My iPhone 6 Home Screen

The last time I did one of these was back in 2013 not too long after the iPhone 5 was released, so we’re definitely long overdue for an update on my home screen. I think it’s interesting how this kind of thing changes over time, either because apps stop getting updated, better alternatives come along, or my own usage patterns change. Either way, let’s get into the nitty gritty.

I don’t have a definitive screenshot of my very first iPhone 6 Home screen, but I think is the closest thing, and it’s certainly the only home screen screenshot from just after the iPhone 6 release back in September 2014. As you can see, not that much has changed from the iPhone 5 home screen: besides adding another row of apps, introducing a whole new dilemma for home screen icon organisation, I’m more or less using the same apps.

Old favourites Fantastical, Clear, Facebook, Boxie, Instapaper, Soulver, Notesy, Vesper, and Pocket Weather Australia all make a return, and Tweetbot retains its coveted number-one spot on the dock. This being a year after the introduction of iOS 7, most apps and their icons have made the jump to feature the divisive flat design.

Changes to apps between my iPhone 5 and iPhone 6 include swapping out the much-loved, but unfortunately no longer updated Articles for the surprisingly great official Wikipedia app, which has all the features I care about in a mobile Wikipedia interface. Following the developer joining Apple, Articles isn’t the first app that was abandoned, and it certainly won’t be the last to be swapped out for a more modern alternative.

The demise of App Dot Net also saw the removal of Felix from my home screen. A pity and a damn shame it’s no longer available in any shape or form, as I’d rate Felix in my top five iPhone apps of all time based on aesthetics and usability alone despite the fact it was tied to a promising, if ultimately doomed, social network.

Sometime in 2014, Foursquare decided to split its app into two. Foursquare became the app for place recommendations, while Swarm was the gamified version, the one you used to check into places and collect mayorships based on how many times you had been there recently. Because the mayorships and check-ins was the original reason I joined Foursquare, I decided to keep Swarm on my home screen. Foursquare was relegated to a folder.

Threes is the only game to feature on my home screen, but mostly because it’s perfect for the in-between moments that life sometimes gives you.

Note that I’m still using multiple pages of home screens, with single icons on the first home screen, some folders on the second, and mostly games on the third.

Subscriptions (and Apple Music)

We’ll get back to the agony and ecstasy of personal transport in a bit, but I wanted to do a quick write up about subscriptions (and Apple Music).

I have something of an aversion to subscriptions.

It’s a bit of a dilemma for me, because while I get that you need to pay for things, the idea that I have to continue paying to get access to a piece of software or, to a lesser degree, some service, is kind of scary. I realise software development isn’t free, and subscriptions make for attractive revenue streams for developers who constantly work on new features, but not enough to release proper upgrade versions, but traditionally, paying an upfront cost for something and then owning it until the day you die is still somehow more palatable.

Maybe it’s just because we’ve paid upfront for software for so long that makes this idea that you need to keep paying or lose access to the stuff that you’ve worked on seem so foreign. Office 365 isn’t so bad in that you can still open and view documents created with the office suite, but even when the price of the subscription makes the cost the same over time, it’s still a hard pill to swallow.

At the time, the Photography Plan for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop made a lot of sense. I recently purchased Lightroom 5 about a year after Lightroom 4, and at that stage I was paying about $100/year for Lightroom, so I’d essentially be paying $20/year extra for Photoshop which seemed like a great deal. Unfortunately, a few things have made this less attractive over time.

For one, Adobe hasn’t released a new version of Lightroom since 2015, so I’ve ended up paying more than those who picked up the standalone version. I also haven’t used Photoshop as much as I thought I would have, making that “added value” null and void, and to top it all off, Adobe has slowly increased prices. New subscriptions to the Adobe Photography Plan are currently $14.29/month, which starts to eat into that extra value of Photoshop, especially if you’re only using it a few times a year.

So that’s software, what about services? Things get a little more complicated when we’re talking about services. I don’t watch enough mainstream TV to subscribe to streaming services like Netflix or any of the other Australian offerings, and even though there are some great streaming services for anime, I’ve never really been able to reconcile paying a monthly fee for their entire library when I only want to watch one or two shows.

I think one of the main problems I have with subscriptions is that most of the time, I’d rather pay for an entire year upfront, instead of a month at a time. It’s weird, but I think I have an easier time justifying $120/year than I do $10 a month, especially if I’m getting some kind of discount that makes the annual option even more appealing.

How does all of this apply to Apple Music? To answer that question, we kind of need to talk about Spotify first…

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The Xiaomi M365 Electric Scooter, Part II: Electric Boogaloo

This post is part two of my experience with the Xiaomi M365 electric scooter. Reading part one is recommended, but not necessary.

