Apples Keynote Speech - Some Issues

I started watching Apples Keynotes speech and there seemed to be an issue with the sound and a women talking in the background in another language, I thought I would come back to it later when someone at Apple had sorted it out. When I later tried to access the Keynote speech from my iPad it closed Safari!!! I kept trying but could not get it to work, I imagine it was due to the amount of people trying to view the web site.

So I have not watched much of it and have only heard about what was said from blogs and tweets. The Apple watch looks better than I had expected, but still a bit chunky. The iPhone 6 is a bit disappointing with the camera sticking out, which I can imagine will scratch coffee tables. Will have to see it in the flesh before giving proper judgement.

Useless Windows Error Message

The other day I was working and tried to look up some help from an application and received the following error message below.

It looks like the latest version of Windows does not contain the ability to open the help file, but instead of giving a useful information to how the problem can be resolved (link did not help) it asks the question 'Was this helpful?'.

Once again this made me think what is going on at Microsoft that allows their software to pass the QA testing with messages like the one above.

Email scam from Broad Oak toiletries

I received an email a few days ago regarding an invoice from Broad Oak Toiletries. The email was very plain, but looked like a normal email. The email was from a person called Sue Mockridge and included an attached. At first I thought the person had just sent it to the wrong person and I considered forwarding it on to our accounts department, then I briefly thought about opening the invoice, but thank God I did not. After looking on the net I found out it was a malicious scam and deleted the email.

My advice to anyone is that if you receive an email you are not expecting with an attachment do not open it, that must be rule one. Best thing to do is use Google and check if anyone else has reported it, if not still do not open it, do a bit of research into the company it came from and even contact the company before opening it.

TV Guide app data usage very high

Recently I had a look at my mobile data usage on my Nexus 4 phone and was surprised to see in the last month the TV Guide app had used 100MB, this was surprising as I hardly use this app, the app size is only 2.2 MB so what else was using the data, I thought this was very strange and quickly removed the app from my phone. Think it would be nice for companies like this to tell users what they are doing that means high data usage when you are not actually using the app.

New iPlayer volume control on Samsung TV

Updated BBC iPlayer on our Samsung TV this week and although overall it looks like an improvement they have removed the volume control. The previous volume control was not very good, but removing it means you need to exit iPlayer to adjust the control then go back in. It also means you cannot mute the volume. Think they need to fix this major bug.

Updating iMac to Mavericks and Parallels Desktop 8

Last week I decided to make the jump and update my iMac to Mavericks. After using Microsoft Windows for years, I was a little nervous about such a major update. The download was about 5GB, which took about 40 minutes to download, then it needed to install. My main concern about the update was that I use Parallels Desktop 8 to run a Windows XP VM machine and that after the update there might be some issues with this. After the update I was surprised how little had changed and that everything just worked fine, including Parallels Desktop. Just wanted to write a quick blog entry to say that I had no issues with this update.

How Virgin Media could save customers money instead of increasing prices

Virgin media have just announced a price increase from February of 7%, this is way above the 2.2% inflation rate in the UK. I am not a Virgin Media customer and have no intention of becoming one, mainly because they are expensive and the people I know who use them do not recommend them.

They could however save a ton of money by not sending out massive promotional packs in A4 size envelopes packed with information that goes straight in the bin. I would have thought a company like Virgin would have been more innovative with how it does its marketing rather than sending huge amounts of junk mail. Come on Virgin and do something new to attract customers.

How is Twitter going to make money to justify its high share price

Twitter went public the other day with is price gaining just over 72% on the first day, the second it dropped about 7%, but is still 50 times the value of its sales. That means that Twitter has to have huge growth and increase in sales to justify this current share price, or what will most likely happen in the sorter term is the share price will fall, leaving some investors out of pocket.

Twitter should look at how it can increase turnover and usage, to justify the share value. A lot of people I know have tried twitter and have not got on with it and don't understand it, I can see there point of view and I only use twitter to tweet articles that I like. Maybe they need to promote twitter and make people realise it is not just for following people you know and minor celebs, but could be for following music bands or companies that give useful information. On that point I do find the problem with twitter is the amount of rubbish tweets that appear, maybe there should be a way to filter out tweets and only receive tweets other users have found useful by a rating method.

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few years with how twitter changes to make money and whether people will keep using it.