Tips and Tricks Archives - Page 4 of 5 - TBNI.Blog

Apple Release Removal Tool for U2 : Songs of Innocence Freebie

September 16, 2014 by TomBoyNI

Along with the release of the Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus last Tuesday (09/09/2014) Apple finished their Keynote Speech with a performance from U2, probably one of the biggest groups in the world ever. Then they announced that the U2 Album would be given away, for free, to every Apple Account holder (for a few weeks anyway – A deal that has been reported as costing Apple up to $100,000,000 – one hundred million dollars).

I know that Apple have hundreds of millions of dollars and are about to make hundreds of millions more as the demand for the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus rapidly gains steam and momentum, but come it’s a freebie!

Also I have to say I am not a U2 fan, at all, I can tolerate them, but this is an album I never would have purchased. But come on it is a freebie!

So I would like to firstly say, ‘Thanks Apple, not really my cup of tea, but it’s a nice gesture and I do appreciate the gesture.’

However the headlines that have dominated this gesture, this freebie, have been ones of anger, unhappiness, privacy invasion and even rage…

For me, personally I don’t care, I’d like to get free albums a lot more often from Artists and Companies, but if you are one of the ones who feel violated, enraged or even just that you want rid of it off your device Apple have now released a Removal tool which you can find here :

Apple U2 : Songs of Innocence Removal Tool.

There we go, problem solved and the New World Order can be restored!

How to Replace / Install PS4 Hard Drive

August 8, 2014 by TomBoyNI

The PS4 is a cracking’ machine. Brilliant in fact. But really, Sony what were you thinking with only giving us a 500GB hard drive. ‘Oh it was to keep costs down,’ you will no doubt reply, but that is a bit of a false economy, as the costs go back up when we have to replace our HDDs ourselves.

It also to be far has been a bit of a slow start for me when it comes to PS4 gaming as at this moment in time I simply have the games that came free with PS+ as well as The Last of Use Remastered, Wolfenstein, Sniper III, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Infamous Second Son, Watch Dogs and Killzone. So a reasonable mediocre collection at this point, so imagine my surprise when I checked my free space and noted I had had 92GB out of my initial 500GB left!

Well all that meant was it was upgrade time.

The story is not that simply however. As in the past, probably January (isn) 2014 I did try to pre empt this situation and took it upon myself to do an early upgrade to limit the hassle of re-downloading all of my games and game data. however back then I was one of the PS4 users who couldn’t upgrade to 2TB. The reasons for that were that at that time Seagate made the only compatible and affordable 2TB drive for PS4. However it came in an enclosure, you had to take it apart…

That wouldn’t put me off however and I did purchase it back then, that’s when the problems arose. It was quickly established that if you cracked open your PS4 and found a HGST drive staring at you chance were that the Seagate drive was going to be incompatible with your system. Basically there was ‘handshake’ issues between the hardware, but I won’t bore you with that as now it is all thankfully ancient history! (Workarounds were present but I like things to work right 100% of the time, so I shifted the drive on to someone who could use it properly.)

So after a bit of reading I established with a degree of certainty that I could live with that the hand shake issues that were previously present were now gone. No matter what drive you had in your PS4 the Seagate 2TB M9T drive was / is now 100% compatible.

That’s all I needed to here, and off to the shops I trekked picking the drive up for £69.99 and back to the house I hurried to try it out.

“This copy of the Install OS X Mavericks application can’t be verified” FIX

March 15, 2014 by TomBoyNI

Just a quickie fix here.

If you are experiencing the above error whilst trying to do a fresh install of OS X Mavericks (from a USB stick) there is a good chance all you need to do is change the date that your machine believes it to be.

So for example it is now 17.15 hrs on 15th March 2014.

To fix this error go to the ‘Utilities’ Menu and run ‘Terminal’ (from within the Mavericks’ installer).

Once in terminal enter the date as follows (of course making it the correct current date and time, this simply illustrates the format)…

date 031517152014

Press Enter.

Now close ‘Terminal’ and attempt the fresh install.

Things should now go your way!

Good luck.

Preparing MicroSD Card for Use in Garmin Dakota 20 (& Other GPS Systems)

January 18, 2014 by TomBoyNI

Last year I purchased a Garmin Dakota 20 GPS System to use on my Motorcycle and also for GeoCaching. I never really used it. However I have now set up setting it up properly and getting it ready for use this year.

One good point about the Dakota 20 is the fact that it has a expandable memory by the addition of a MicroSD card, which sits neatly behind the batteries. This is a bit of a no brainer really as SD Cards are so affordable now. You don’t even have to go that big as the Custom maps from Garmin are a maximum size of 4GB, an 8GB should easily do most users. One other option is that if you have a lot of custom maps you could buy bigger, store all your maps on the device then move them around into the proper directories as required as your journey progresses. (Pretty much the whole of Western Europe on a Custom Map is squeezed into 4GB).

To utilise this all you have to do is prepare the card.

(One quick tip for when you get set up, make sure you leave the WW BaseMaps Enabled, this will give you at the very least a base map whilst your detailed maps load, removing any white screens that you get as loading occurs, it is purely cosmetic, just nicer to work with!).

