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...

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...

I have pretty much made a decision about my next car. But before I go into details: some background. I have had 6 cars since 1998, from 5 different manufacturers: two petrol and four diesel. I bought my current car, a Ford Focus with a small turbo diesel lump up front, just over eighteen months ago and I made a conscious decision at that point to buy a nearly-new diesel with the intention of keeping it for five or six years. Whether I keep it for that long is now in doubt. Don't get me wrong, I really like the Focus. It is quiet, comfortable and has sufficient toys and gadgets to keep my inner geek happy, but how it is powered is giving me serious food for thought. The decision to buy diesel boiled down to higher mpg/lower CO2: the EuroV engines were supposed to be clean, certainly compared to the filthy things you could buy 20 years ago, when diesel sales in the UK were way behind those on the continent. But perceptions have changed recently. The VW emissions scandal has cast ...

I'm sure that I'm not alone in my first taste of a foreign language being at school, when I started being taught French around the age of 10. And I mean being taught  French rather than learning the thing. Classrooms full of teenagers are not great places to build a working relationship with a language, but at least they force you to do it. This has been an ongoing problem for me in my post-school attempts to learn languages. I have dabbled in a few: Japanese, Turkish and Spanish - but I haven't really got anywhere near fluent. I could hold a basic conversation in Japanese, even read and write a bit - night classes helped there. I could order food and drink in Turkish, again night classes were a big help. Spanish I struggled with - no night class. But, despite mixed results, I'm keen - really keen - to avoid being one of those English speakers who relies on the fact that "everyone speaks English". I really want to be able to converse in another language and ...

Here we go then, four months of mud-slinging and associated political nonsense in the lead up to what is a very significant decision. The outcome of the EU Referendum on 23 June is arguably far more important that last year's general election. So, right on cue, here I am with one of my infrequent, meandering and opinionated posts. The EU certainly has its issues. It is a complex beast where only a select few have a clue how it all fits together and only the Parliament is directly elected. Much is made of Europe's lack of democratic accountability, but then Westminster is hardly a beacon of democratic perfection, is it? I live in a safe Labour constituency, but I don't vote Labour, so my vote has zero effect on the make up of the House of Commons. That's hardly democratic. Neither is the House of Lords, which I have supported in the past, but is now so stuffed to the gunwales that its validity is rapidly diminishing in my eyes. Yes, the EU could do with restructuring a...

Over the years, I have used a  Netgear EVA8000  and a  Raspberry Pi Model B  running  XBMC  to get digital content to my TV, mainly from a NAS box but also from the internet. However, when Amazon sent me an offer for £30 off their new Amazon Fire TV  if I pre-ordered, I couldn't really say no: I'm already a Prime customer and it was time for a new gadget. After a wait of a few weeks, release day arrived and so did my device. It is a tiny thing and, because the remote control is not line-of-sight, you can hide it away in a cupboard should you prefer the minimalist look. It is very straightforward to use and the voice search feature works a treat. I did have a bit of a problem getting the thing to link to my Amazon account. It was listed on my account page, but the box itself didn't want to log in. A quick chat on the phone with a member of Amazon's support team sorted that out though. Really excellent service. If you have Prime membership, there...

Newcastle Arena. Friday, 24th October 2014. Ah yes, the Arena - the place where good music goes to die (it probably doesn't make much difference with bad music). Imagine if you will the crack of a snare drum. Drummer hits drum skin and from the PA comes the sound of, well... a snare drum. All good so far. However, half a second later the same sound hits your ears again, only this time reflected off and mangled by the hard surfaces inside this glorified cow shed. Lovely clear crack of the snare now sounds more like a dog farting in a wheelie bin. Now add in to the mix a selection of guitars, synths, brass and vocals. Mess. No professional musician should be forced to play in such a place. But I digress. He played a selection of tunes from his latest album, Caustic Love , which I really like. Obviously, he played songs from his earlier albums too, which I'm not so familiar with but there wasn't a duffer amongst them. We were even treated to a couple of strripped-down ac...

Yes. I read it . Thoughts in brief: It could have been significantly shorter. There is so much repetition throughout the document, it almost feels like a hopeful 'say it enough times and it shall be'. It is a curious blend of government white paper and political manifesto. I'm not convinced it works as a document. A huge amount of future policy up in the air - there is a lot of aspirational stuff devoid of any real detail. There are some very sizeable assumptions in there over which the Scottish Government has no real say. (e.g. EU membership, Sterling zone membership) The complexities of splitting things such as pensions are not really detailed. Look, I'm not a policy expert - or an anything expert for that matter - but the further through the document I got the more concerned I was about what is being offered here. There is much aspirational stuff with little or no detailed proposals how policy goals can be achieved. So many areas of policy seem to rely on the...

