Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

Yousician is a software application that teaches you to play guitar. It is available for iPad, iPhone and Mac (and possibly other platforms). I have been trying out on my iPad because I imagine, and other reviewers have commented, that the iPhone screen is just too small to be practical.

It starts off slowly with a skill test, some basic notes and chords. Each “mission” starts off with a video that you have to watch, then you have to do the exercise. The app listens to your playing and checks you are playing the right note. If you hit a high enough percentage, you pass the mission and unlock the next one. If you fail, you have to retry.

A ball bounces between the notes to tell you when to play them. It falls at different rates though. It flies in an arc, and sometimes will come down steeper than others, so getting the timing spot on is very tricky. I sometimes felt like I was playing an arcade game rather than learning guitar. In the end I adopted slightly different strategies for timing my chords and my individual notes.

It is also slow to get going. I think I must have spent 2-3 hours on it just to get through the basic stuff and up to a standard that I found a challenge. This is despite the “skill tests” it recommended I took to get ahead. Also at one point it decided to remove the chord names and replace them with individual fingering, which was annoying, though thankfully disappeared after a few songs. After that I thought it got very difficult very fast, so it would be nicer to have a more adaptive curve.

Given it is so similar to Rocksmith, it is impossible not to compare it. It is not as well made as Rocksmith. You have to download each mission each time you play it – so even if you have done it before, it re-downloads it. Also all the videos are just embedded YouTube videos, so again you will need internet access for these. There is no offline mode.

It is difficult to gauge how accurate it is, because it could be me missing the notes, or it could genuinely be missing them. On the whole, it is fairly accurate. I started by playing with my guitar amp and the iPad’s microphone. This I found the timings difficult to get right. Eventually I plugged my Apogee Jam interface into the iPad and this made things much better.

It also allowed me to play chords wherever I wanted. For example it recommended I play A5 with the root note of the open 5th string. I played it on the more typical place of a closed power chord on the 6th string and it did not complain.

You are limited to about 30 minutes of game time per day on the free version. It’s not this straight forward though because you have to wait exactly 24 hours between free sessions, so you can only use this if you move your practice time back half an hour every day. This time is also interrupted by ads telling you to upgrade. The game doesn’t pause when these adds appear, so an add will finally disappear only to find you’re about to finish a song having missed all the notes.

Premium gives you unlimited access for £14.99 a month. When I first tried to upgrade to premium it failed every time, and I had to wait until the next day. It’s recurring billing and bills your iTunes account, though you can easily disable auto-renew in iTunes.

Summary

Yousician is like Rocksmith, only not as good. Given the price and the build quality, I would recommend going with Rocksmith instead, though Yousician certainly has its charms.

We’ve been using the Brand New Day theme for years now and we love it. It has a big happy picture of the sun, which is just the pick-me-up when your down because something is broken and needs fixing.

However, it does not work well on mobile devices. This is a real problem for us because if you’re on our site, it is often because your computer is broken and you are trying to fix it. So there is a good chance you are searching around on a mobile device to work out how to get it to turn back on again.

Our new theme works much better on mobile devices and provides a cleaner way to access the information. We hope you will like the change too!

CentOS does not always have VIM installed on it. This is easy to fix though:

yum install vim-common vim-enhanced vim-minimal

Run as sudo.

Recently I registered with the new Virgin Money credit card service. They have just taken over the running of their own credit cards from MBNA so everyone has to re-register on their new system.

I selected a 14-character password containing a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.

Five minutes later I was changing it to a simple easy-to-remember phrase. Why? Because every time I log in to my account I have to enter a set of certain digits from my password.

The problem is that I have no idea what my password is. It is safely secured away in 1password; I never look it at, I never know what it is. But thanks to Virgin Money’s so called security measures, much like other financial organisations do, I am instead forced to use a far more easily crackable password.

If you attempt to run php.exe on Windows you may get an error involving the following DLL.

MSVCR110.dll

The resolution to this is to install “Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 4”. Note that you should install the 32-bit version even if you are using a 64-bit operating system!

This can easily catch people out first time, however you can just install the 32-bit version over the top.

If you use self-signed certificates on cPanel and WHM, they will still expire each year. You may find yourself getting an email such as:

The SSL certificate for ftp on host.example.com will expire in less than 30 days.

Your server’s SSL certificate for ftp will expire in less than 30 days. You need to install a new certificate as soon as possible. You can install a new certificate using WHM’s “Manage Service SSL Certificates” interface: https://host.example.com:2087/scripts2/manageservicecrts (Main >> Service Configuration >> Manage Service SSL Certificates).

To resolve this, click the link as suggested by the email. Then, next to each service, click “Reset Certificate”. This will generate a fresh certificate and automatically install it.

Google Chrome is not the only application struggling with OS X Yosemite’s file dialog. When saving files in Coda, the dialog will continually fall off the bottom of the screen.

Currently the only known workaround for the issue is to switch to the simple view by clicking the up arrow next to the file name box, and then click it again to re-expand the dialog and then it will be probably sized again. However, you need to do this every time you save a file.

There is a bug in Apple’s OS X Yosemite in which the file dialog boxes grow larger than the screen. However, it does not seem Apple are in a rush to fix this.

The workaround is different for each application but for Google Chrome you can temporary solve it by running the following commands.

defaults delete com.google.Chrome NSNavPanelExpandedSizeForSaveMode
defaults delete com.google.Chrome NSNavPanelExpandedSizeForOpenMode

The box will continue to grow each time you use it, so you will have to run these commands again every time the box gets too big again.

After years of waiting, after every single tiny village around Leeds getting fibre, the city centre finally has fibre! What a glorious time we live in. Top marks to BT Openreach, they turned up when they said they would and got it sorted within a hour.

This was us before:

And then this was us after:

And now:

If it keeps increasing like this, I will have all the world’s bandwidth by Christmas!

I was dragging an image from my desktop into a folder when it happened to pass over my browser with Google open on it. Suddenly, Google suggested that I might want to search the web using the image.

How well it works is debatable, but it is certainly interesting.

For example, if I upload the image I use as my avatar I get a series of pages that that image is used on. It also shows me visually similar images, but none of them are me.

I can see that finding where an image has been used can be useful. Not sure about the similar images though. However, it works better if you use a photo of a celebrity. It identifies the person and then tries to find relevant pages.

The image I uploaded was just called 11.jpg and doesn’t have much metadata, so it is quite impressive that it worked all that out from the image.