As much as I enjoy scooting around on the Xiaomi M365 electric scooter, I find it very difficult to recommend to someone who wants to pick up something for personal transport. Some of it has to do with quality control, some of it has to do with design flaws, but ultimately, the reliability just wasn’t there for the model/revision I purchased back in January 2017 (more on this later).

It’s February, 2017. I’m barely a few weeks into electric scooter ownership, a total of 70KMs on the clock, when I scoot right into my first show-stopping issue: a flat rear tyre. At first I have no idea what’s wrong. I’m minding my own business, enjoying the joys of personal transport and riding along, when suddenly the back feels sluggish. It isn’t until I get home that I realise that the rear tyre is looking a little flat. I don’t even own a bike pump, so I can’t see what the issue might be.

She’s flat, Jim.

A quick trip to the local bike shop and I now own a bike pump. But there’s more bad news: while the tyre inflates, as soon as I inflate it to a certain point, it deflates again. Kinda weird. I’m no mechanic, but at this point I’m thinking it’s the inner tube — there’s no signs of a puncture or any other kind of damage on the rear tyre itself, so it must be the inner tube, right?

Tyre, wheel, and inner tube. Getting them apart was a feat in and of itself.

I get no help from the place of purchase (unless you’re counting “take it to the local scooter repair place” as help), so I pick up a few inner tubes I think will fit from Ali Express. A few tyres, while I’m at it, just in case. A few weeks go by; shipping from China is slow, and I am impatient. I set aside a weekend to do the deed, and following an afternoon of the ugliest work I’ve ever done, I get the rear wheel of the scooter, the tyre off the wheel, and replace the inner tube. The replacement valve sticks out a little more than the previous one, but it’s nothing that isn’t fixed by a cable tie.

One repaired rear wheel, now with cable tie to prevent the new valve from contacting the chassis.

Not exactly a heads-up display, but works in a pinch for working out where I want to go.

My suspicions were right; some kind of split in the inner tube that only opened when it was filled with air was preventing it from inflating all the way. Probably a manufacturing defect, but we’re back in business, and that’s all that matters. And for a while, everything is great. I get a case for my iPhone and a little velco, and pretty soon I have my own on-board computer that I can use for navigation.

I’ve started noticing that the range indicator has become less and less inaccurate over time. Strangely, it doesn’t seem to affect my actual range – even with 0KM showing, I can still scoot along, just more slowly than normal. I pass it off as the battery needing calibration or something. Then it happens — with 100KMs on the clock, I run into my second show-stopping issue. One day, the scooter just stops turning on. And with no way to turn it on, there’s no way to charge the battery.

Unfortunately, things get a little complicated here as now electricity is involved, and I’m no electrical engineer. I open up the scooter anyway, and nothing seems particularly broken that would indicate a major fault with the battery. I get the retailer involved again, and this time they’re nice enough to send out a replacement battery. I discover the product page for the electric scooter now has a warning about only using 220V mains to charge the scooter that definitely wasn’t there when I purchased it back in January. I wonder why the warning was added, and theorise that the higher charging voltage has worn the battery down somehow. Nothing on the internet I can find indicates what kind of an effect higher input voltage would have on a universal power adapter (which definitely says it’s compatible with Australian 240V mains), so I can only speculate.

Weeks pass. While I’m waiting for a replacement battery to arrive, I find a French blog about the Xiaomi M365, including detailing issues about the battery and fuses. I discover that people other than myself have had issues with the battery; fuses that have failed, or faulty connections which mean the proper voltage isn’t provided to the electrics, which means the scooter doesn’t turn on. Hundreds of pages on a Spanish forum say that there’s a design flaw within the regenerative braking system which results in a fuse blowing if too much current is passed to the battery at a time, or when current is passed to the battery when it’s already full. There’s plenty of useful stuff there too, including all of the mods people have done to their scooter, but none of it is particularly helpful. I will point out the 149-page unofficial user’s guide PDF that they’ve put together for the scooter, featuring all kinds of information from people who have taken their scooters apart and put them back together again. It’s entirely in Spanish, but there’s enough photos that you should get a good idea of what you’re looking at.

At the end of May, the replacement battery arrives. It’s basically identical to the one I pull out of the scooter, with the important distinction that this one actually works. With a working battery in the scooter, I take apart the old battery and test it using instructions from the Spanish forum. It seems normal enough — the output is 42V, the fuse seems to be intact, so perhaps the battery cells themselves that are dead.