Great quote from Paddy Ashdown : "I think far too many politicians today come into politics in short pants straight out of school never having done anything else. Before I was elected I was a solider for 11 years, I was in the foreign service, I was a businessman, I was unemployed twice – I was actually elected to parliament from the unemployment register when I was given a temporary job as a youth worker. I’ve done a lot of things before I went into parliament. What I can say is that all of those things proved an accidental apprenticeship for the job that I then did. And I do think politics is diminished today by being far too professional, and having people telling us what to do who have never done a real job themselves." Can't argue with that. References: Original interview on ArabianBusiness.com via the Liberal Democrat Voice website.

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.

I am a big fan of rail travel. If it was down to me I'd be expanding the rail network, so you would rightly expect me to be in favour of HS2. Well... yes and no. The plus points are simple enough: faster joutney times between major cities; extra seating capacity for those passengers who find themselves standing before and after work; and a freeing up of space on the current main lines for regional services and freight. There are problems, however. Firstly, journey times aren't really that bad to and from London as it is, whereas if you want to travel from Newcastle to Liverpool, be prepared to write off a big chunk of your day. Secondly, HS2 will start at Euston not St Pancras, where the high speed link to Kent and the Channel Tunnel terminates. So, any through service from say Birmingham to Paris, wouldn't stop there. Very strange concept and perhaps more to do with protecting Eurostar's market share than constructing an integrated rail system. Compare that to Berlin...

It has been a few years since I posted about finding my 4th-great-grandfather. Although I was sure that I had found his death in 1852, I was never convinced about his birth, mainly because he had never been at home with the wife on census night. As as result, I knew his age at death, but not where he had been born. I had, during a visit to the National Archives in London, noted a few William Millers down from the register of seamen and one had seemed to be a fit: William Miller of South Shields, born 17 Dec 1795. This was wrong. Now then, I count myself very fortunate indeed to have a partner in crime as far as family tree research is concerned. A distant cousin living in Australia is looking at exactly the same William Miller as I am and, conveniently, he retired this year. Boy, has he put his time to (what I would class as) very good use. The key documents he found were William's claim for his Master's Certificate of Service and the resulting certificate itself which, bet...

And so begins another rambling post... You may have read my last post (which was about 3 months late in publishing) about fountain pens which included a brief reference to notebooks. Specifically, the A5 Leuchtturm1917 I am now using as my main notebook. This has turned out to be a really lovely book to use, with very nice features such as contents pages, archiving stickers and page numbers; and the paper is splendid to write on. I tend to carry a smaller A6 book around with me all the time and, recently, this has been a hardback Black n' Red. The paper in these books is lovely and smooth and takes fountain pen ink really well. But, as my current book was almost full, it was time to think about a replacement. There are many premium notebooks available these days, Rhodia and Moleskine being two fairly well known brands. My wife has a Rhodia (because I bought her one, not because she's that interested in this sort of thing) and I considered getting one of those, but then I ca...

I was given a fountain pen set for a birthday long ago, a lovely slim Elysée with matching rollerball. I've no idea where the latter has gone, but the former hadn't been out of the box much for many years, until I decided I was going to make proper use of it again a couple of years ago. Despite the French-sounding name, Elysée was a German brand which went out of business in around 2000. Sadly, despite still being a great writer, the top doesn't stay on very well any more; it is also very slim and light. It was time for something more substantial. As usual, I procrastinated about which make, style, etc. and I had really wanted a British pen if I could find one. But nothing was available at a sensible price, so I ended up looking at US maker, Sheaffer. They have a large range of good, solid pens and I did the usual "if I stretch another fiver, I can get this one" a couple of times. Anyway, I settled on a Sheaffer Prelude which I got at First Stop Stationers f...

I have an interest in law and, in particular, constitutional and administrative law - how the state works - and I have been thinking about this for a little while, because I'm odd like that. The current set up in the UK is not, to my mind, satisfactory. The UK government is far too centralised (although Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have a better set up thanks to devolution) and local authorities in England have too few useful powers to affect the lives of the people who live within their borders. This lack of influence over their own territory will become more important and more marked over the next couple of years as Scotland gains more powers either as an independent state, or with a more powerful devolved government. Here in the north east of England, we have already seen this imbalance at work when Amazon decided to set up a new site in Scotland rather than North Tyneside. Even now, the Scottish government has sufficient powers to significantly influence the lives o...

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...