To do this follow these simple steps.

1. Format your MicroSD card as FAT32 (FAT MS-DOS on a Mac)
2. Rename the Card – ‘GARMIN.’
3. Create a folder named ‘Garmin’ in the root directory.
4. Any Map files with the extension ‘.img’ are placed in this directory.
5. Copy the File Structure from your Actual Garmin GPS to that of your Freshly Formatted SD Card. The folders named below are all within the ‘Garmin’ Root directory.
6. The ‘CustomMaps’ folder will contain any ‘.kmz’ files.
7. The ‘BirdsEye’ folder will house any ‘.jnx’ files.
8. The ‘GPX’ folder will be the home of waypoints and so on just as the Garmin was itself.

Seagate Expansion HDD 3TB UnBoxing & Time Machine.

January 12, 2014 by TomBoyNI

A quick unboxing gallery of a Seagate 3TB Expansion Desktop Drive (USB 3.0).

For reference the drive is a mere 36.0mm thick and cost only £80.

As you can see from the last images I use this drive as a Time Machine. At this price it is a very affordable back up (Time Machine) solution. The speeds are good, and by that I mean I don’t notice them being slow. I can’t comment on how it operates as a daily drive however as a TM it has given me no problems, I haven’t even noticed it was there. Which makes it pretty much ideal!

iTunes Updating Apps – Auto Update of Multiple Apps

January 12, 2014 by TomBoyNI

iTunes (at the time of writing this is iTunes 11) has changed the way you update your Apps.

Previously you clicked on the Apps Tab in the left hand column then towards the bottom right of the screen the was an ‘Update All’ Button that has now gone.

You will now notice that in your apps listing the icons of apps that have an available update have a nice wee tag in their upper left corner.

So to update all of your apps in one go here’s what you do, don’t fret it is easy!

1. Below you will see the new look ‘Update’ Flag on the relevant icons.

2. You will see the new ‘Updates’ Tab at the top. Click it!

All Apps that have an available update will now be shown…

3. Click ‘Update All Apps.’

That’s it your done and on the way to be fully updated again!

iCloud Asking For Old AppleID Account Details?

October 24, 2013 by TomBoyNI

If like me for some reason you have to change your AppleID email address you could well discover that this is an absolute nightmare.

To do this you need to go to : https://appleid.apple.com/

And then you click on ‘Manage Your Apple ID.’

From here you can ‘Edit your Apple ID and Primary Email Address.’

It should be a case of changing your email address and saving it. For me and many others though that is not the case.

– Perform a FULL BACKUP using both iCloud and a physical backup on iTunes –

Show hidden files Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion

October 21, 2013 by TomBoyNI

I have found that on ocassion you may need to see some of the hidden files and folders in OSX, mainly for troubleshooting. When enabled things can appear very messy and untidy so in my opinion it is best to make things visible, then when you are done, hide them again.

Good luck.

To enable hidden files/folders in finder windows:

– Open Finder

– Open the Utilities folder

– Open a terminal window

– Copy and paste the following line in:
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

– Press return

– Now hold ‘alt’ on the keyboard and right click on the Finder icon

– Click on Relaunch

You will now see all the hidden files and folders. Once you are finished, perform the steps above however, replace the terminal command in step 4 with:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO

Acer Aspire One D257 RAM Upgrade

October 18, 2013 by TomBoyNI

The Acer Aspire One D257 is a capable netbook, but one of the choke points of the system is that it is supplied with 1Gb of RAM, this can be easily upgraded by the user to a maximum of 2Gb and this is one upgrade that I reccommend all users consider.

It is a fairly simple process that can be done without any issues by taking your time and being careful. It isn’t like your desktop where the RAM upgrade is almost foolproof, here you will need to undone some very delicate clips and leads, my best advice is :

1. Take your time.

2. Don’t force anything, if it is isn’t going, it won’t go.

Then my next bit of advice is watch this video, it isn’t mine, but I used it and it is very good and well explained :

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DiBKaS1s80&w=560&h=315]

From this video you will see that this can be broken down into a number of simple parts…

Acer Aspire One D257 Netbook Windows 8 Installation

October 18, 2013 by TomBoyNI

Acer Aspire One D257 Windows 8 Installation :

I have decided to add this as an individual post to make it easier for anyone looking for specific information in relation to installation of windows 8 on a netbook, so apologies for the double post.

They say it couldn’t be done! They say it wont work! I say, ‘Bring it on!’

Every one loves a challenge right? So here is the thing Windows 8 is out, I have it. It was on my Mac, I got rid of the Mac, so I had a licence of Windows 8. I wanted it on my netbook. It requires a minimum resolution of 768. My netbook has a resolution of 600. They say nothing will work, I say we will tell it to work!

If you are in the same position and have a 600 resolution netbook and would like to see what Windows 8 is like, it is entirely possible. The upscaled resolution would look completely polished but it is entirely usable and more importantly fully functional!

This machine comes with Windows 7 Starter Edition so the first thing to do is to make sure it is fully updated so run windows update.

– Now Install Windows 8 – as you would if upgrading any machine. Run the ‘Setup’ from the USB / media…Windows 8 will install.

Disclosure :