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 ...

I use my mobile phone a lot and, even though I don't look at it quite so often now that I have a smartwatch, it still gets hammered every single day. For almost 3 years now, my digital companion has been an HTC One M8. A very able beast she is too, so much so that I felt no need to spend an extra £12 a month to upgrade to the HTC 10 last year. HTC. Ah yes, I have used many of your phones over the past few years. Between work and personal mobiles I have had the Hero, Desire, Desire S, One X and One M8. Great phones all. I like HTC; I like HTC Sense. Or at least I did. A system update a while back introduced more crapware that I didn't want and couldn't uninstall. Things that I had to go and disable because they wouldn't stop firing unwanted notifications at me: News Republic, Peel Remote, take a bow. However, once disabled, things got more or less back to normal. Apart from the odd time when she doesn't charge up overnight. And the increasing number of occasions wh...

Is anyone else having problems with their HTC One X following the OTA update to Android 4.2.2? Battery life on my phone is now awful; as is WiFi connectivity. The phone has, as a result, gone from brilliant to barely fit for purpose. This is most annoying to say the least. Ok, I am at the end of my contract. Yes, I can start hunting around for a new phone. But I want to do that in my own time, not rush it because of some software update gone bad.

Back in October I posted about replacing Ubuntu on my Dell Mini 9 because it was just getting too much for the poor little netbook to cope with. I went into some detail about installing Chromium OS (different to Chrome OS) which was a bit of a chore, finally installed, but then really didn't do anything for me. So I removed that and installed Joli OS instead. Joli OS is Linux based, syncronises with your JoliCloud account which allows you to have the same interface / applications / etc. on your computer and through a web interface (say, on a Windows box). It's interesting and quite nicely done, but it hasn't inspired me to make any more use of the Mini 9, which I suspect will now be heading to eBay to help fund a Google Nexus 10. References: http://www.jolicloud.com/

I've had my Dell Mini 9 for 3 or 4 years now. It came installed with Ubuntu 8.10 and I've upgraded it every April and October ever since. This has been mostly fine (apart from the occasional WiFi glitch) until recently. I have been running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS since April, but recently system updates have been causing problems and last week I just couldn't get it to update properly at all. So, I thought I could either revert to Ubuntu 11.10, or try something else. As a Google Chrome user, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at Chrome OS, which the Dell team had conveniently ported for the Mini 9. It took far longer to install than expected due to a small but significant error in the installation. This led to a trawl of the interwebs for a fix. Here I present my mashup of useful information (with references at the end). If it doesn't work for you, please let me know and I'll investigate. Onwards: Download the archive (ChromiumOS_x86_April15_2012.img....

I have at various times over the past few months had a Kindle in my Amazon basket, but have managed to summon the strength to remove it. Last week, I finally gave up resisting. The idea of an eBook reader has appealed for a while. My Dad got a Sony Reader a couple of years ago and he really likes it. He's never actually bought any books for it yet (plus it's impossible for me to buy him one indirectly for a present) but he's been happily working his way through the sizable collection of free classics that are supplied with the device. Of course, you can carry a lot of books around with you in one of these things. Kindle plus points? Well, it's compact, the screen is lovely and clear to read and it is very easy to get books onto the Kindle: you don’t have to use dreadful software to get books onto the thing. So the system works (wake up Sony), the books are not stupidly overpriced (i.e. more than a hardback - wake up Waterstones) and, though you can easily find books fo...

Around fifteen years ago, a 28" television rattled off the Philips production line - in an era where the UK just about had 5 terrestrial channels. Tonight, it showed me video from the internet. Here's how: The internet arrives from the outside world through a filter and into an ADSL router. Out of the router via a short length of network cable, it enters a powerline network adapter and through the domestic 240v power system at 130Mbps. At the other end it comes out the socket, into a 4-port adapter and through more Cat5 to the FreeSat box. There, it travels the short distance to the TV through a SCART lead and lo... BBC iPlayer arrives on the screen. It may not be a holiday on the moon, but it's a little bit of future.

Technically, the T-Mobile G2 Touch , but it's an HTC Hero really. First, I'll tell you where I'm approaching this from. I have been using a Nokia N95 for almost 2 years and I use pretty much all the features on my phone: GPS, web browser, email integration, etc... The N95 does the job very nicely, so much so that when I was due to upgrade last year, I didn't. Yes, it has its problems (I'm not a great fan of Symbian ), but it is a very effective package. So, I was interested to see how much better Google's Android system and the new hardware were. The company I work for has just kitted out its staff with Heros. We use Google Apps to service our email, contacts, calendar requirements and as Android is a Google product, you'd expect these things to work together pretty seamlessly. And yes, they do. Setting up the phone to talk to my Google account was simple and in no time all my contacts, emails, etc. were synchronised. Whatever tools, gadgets and applicat...

For those of out there who have one of these phones (or are thinking of getting one) the GPS functionality appears to be a nice little bonus. However, if your phone is anything like mine, it probably had the worst possible settings by default, making signal acquisition and absolute nightmare - easily taking 10 minutes to get a position lock. Nice and easy to fix though: Go to the Positioning settings through the menu (Tools/Settings/General/Positioning), select Positioning server , and then Access point . If you're with 02-UK you'll have 3 options: O2 MMS, 02 Mobile Web and O2 WAP (I guess other networks offer a similar choice) and the current setting will probably be WAP. This is far too slow, so change to O2 Mobile Web which uses GPRS or 3G. Bingo - much quicker initialisation of your GPS and suddenly it's a useful gadget.