Category: General

I’ve stared watching WandaVision. I seem to be missing certain key plot points and I think it’s becUse I’ve never seen the Marvel Cinematic Universe in its complete form. Sure, I’ve seen a few – the Iron Mans, the Guardians of the Galaxy etc but not them all – and especially not the most recent ones including End Game.

Thanks to Disney+ I’m now in a position to start watching the majority of them, and in some semblance of order. Thanks to techradar I’ve managed to get the general list of what to watch and when – and I’ll update this list as I watch them.

On this list there are a few that aren’t listed on Disney+. Gotta love movie rights.

• Captain America: The First Avenger
• Captain Marvel
• Iron Man
• Iron Man 2
• The Incredible Hulk (Netflix UK)
• Thor
• The Avengers
• Iron Man 3
• Thor: Dark World
• Captain America: Winter Soldier
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
• Avengers: Age of Ultron
• Ant-Man
• Captain America: Civil War
• Spider-Man: Homecoming (Sky Cinema)
• Doctor Strange
• Black Widow
• Black Panther
• Thor: Ragnarok
• Avengers: Infinity War
• Ant-Man and The Wasp
• Avengers: Endgame
• Spider-Man: Far From Home
• Shang-Chi
• Eternals
• Spider Man: No Way Home

Update: 3 down. One feature I’m loving is that Disney+, much like most streaming services offer a “Skip” button. Usually it’s to skip the opening title of a TV show. They’ve enabled it for the end of the Marvel (and possibly other) movies.

Let’s see how long it takes me!

I’ve said before about how much I enjoy playing the game Destiny, and, to a much smaller extent, its successor Destiny 2. I used to be an avid player — jumping on for a few hours a night, playing with a clan, running strikes, missions and raids.

I was a late start into Destiny. I remember buying the base game just before House of Wolves launched. That meant I missed out on the real experience of running Vault of Glass first.

I was never a PvP person. I enjoyed the stories, the character building, the worlds, the music and the exploitability the PvE experience had to offer. After playing by myself a bit I got into a clan – Legion of Morn (Which sadly is no more) after watching Brendan on Twitch. LoM were great with a few really active players and I was always able to jump on and have a run at some PvE activity. The whole community surround Destiny at the time was phenomenal. Bungie had a pretty open API that allowed people to build incredible applications. Ones that transferred gear to your characters or gave you insights into how you or other people played, and even how much time you spent on Destiny in various activities.

I ran my first raid, Vault of Glass, away back 03/03/2016, and then various raids since then. My favourite of all was Kings Fall. A proper, behemoth of an activity that replied on multiple people doing multiple things, with everyone having to take their turn – so you could always be the one who did certain things thanks to the mechanics. I only ever completed Kings Fall 4 times but man, I still reminisce on it fondly.

Destiny 2 then came out and despite being better looking, with better playability, something just didn’t strike the same feelings as Destiny 1 did. I went with my clan into Destiny 2 full of wonder, but very quickly it was apparent that some decisions had been made by Bungie that put the whole game in jeopardy — not from a “this game is going to crash” type thing, more of a “this game is about to lose all its player base”.

Destiny 2 has always had 2 sides. PvE (Player vs Everything – where you normally fight or battle computer based opponents) and PvP (Player vs Player, where you would fight against other Destiny players from around the world), and for a while, it seemed as though PvP wash the driving force behind the decisions Bungie was making, and it affected a large portion of the player base — me included.

Destiny 2 was the start of me realising that it’s not the game I started playing. It’s not the game I enjoyed playing. I’ve forced myself time and time again to play Destiny 2, having now clocked more hours in it vs Destiny, and I still just don’t feel the same about it. Some missions are brilliant. The opening story and subsequent story missions have been phenomenal, but more recently the stories just don’t feel like they have the same depth or planning as they used to.

Its a shame. I still love the stories. I still love the lore. I love the background, almost everything about it apart from playing the game. I’ll happily read the lore entries, and watch other people play – anything to do with Destiny. Apart from play it.

That saddens me.

I don’t post too much personal stuff on this site. I never have. However, I’m getting married this year, and, as is the done thing now, I’ve we’ve decided to have a wedding website.

I’m not going to post a link to it, again – personal, but I am happy to discuss what I’ve done and how I’ve done it.

First off, I had to figure out what the website would be for – there’s the standard of letting guests know about the location, the date, the time, the plan, the food etc – and I wanted it to be custom. I’ve never been one to pick an off-the-shelf product when I can roll my sleeves up and get handy with code.

I also wanted an RSVP system – something fast and efficient that would be easy to use.

I started by looking at other sites. We have a few weddings to attend this year and browsed a few of the sites offered. They all offered the functionality I was looking for but just not what we wanted.

I started off with hosting. As per this post, I’ve now found decent, reliable hosting at a frankly absurd price (£1 per month! – Affiliate link). As long as you have some System Administration and Security know-how – its a cinch to set up.

I’ve also bought myself an email hosting service that was discounted during Black Friday from MXRoute. It came to a total of $10 annually. It also now routes most of my other mail. This is also important as I didn’t want to use the built in PHP Mailer.

Next, I went with the tried and tested versatile can-do-anything site maker, WordPress. I had toyed with the idea of self coding everything but after seeing what was available, there was absolutely no need.

I kept the standard theme from WordPress, Twenty Nineteen and set about making the pages. My next hurdle was the RSVP, and there’s a plugin that’s designed just for that, which I ended up getting direct from the authors site – however it looks like I managed that timing particularly well as they only offer it via the WordPress site now. Functionality looks similar but your mileage may vary.

To keep the whole lot safe I’ve installed a couple of more security conscious plug-ins to stop spray and focused attacks, and replaced the built in wpmail() function with a plugin that allows me to specify my own mail server.

