Ah, so here’s why my shiny new lawnmower isn’t getting as much use as it might…
Our spaniel is sitting looking out of the patio door, and positively quivering with excitement…
Nibble
April 10th, 2018
Buster Keaton working downstairs
March 28th, 2018
Hope your browser can display this…
Zooming in the rain
March 28th, 2018
On Wednesdays, there’s an interesting group of catering vans that collect at the far end of the West Cambridge campus, and I like to go there for lunch.
But it’s a bit of a distance, and the weather today was bad, so it was important to find the most appropriate method of transportation…
Everything stops for tea
March 23rd, 2018
There are some tunes that are so catchy, they stick with you for ages.
I think I heard ‘Everything stops for tea’ about three or four decades ago, and probably only once. But the wonder of modern search engines is that they allow you to go back and renew your acquaintance with the things that formed those neural pathways all that time ago…
Adding custom ringtones to your iPhone using iTunes
March 19th, 2018
In case you’re Googling for it, or in case I forget how to do it…
If you search online, you can can find various articles about how to take an MP3 or AAC audio file and make a .M4R-format file which an iOS device can then use as a ringtone. I’ve had a bit of Gilbert & Sullivan as mine for years, and have probably infuriated and/or amused those around me in equal measure when my phone starts announcing that I am the Captain of the Pinafore…
I lost this, though, in a recent wipe and re-install of my phone, after which I discovered that iTunes no longer makes it at all obvious how to put these custom ringtones onto your device. It’s easy if you buy them on the iTunes store, of course, but otherwise no amount of dragging and dropping would get my old favourites into iTunes or onto my phone.
But it turns out that there is still a way, and it’s documented some way down on this Apple page. As a quick summary:
- Connect your phone to your computer, so it appears in the sidebar of your iTunes
- Go and find your ringtone(s) in the Finder or Windows Explorer and COPY them.
- Select the ‘Tones’ section of your device in iTunes and PASTE.
This works fine for me in iTunes 12.7 – no dragging and dropping needed. You should then see your ringtones, and be able to choose them in Settings > Sounds on the iPhone.
Inspection
March 18th, 2018
Tilly inspects the recent repairs to her castle walls…
Personalised echo chambers
March 18th, 2018
John’s column in the Observer this morning is a good one. Extract:
This doesn’t mean that YouTube’s owner (Google) is hell-bent on furthering extremism of all stripes. It isn’t. All it’s interested in is maximising advertising revenues. And underpinning the implicit logic of its recommender algorithms is evidence that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with – or perhaps to incendiary content in general.
So YouTube (like Facebook) is caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it’s embarrassed by the way in which it is being exploited by unsavoury actors (and also possibly worried about the longer-term threat of regulation); on the other hand, its bottom line is improved by increasing “user engagement” – ie, keeping people glued to YouTube.
Stormriders
March 9th, 2018
I’m in a lovely but slightly moist campsite in Norfolk. The climatic conditions are, I must admit, mitigated for us by the simply splendid heating system built into the campervan we’ve rented for a few days. We’re not really ‘roughing it’!
Anyway, inside the facilities block, where I’ve just been doing the washing up, there’s a large motto printed on the wall.
Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass.
It’s about learning to dance in the rain.
Yes. Amen to that!
Waiting for Summer
February 28th, 2018
The Snowdial
February 26th, 2018
Here’s a photo of snow melting in my front garden this afternoon. It occurs to me that, even without other clues such as the British number plate on my car, you could at least work out from this whether I was in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere. Can you see how?
The great moral dilemma of the age
February 11th, 2018
In the case of doubt over a particular item, is it a greater sin to recycle that which we ought not to recycle, or to leave unrecycled that which we ought to recycle?
Setting healthy boundaries for your child’s use of fire
February 10th, 2018
Here’s a thoroughly enjoyable piece in the New Yorker, providing guidance for concerned Palaeolithic parents. Extract:
You don’t want to be the bad guy, but you also want to make sure that your child engages in other activities, like mammoth hunting and the gathering of rocks and bones with which to make tools. So, how do you set appropriate boundaries for your child on fire usage without jeopardizing the family unit so crucial to the survival of the species? Here are some tips…
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