I take it pretty easy on the scooter for a few weeks, only riding it to and from the Valley on weekends for one of my weekly grocery runs. The thrill of riding the electric scooter is now tempered by the anxiety that this will battery will likely fail as well. I contemplate buying a voltage converter so I can charge the scooter using 220V. But a good quality one is about $200, and you can understand my hesitation on spending even more money on something that has already had so many issues with less than 200 KMs on the clock. For now, I’m just thankful that the scooter is back in the land of the living.

It’s September, and I’m riding the scooter into work on a bright Saturday morning. I brake to come to stop at a pedestrian crossing 200 metres from work, and while I’m almost stopped, I suddenly lose all braking power. I don’t notice something is wrong until the light turns green; I push off into the pedestrian crossing, press the accelerator, only for nothing to happen. I try pressing the power button in the middle of the road, but nothing happens. She’s dead, Jim, and I spend the rest of the 200m kicking my scooter along, and cursing the time I decided to buy an electric scooter.

By this time, you can probably understand I’ve had enough. The scooter doesn’t turn on, and frankly, I don’t care. It’s probably a blown fuse, thanks to the issue that decides to pass power to the battery when you’re braking. If I wanted to, I could probably swap the controller board from my old battery into the new battery, but I’m finding it hard to muster up the motivation to spend time and energy on a product that has already proven to be unreliable.

For what it’s worth, there’s speculation on the internet that later revisions of the M365, or versions with a certain firmware, have fixed the issue where the regenerative breaking will attempt to push more power to the battery than it can handle. As far as I’m aware, I was using the latest scooter and BMS firmware available, and still managed to (probably) blow a fuse on my battery, so I’m not sure how much stock you can put in that speculation. It’s also possible that I got a second dud battery, but the manufacturing dates on both batteries differ by about six months, so I’m not sure what else would have made a difference in terms of reliability. And plus, it was working fine for a few weeks, even if I was only riding it once or twice per week.

It was fun while it lasted, but maybe I’ll just suck it up and buy a bike next time. Or an electric skateboard – but that’s a story for another time.

The Xiaomi M365 Electric Scooter

The Xiaomi M365, all folded up.

Here’s something interesting about the M365. Xiaomi advertises that there’s an app you can connect your electric scooter to, to see your current speed, the remaining mileage, and other current trip statistics. One page of the completely Chinese manual says you can download Xiaomi’s own app or use something called “Ninebot”.

I couldn’t find the Xiaomi app in the Australian App Store when I went to look, but I found the Ninebot app on the first go. It’s pretty basic, but does let you rename your electric scooter and adjust the level of regenerative breaking. But hang on a second, this all seems very weird. How does a Chinese manufactured and marketed scooter, with not a word of English in the user manual, works with an app that has near-perfect English? Something doesn’t add up here.

After doing a little internet sleuthing, I discovered Ninebots were originally manufactured by a Chinese company as a kind of personal mobility device. They’re kind of like Segways, except a little more discreet and don’t have the traditional Segway handlebar design. Still, none of that explains how the M365 is able to connect to the Ninebot app. Did Xiaomi reverse-engineer the app to such a degree that every feature works perfectly with their own electric scooter hardware, down to the regenerative braking setting and the cruise control mode?

As it turns out, Ninebot is a Xiaomi-backed company. It’s perhaps one of the simplest explanations for why the M365 works with the Ninebot app; being the parent company and all, you’d hardly want to go to the trouble of developing an entirely new app when one of your subsidiaries already has something that does exactly what you’re after. It’s not perfect (the Ninebot app doesn’t recognise my M365 as an valid Ninebot), but there’s nothing that I’m missing out on that I can see. My KMs even count towards the weekly and overall distance travelled leaderboards.

What does all of this have to do with Segway? Well, Segway complained to a US trade commission that several Chinese companies were infringing on its patents. They complained in September 2014, and not a year later, they were acquired by the Xiaomi-backed Ninebot in August 2015, which is all pretty hilarious when you think about it.

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The Haul From An Impromptu Malaysia Trip

I wouldn’t say I go looking for cool stuff. It’s not as if I’m methodically searching through every retail outlet or corner store for that extra special piece. But by virtue of my curated RSS and Twitter feeds, all relevant to my interests, I’m always peripherally aware of cool things, and sometimes I go looking.

A recent impromptu trip to Malaysia for the funeral of my grandfather was hardly the ideal time for shopping. Reflection, perhaps, either on the traditional Chinese funeral, or the grandfather I didn’t really know, but somehow, we still managed to make the trips to Aeon. Almost every day we were there.

