More Apple hating going on here this evening after the latest changes have left my iPhone without my playlists. I have already vowed never to buy anything Apple ever again as a result of broken functionality, built in obsolescence and cost but this is the final straw.

Mind you, Microsoft are not much better given they change the name of their products every week and practically force you to use their AI. Think I’ll just have to invest more time in Linux.

Anyway, back to Apple. Now I get the reason to split iTunes in to Apple Music and Apple Devices, that much makes sense to me. But when I installed Apple Devices and sync’d my phone, all my playlists disappeared apart from the one I just created in iTunes. I use these playlists on a daily basis so now I’m going to have to figure out how to get them back…

The music is still on the iPhone but that’s it.

Export playlists from Music and import into Devices…can’t export playlists from Music

Create playlists from scratch in Devices…can’t create playlists in Devices.

What a shit show.

Forever, I have been using a “home grown” way of storing my passwords. I’d like to think it’s secure! I only use it as a last resort as I try to remember as many passwords as possible — good for exercising the memory. Delegating skills to software makes you lose the skill.

Recently however, as a work task, I have been evaluating password managers and have come across Keeper.

This impressed me as a product, using modern algorithms and implementing passkeys. To be fair the other products I am evaluating (1Password and Bitwarden) also have that feature.

So I have installed Keeper as a trial and if I find it useful I may even buy a license. Install was simple enough as shown in these screenshots.

For years I have put up with intermittent power-offs on my QNAP. I’ve taken the motherboard out and believe the problem has been caused by dry joints or a faulty power socket on the motherboard. I’ve changed power supplies and re-soldered the connections several times but to no avail.

This time, major surgery. Removed the power connecter from the motherboard and replaced it with the same kind from my older QNAP. In fact I swapped them over so both circuit boards have freshly soldered power connectors.

Both now seem to be working. Time will tell!

Following from the last 2 posts I have discovered there is certainly a poor end of the scanning market.

I’ve used Epson printers and scanners always but when the ET-2550 stopped working because the inkpads were full (read throw it away) I vowed never to buy another. Can’t even use the scanner. I. glad I didn’t throw it away though because the scanning software that comes with the cheap HP I bought is rubbish.

Looks like I’ll have to grit my teeth and pay for a license to reset the Epson so I can continue to use the scanner at least. Grrrr.

Having moved into rental accomodation recently, I needed to purchase a broadband service. I chose Hyperoptic, which was in the building and a good deal. 150 Mbps down and symmetrical so 150 Mbps up.

One of the first things you do is of course https://hyperoptic.speedtest.net which showed a great download speed but only a paltry 0.7 Mbps upload speed. Tickets were duly raised with Hyperoptic.

As is transpires, however, the problem is not the WiFi service, it is my laptop. All other devices work fine. The issue is with the Lenovo T14s Gen 2 which I have been using since mid 2022. In general its been ok, but it often blue screens with DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE. Quite annoying.

Now it transpires that the Intel WiFi 6 AX201 hardware has known issues. Just Google for slow upload Intel AX201 to see the longrunning fail from Intel. I’ve tried every setting I can think of and all the suggestions on the web but to no avail. Basically at this point Lenovo is in the dog house and they shouldn’t expect any more orders from me!

I’m in the process of scanning the family albums for posterity. It’s a big job! Not only do I have my parent’s albums but my grandparents as well. I’ve figured out how to use Eson Scan 2 – have always used Epson Scan up to now. I think the key points are to use a bitmap format and a high resolution. It’s surprising how much more you can see in a picture when zoomed in on a screen.

The image above shows my grandad and I think my mum and aunt Elaine.c 1935.

So, I installed Windows 11 on the new(ish) laptop yesterday afternoon and happy to say it all went smoothly. So far no problems and it is in general ‘better’. Hopefully my Outlook, OneDrive and Edge will be more stable (although edge still won’t browse my local network using http).

Something changed in Edge which has meant I’ve had to start using Chrome again. Simply, Edge won’t go to sites on my home network, e.g. QNAP or router. No sign of any recent issues reported from a search (plenty of very old ones). I’ve played with a number of settings to no avail.

I mean, Outlook constantly hangs, OneDrive is playing up. Is it forcing me to move to Windows 11. I suppose it is.

I noticed my Zoom calls on work Surface Pro were getting consistently bad. I did a Speedtest from my personal laptop and discovered that whilst the download speed was good at 60 Mbps, the upload was rubbish at 0.5 Mbps.

I’m no stranger to this problem but one of the advantages of BT Broadband over Virgin was/is that it had better upload speeds and I’m pretty certain I got 5-10 Mbps when the system was new (a few years ago now).

I took my booster disc out of the equation. Doesn’t seem to do anything anyway.

I did a test from the router itself and it reported 20 Mbps uplink bandwidth. Bit of a discrepancy there!

Next test was to eliminate WiFi. Lo and behold, a Speedtest from a wired connection straigh into the hub gives:

Whereas on WiFi, same place same time:

Consistently.

Now I need to go and find out if it’s a generic problem or if there’s anything I can do about it as a result of my setup.

My new laptop has been doing a sterling job as a lab resource. I have created five Windows Server 2022 servers in a lab domain and used them to evaluate storage replication and stretched clusters. Having Hyper-V in Windows is such a massive boon, thinking back a few years ago when we had ESX and Linux based virtualisation.

The performance is great too, but then I did order the laptop with 16G and a 1TB SSD with this in mind.

When I’ve finished this piece of work I can get back to my programming book “Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming” by Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi. It’s quite an old book and uses a rather old Mozart programming language but I’ve got it working (thanks to Hyper-V again). The explanations are good and the exercises worthwhile.