daveydave

Snappy title, eh? I have one of these snazzy bits of kit plugged in to my PC for recording stuff in Presonus Studio One. It started to misbehave when I upgraded to Windows 10. There seems to be quite a few people around having some issues with the FireWire cards or the Saffire Mix Control software so when my setup started to act up, I hit the forums. The issue I was seeing was that Saffire Mix Control wouldn't open. The first thing I did was replace my FireWire card for one with a Texas Instruments chipset (TI TSB43AB22A) which seemed to fix things initially. But didn't. So it is possible that the original FireWire card (with VIA Fire VT6315 chipset) would be fine. I just can't be bothered to swap it back into the computer. The solution for me was to get Saffire Mix Control running in compatibility mode. I used the compatibility troubleshooter and the Windows 7 setting seems to work fine, Another issue that has shown itself is that I stopped getting sound out of the...

In a brief follow-up to an earlier post ( Time to replace the mobile ), I though it may be useful to outline how I use my mobile phone. Everyone uses their mobile differently because modern smartphones can do so many different things, so what I need from my mobile is likely to be different to what you need. This is how mine gets used: I drive to and from work, so that is around an hour of screen on/GPS time per day while I run Waze . Sadly, my current phone just will not charge when plugged into a 12v car charger, and I've tried a few. It is about 20 to 30 minutes walk from the car to the office, depending on the route, during which I am tracking progress using Endomondo and listening to music over Bluetooth. So that is another 40 to 60 minutes of GPS a day as well as sending music to my Bluetooth headset. During the day I may have a phone call or two, but that's not too common. Yes, using the phone as a phone is nowhere near the top of the usage list. Other than that ...

Ok, some time ago I mentioned that I was absolutely going to learn German. I mentioned how past language learning efforts had failed and how I proposed to succeed this time around. So how am I doing? Well, the title of this post probably gives you a rough idea. I'm at the very annoyed with myself  stage and have come to the conclusion that I can either get on with it, or stop pretending. I'm going former. One of the main problems I'm having is setting aside time. Solution: the car journey to work gives me at least 45 minutes a day to work with. But: some language courses aren't ideal for use in this situation because you really need to refer to the book. And so I introduce Michel Thomas. I say introduce, his courses have been around for decades but I've never used them before because they are 100% audio and I always want to be able to read a write too. However, they are 100% audio, so they should suit car-based study. I bought the Start German taster to try ou...