Designing the invites was done via a Wedding stationary company, but for the RSVP code also came in handy. I created a very small snippet that took a selection of letters (with obvious easy-to-mistake letters removed) and set about making unique 3 letter codes for each guest to RSVP. That, coupled with an Excel spreadsheet to get all the data in a nice format meant a bulk upload to the RSVP plugin was easy.

For making the RSVP cards I decided to purchase a small Brother QL-700 – normally £40 but I managed to get a (hardly) used one for £20. 62mm labels with unlimited length came in at a pitiful £5. The Brother software is actually pretty flexible and can take an Excel (or CSV) file as an input database and allowed me to print, to sticky labels. I made use of the append

(C1 & "TEXT" & C2)

function in excel to get all the individual columns set the way I like and the software allowed certain columns to be input as a QR code.

It turned the Excel spreadsheet from similar to this

to this

IMAGE

And allows labels for postage to be printed.

The website will stay the way it is until the day of the wedding, at which point I’ll make the whole thing a PDF document, and remove the site and replace it with any images that are shared with us by our friends and family attending, with an option to download the original in a PDF form.

Wow. 2 years since my last post. This wont be a long post, or interesting, however I am surprised it’s been exactly 2 years since I last wrote on here.

Funny thing is, I’ve spent the last few hours looking at alternatives for WordPress. No idea why – I think I just fancied a change. Looks like I better write more before I worry about what backend the site uses!

There will be updates. I don’t know when, or have a plan for them, but they will involve my YouTube channel, my PiDashCam project (which is coming along… slowly), my 3D Printer(and the amount of issues it comes with) and other boring stuff that most people will probably not find at all interesting.

Until then!

So I decided to purchase an SSD for my Mac mini using some of the Amazon Vouchers I received for Christmas. After much research, I decided on the Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD from Amazon UK, which, at the time came in at £85.80. I bought a small fitting kit from eBay for £10.

I’ve uploaded a video to youtube. It is a highly sped-up version of me installing a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD. I run a pretty standard 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 Mac mini, with 16Gb RAM that I installed as soon as I purchased the machine.

You need an additional kit to fit the hard drive, which I purchased from eBay for £10. Beware however. The kit I purchased came with everything I needed, but the rubber grommets were too stiff and thick! I had to cut one grommet in half which fixed the issue.

All in, it took me about an hour to do taking my time and verifying everything I was doing with the iFixit site.

Before starting, my primary and pre-installed (1Tb) hard drive was showing as the bottom hard drive caddy in System Information.

On opening the mini, the Hard Drive was sitting at the top of the caddy, which, when the mini is sitting the right way up, would make it the bottom drive. The original SATA cable was plugged into the left port as you look at the mini being disassembled, which is the one nearest the bluetooth and Wifi antenna connector.

Eventually I put the 1Tb Hard Drive into the upper bay, transferring the black sheath around the original Hard Drive to the new SSD, and used the new SATA cable for the existing Hard Drive. I then put the new SSD in the bottom part of the caddy and used the existing SATA cable.

I swapped the cables as I read a few stories about read/write errors using third party SATA cables in the mini that only affected SSD drives. Better being safe than sorry!

I have a full video of my installation, including the issue with the grommets.

Before starting, I took a quick video to see how long it took to boot. My start was switching the mini on. The Stop mark was when the TomTom update helper popped up letting me know I had updates flashed onto the screen. I was a few milliseconds slow in stopping the video after the SSD install, but even with the time given, its still an astonishing difference.

Mac mini with no SSD boot time: 3 minutes, 15 Seconds.

Mac mini with SSD boot time: 56 Seconds.

I reckon thats near to a 72% speed increase in the boot time alone.

Generally I keep the mini running 24/7, so boot up times are not all that important, but the difference in software starting is astounding. iPhoto loads lightning fast, as does pixelmator. iMovie also. Other apps don’t even blink!

I’ll give it a few months and measure the performance again to see if it can keep it up.

Its been said many many many times that the App store is broken. Several of the podcasts I listen to have discussed it at length. The search is terrible. The ranking system is awful. For new apps, it must be extremely hard to gain any traction.

I’m not an App developer (as much as I wish I was), but from a user perspective both the iOS and the Mac App Store are pretty painful to use.

Don’t get me wrong, if the App has a unique name, its pretty easy to find. It’s even better if its on one of the front pages. Apart from that? Good Luck.

One of the issues I have with both versions of the Store is the lack of interoperability.

I was looking at the Desk App online, via the developers web site. It looked pretty neat, had what looked like a good feature set, but no price. To see the price, I had to check the Mac App Store.

At the time, I was on my iPhone, and not near a computer (I use a Mac mini, so its not overly portable). Safari on my iPhone detected it was an App Store link, and fired up the iOS store, where I got the ever so helpful “Desk […] is only available on OS X” with no price. There is a handy “Learn more about this App” link, however that just takes me back to the developers website, desk.pm.

This isn’t directed at the developer of the App, but at the App Store itself. It just put off a potential impulse sale until I was back at my Mac.

I completley forgot about the App until just now, when I was using my Mac. I was installing Xcode, and on the main page of the Mac App Store, there was a featured App called Notability, tagged as “App of the Year”. Reading the description, I saw that it was both on sale and that there is an iOS version of the App.

Now, the reason for this whole post. Even though these apps are from the same developer, and will most probably be used together, nowhere in the Mac App Store (or the iOS App Store) does it provide an easy link to view the App for the different platform, nor provide an option to purchase it immediately.

Likewise (and again, I’m not a developer) I’m guessing that App Bundles can’t be used for cross-platform purchases.

It seems like Apple is missing a trick here. And for the record – I still haven’t purchased desk.