Category Archives: apple

Apple specific how-to’s

AirPlay? No play!

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So Apple have gone and changed the connector on the iPhone 5 and new iPads. As irritating as it is for those of us with spare charging cables and docks all over the place it does precipitate a move away from a dependency on cables.

With that in mind, and the fact that the kitchen dock was no longer any use, I thought it was time to dip a toe in the watery pool that is AirPlay (Apple’s proprietary technology that enables you to wirelessly connect to a device and stream content from your iDevice to it).

AirPlay enabled devices are quite expensive but prices are coming down. After a search of the internet, the reading of several dozen reviews and, most importantly an assessment of who actually has what in stock, I decided on the Sony SA-NS410. According to the reviews it was a good quality, easy to set up speaker that provided good quality sound.

Setup was relatively simple via an app on the phone and before long the speaker was connected to my wireless network and playing music that sounded good. Great I thought, now to show the family how it works. Look it’s easy, you just go into the music app and click on the AirPlay button and then select the… hold on. Where’s it gone!

There then followed about three hours of manual set up through a browser. Numerous resets. Assigning a manual ip address. Periods of brief working and relief then followed once again by a disappearing speaker.

I hate to admit defeat but I really couldn’t find a reason for the issue and, for once, the Internet let me down with nobody else reporting problems with this particular device.

At the end of my tether I decided the only option was to contact Sony support. I promptly registered, filled in the form and crossed my fingers.

I needn’t have worried! There was a slight delay due to timezone differences but I received a reply from a very helpful technician who went through a few options with me via email. It turns out that despite the user guide mentioning a WEP security key clearly in the “Setting Up for a Wireless Network” section WEP is actually not supported (which isn’t actually a bad thing as it is a very old encryption protocol from the very early days of WiFi). Simply changing my network to use WPA-PSK has fixed the problem and the speaker is now working as it should (as well as making my network more secure).

Whilst preparing this blog entry I returned to the Sony site and found an entry on trouble-shooting WiFi connections with this particular problem now very prominently mentioned!

Poppa G

iMovie 11 Photo Problem

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What a fun couple of hours I’ve just spent going around in circles!

The task was to create a video of a recent family celebration consisting of a couple of bits of video and a few photos. Not an onerous task I thought and one that was eminently suited to the integrated iLife suite on my Mac.

With all the source material in iPhoto it’s into iMovie I go; create the new project, import the material into the timeline from iPhoto, apply the theme, transitions and titles and preview the finished article.

It all looked great up until the point when the photos started to appear. Although the photos showed correctly on the timeline when it actually played it just previewed the same photo each time. Okay, maybe it’s a preview issue so I rendered the movie out to check; forty-five minutes later and the problems still there!

A thorough Internet search ensued and it seems I’m not the only one seeing this problem. That’s good I thought as there’s bound to be a solution somewhere; so started my quest to find it. There were many entries discussing clearing iMovie caches and removing .plist files and I tried them all to no avail; iMovie resolutely refused to show the actual photo that was clearly visible in its timeline.

Finally, in a desperate last-ditch attempt I exported the photos from iPhoto to a folder on my desktop (as mentioned in the penultimate post on the third page here). I then imported them into the timeline from there and replaced the originals from iPhoto. Success!

It’s interesting that the integrated iLife suite isn’t entirely integrated but at least I found a workaround that meant I could finish the movie and share it with the family. I love the internet!

Poppa G