I was in conversation the other day with someone who was complaining about the short battery life of their iPhone. I remembered that I’d put an alert in my calendar for later this year to take my 6s, and Jenny’s SE down to the Apple Store to get a battery replacement under their “special offer” scheme.
This came about as a result of them changing the way the operating system (iOS) worked on older models – slowing them down – to retain battery life. This caused a bit of a stink at the time, and so Apple responded with a replacement programme that means a replacement battery would cost £25, as opposed to £79, through 2018.
Apple also issued an advisory note to tell users a little bit more about how batteries would cease to work at full performance in this note which also explained how you could manage performance – which is of course what they should have done before they implemented it in the background without telling anyone. This article tells you how you can monitor and manage your battery health.
So … if you have one of the affected models (iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone SE, iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus) you should consider taking advantage of the Battery Replacement Offer, but for a few people with a 6S, it could be a free replacement.
The Apple Store calls …
Category: Hardware & Devices
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iPhone Battery Replacement
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Amazon Echo one year on.
Hi,
After being an enthusiastic Amazon Echo user for the past year, I have to admit that I’m simply not enjoying her company so much any more.
As an enthusiastic user, I took out an extra subscription with Amazon so that I could upload my music to their servers so that I could access my CD collection through the devices. Recently I’ve had an email from them to tell me that they are discontinuing that service. Hours of wasted effort.
It was kind of cool asking Alexa to play certain tracks and certain tunes however once you realised that your success rate was only about 40% my enthusiasm soon waned.
I took out the extra Amazon Prime Unlimited subscription for a while so that I could listen to just about any track ever recorded. Thing is; and you old folks might relate to this ….trying to think of something inspiring out of fresh air isn’t all that easy any more. It is far easier to see your albums displayed on a tablet screen, offering some suggestions as to what you might like to listen to.
However, the most infuriating problem that I experienced was what I’ll call “The Tuesday Phenomenon.” My wife babysits on Tuesdays. Theoretically that gives me free time with my music collection. Often, on a Tuesday I’d ask Alexa to play a certain album only to find that it had lost network connection. It would then take about 30-45 minutes to get back into the groove by which time I’d often need some calming music to tend to my fraying nerves.
Amazon Echo. Great for asking for spellings. Pretty good at sums. Turning lights on and off is really cool but the music player simply isn’t anything but frustrating. -
Meltdown and Spectre: How chip hacks work
I was unable to explain that well how these vulnerabilities in the Intel chips was being exploited. On the plus side I didn’t say anything that was incorrect, but here’s a reasonably readable description of the problem and it’s implications to us all.
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Developments (generally rather expensive) in Digital TV display technology
In my breathless tour of Digital TV this week, I didn’t mention developments (generally rather expensive) in display technology – I should have. Along with 4K/UHD resolutions increasing the number of pixels on your screen, LG, Panasonic and Sony are introducing anew display technology called OLED whilst Samsung are promoting their alternative rather confusingly called QLED.
The article below explains the difference between the two technologies, and if you’ve got the dosh, you could trot along to John Lewis and buy one …
https://www.howtogeek.com/327047/whats-the-difference-between-oled-and-samsungs-qled-tvs/
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Protecting a USB stick
The subject of protecting a USB stick came up – I’d forgotten to provide the solution! As I suggested, in an earlier post, the answer is to create a Folder on the USB stick and protect the folder, not the stick.
Two articles here I think provide the solution. The first one proposes encrypting the contents and is probably the easiest, you must remember the encryption key though!!
A number of other alternatives are also provided in the second article …
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/password-protect-folder-windows/
… for me. I’d prefer to put stuff I’m worried about on a USB Disk (not a stick) and use the security software provided by the drive manufacturer, eg Western Digital.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/faq/id-3114794/password-protect-folder-windows.html