades/media. Daily auto-backups over wifi .. another nice trick.
Apple's triple play (Lion / iOS 5 / iCloud) is certainly the best announcement from them for the last year ... personally I can't wait 'till Autumn to spend £22 on Lion and get a free iOS5 upgrade and get a free iCloud account... now where is the MacBook Air with backlit keyboard Steve?
Tuesday 7th June 2011 08:40 GMT
Syncing not streaming
The key part for me is that the iCloud service is mostly ISync with caching. You can store documents and device backups and 'copies' (symlinks) of your music BUT the permanent storage is still on your devices.
So it drives hardware sales (upsell to bigger capacity iPads etc) and a greater lock-in to Apple's ecosystem (which for most people will be met with open arms).
I'm interested in how the encryption works .. do Apple have a master key backdoor? Do they create a random symmetric key (to encrypt all the data stored) and then encrypt that key with your AppleID password?
What privacy is guaranteed in the terms and conditions? I'm sure that governments will be watching them very closely over that.
On it's own iCloud looks interesting (and free!) but taken with iOS5 (free?) and Lion (almost free) it is looking like a very interesting Autumn ... now I wonder if there going to be some new kit released then as well to help pay for all these free goodies?
Ten... Core i5 laptops
Tuesday 31st May 2011 10:27 GMT
TCO
How many of the non-Apple kit will be still usable in 4 or 5 years time? How many will have burnt out or smashed (accidental or MS induced deliberate bashing)? How many will have a 3 digit resell value even 2 years down the road? Sorry but the MacBook Pro is worth the money to me. I hate having to use a work's lenovo, its noisy, dusty, dreadful screen, gets very hot and needs a battery the size of a garden shed to get anything more than 3 hours out of it.
For me the unibody MacBook Pro is currently the best laptop to own (you can keep your 15-17" monsters .. I don't want to carry those around). Over the next year I suspect the Air will become the best mobile PC to own .. A graphics and speed bump is on its way (next few weeks no doubt) and if it has a backlit keyboard then I'm sold.
BenQ W1200 HD DLP projector
Comet owner boosted by closure rumours
'Upgraded' Apple iMacs lock out hard drive replacement
Monday 16th May 2011 00:11 GMT
@Laptop drives
Have to disagree about the 10 very tiny screws .. no problem undoing them and adding more memory or swapping the HDD for an SDD .. and the screws make the back firm and rigid (missus) to go with the rest of the superbly manufactured hardware design.
MBP unibody - best ever laptop I've used in 20 years of mobile computing and I'd get a Macbook Air if it had a backlit keyboard.
Renault readies sub-£7000 e-car for Blighty
UK.gov would pay to have benefit claimants' tattoos erased
Reg reader lost for words over blank HP keyboard
Is iPhone data collection legal?
Monday 2nd May 2011 18:05 GMT
And soon to be fixed ..
in iOS 4.3.3, which to quote "BGR" is rumoured to include ..
- The update will no longer back up the location database to iTunes.
- The size of the location database will be reduced.
- The location database will be deleted entirely when Location Services are turned off.
- Battery life improvements.
- iPod bug fixes.
The Sandy Bridge Hackintosh
Friday 29th April 2011 08:02 GMT
@guy in a turtleneck next to you is using
an iPad obviously.
Although I personally find turtlenecks too restrictive and StarCostaBucks coffee bitter/over-roasted .. my local highstreet cafe is nicer (alternatively McDonalds coffee's not bad and there's free wifi and plastic toys available, shame about the ankle biters though).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