It was in Aeon’s shopping complex that I first saw the Pikachu and Eevee. Not sure if it was cool or not, I borrowed my sister’s internet to look it up. Apparently, it was a promo that was only available via some kind of lottery system at Pokémon Centres in Japan in 2013. I’m entirely unconvinced that what I purchased is the real deal as the box text is slightly different, but eh, it’s a pretty good fake… that I later discovered was super-common, after finding it at a few other shops.

Later in the trip I found myself at KLIA2 more than twelve hours before my flight was scheduled to depart. We were dropping off my sister, and after that was done, there was still over six hours to kill before check-in opened, and another eight before my flight was scheduled. We took the KLIA Ekspres to KL Central, then a taxi to Mid Valley Megamall.

We go to Megamall basically every time we’re in KL. Truth be told, I was beginning to get a little sick of the place, even if I’ve found some cool Dota-2 stuff there before. Alas, the gaming store that was there before wasn’t there any more, replaced with yet another gaming store that had nothing that was particularly interesting. I thought about picking up the Hypebeast edition CS:GO Steelseries mousepad, if I didn’t find anything else that piqued my interest elsewhere in the mall.

But it was on the recently-refurbished (at least, I think it was recently-refurbished, it definitely wasn’t like that the last time we were there in 2015) fourth floor that I found a small gaming store. They didn’t have as much stock as some of the larger stores, but their shelves were crammed with all kinds of gaming gear. And on one of those shelves, the SteelSeries Rival 100, Dota 2 Special Edition.

It was only afterwards that I learned these were originally sold at the Shanghai Major Secret Shop, and later released worldwide. But I’ve never seen it posted online anywhere, so stumbling on it was completely by chance.

Last but not least, I happened to know that Uniqlo in the US offers Nintendo-themed tees. I’ve never seen them at an Australian Uniqlo, but a quick recon of the Uniqlo at KLIA2 revealed that Asian Uniqlo stores stocked the Nintendo-themed tees. With the hours dwindling, I made one last stop and picked up a Pikachu-themed tee from the collection, completing this trips haul.

It’d be a misnomer to say cool stuff finds me. I’m always on the lookout for that next exclusive, unique piece that will somehow make my life that little more fulfilled — if only momentarily — but sometimes, that necessitates a little looking. And most of the time, I’m glad I did.

Simplicity is dead, long live Simplicity!

Back in August 2013, I wrote about the simple, it-just-works mentality of Apple products. I was experimenting with dd-wrt at the time, and once I had worked out that it definitely wasn’t the simple option, went out and bought an Apple AirPort Extreme to serve our family’s NBN connection to every device in the house capable of communicating via TCP/IP.

And for a while, everything was great. The AirPort Extreme dished out fast, reliable Wi-Fi, just like it says on the box. A few years pass without incident, and when I move to a different state, I trust that my network setup is robust enough to require zero maintenance. But soon enough, my family begins to complain about internet issues. Unfortunately for me, the kinds of issues they describe necessitate an in-person visit to ascertain what the issue actually is.

I’m back in Hobart now, and the Wi-Fi situation is even worse than I imagined. I realise something is seriously wrong when I try connecting to the Wi-Fi. For some reason, the wireless network is broadcasting its SSID even though I’ve set it to be hidden. It also tells me the password is wrong, even though I, nor anyone else, has changed it since it was setup. I ask my parents more questions about it. We give it a reboot and leave it at that. I’ll need to witness a failure to figure out what’s wrong, not have it broken to begin with.

As luck would have it, the Wi-Fi dies a short time later. And that’s pretty much all I have to go on, given that I don’t have any other way of connecting to the unit to check it out. All the devices in the house are wireless and don’t have an Ethernet port; any troubleshooting that I was planning to do is severely hampered by the fact I can only connect to it wirelessly.

I mean, there’s an old XP box that still has one, but I’m not sure I want to try troubleshooting anything from that. My mum has a Surface (Pro?) that has an USB dock with an ethernet port, but I’m loathe to install some potentially dodgy Targus Mac drivers for it on my MacBook Pro. My sister has a MacBook Air, which doesn’t have an Ethernet port, and even my old Chromebook doesn’t come with an Ethernet port. Of course, I own a Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter, but I left it back in Brisbane, and buying another for the sole purpose to diagnosing a Wi-Fi issue seems somewhat wasteful.

Giving up on diagnosing the issue for now, I ask what my family does when the Wi-Fi stops working. They power-cycle the device, which fixes the issue for anywhere between a few hours or a few days. Given that the Wi-Fi can drop out multiple times a day, that’s kind of an issue. So we power-cycle the unit again, which fixes it until I can work out what’s wrong.

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