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Three months ago (and one week) I returned home from seven weeks in various hospitals to find my brother had reorganised my lounge room furniture. The greatest change was the viewing distance to the TV from the armchair. The distance was about half of what it used to be and the sofa that has been on one of the long sides of the room was now where the old recliner/rocker used to be.

That chair I'd inherited from my late father, in 2002. It was dumped, there's only so much space and I received from storage at my sister's place, the electric assist armchair Mum had used while in the aged care facility for he last 14 months of life. This chair rises to a height and angle sufficient to enable anyone to stand without needing the effort normally associated with standing, something critically necessary as my mobility was greatly impaired, needing a wheeled walker to get around.

The chair was positioned where the sofa used to be. I felt that to be unsatisfactory, so now that I can get about home without walking aids I rearranged the furniture again. The sofa was moved from the end of the room to the long side under a 3.6 metre-wide window. DVD/CD racks from behind the sofa at the end of the room moved between the sofa and a bookcase. An open box-style display/storage unit that had been behind the sofa was moved sideways, leaving just enough room for the electric assist chair to go where the old recliner had been.

The existing 7-year-old 32-in HD TV was now twice as far as it had been for the last three months and I was having trouble seeing text on it when using the Apple TV 4k. I'd been intending to replace the TV with at least a 43-inch 4k unit and started pricing LG-brand units.

Why LG, you ask? Because Google and Samsung. I wanted anything except Samsung's Tizen OS or Google's Google TV/Android TV OS types. This left LG Smart TVs option of webOS, which I've always had something of a soft spot for.
I started pricing units last week and would have bought a 43-inch LG 4k TV had any been available. Alas, as most retailers had that one at about $170 off normal price, there were none available until the 2nd week in August.

Then a few days ago, that low price was discontinued and it was now just under $900 for the 43-inch LG UT8050 4k TV, exactly the same price as the 50-inch version that was in plentiful supply. So yesterday I bought the 50-inch LG UT8050 4k version. Had the box been 5mm longer it would not have fitted in my car in the preferred semi-upright position. Thus I was able to get it home without having to incur an additional delivery fee and delivery time delay.

This thing needed an internet connection to set it up, so i fed it with an available Ethernet cable from the spare port on a Mesh router used as a Wi-Fi range extender. One Ethernet port is used with the 4k Apple TV streaming box as Ethernet is a more stable connection than Wi-Fi in that room. Once it was set up to my satisfaction and had downloaded and installed a software update, I turned off Wi-Fi on the TV and disconnected the Ethernet. Now it's no longer a Smart TV but a Lobotomised one. Any features than need internet are covered without intrusive ads by the Apple TV.

Seven years ago I'd bought the 32-in TV from ALDI and found its speakers to be inadequate at best. Most of the time it used the single 1st generation HomePod attached to the Apple TV for audio. Something went wonky with the audio output when I added a second HomePod as a stereo pair so another ALDI trip was in order to buy a soundbar to use with the TV. Later I sorted out the HomePod stereo pair issue and the soundbar was only used for live TV broadcast viewing without the Apple TV.

The speakers in the new LG TV are excellent and don't need the soundbar. So I disconnected the portable ALDI 19-in HD TV from the bedroom and replaced it with the now unused 32-in TV and soundbar combination. While testing the new TV with the soundbar, I used the Toslink optical connection between the two devices and found it to be quite effective but ultimately unnecessary, because the TV's built-in speakers we perfectly adequate. Other connections for the soundbar include Bluetooth, Composite, Aux or USB. The soundbar with the 32-in TV uses the Aux connection.

I'm very happy with the video and audio quality of the new TV plus the simple 56% increase in the diagonal screen size leads to a viewable area almost 2.5 times greater, very nice for these aging eyes.

I bought an original HomePod and used it initially in my bedroom before adding it to my Apple TV 4k. This was great, but even better when the price came down by $130 and I now had a stereo pair.

Then one failed, just like that, no logical reason. Completely unresponsive. Cost constraints led me to replace the failed one with an Apple Refurbished replacement unit. That one still works fine but the originally purchased device has also failed. Again without notice and completely unresponsive.

So on Thursday I bought a pair of Midnight Apple Refurbished 2nd generation big HomePods. New price from Apple is $479 each, marginally cheaper elsewhere. The refurbished price is $409 each and they were delivered on Friday. They have complimentary 7-day AppleCare+ which (in light of my previous experience with failed units) I shall continue after 7 days if that's permissible with refurbished items.

Once the HomePods arrived it didn't take long to set them up as a stereo pair combined with the Apple TV 4k. The time-consuming aspect was waiting for both of them to download the latest version of the OS. The sound is just plain brilliant.

The remaining original model HomePod has gone into the spare bedroom that I'm currently using, pending the acquisition of one of two king single beds from storage at my sister's place. That will go into the main bedroom that already has a stereo pair of HomePod Minis..

On the 2nd of March I went to bed with a sore knee and the following day couldn’t put any weight on it, so I lurched around the house grasping the back of an office chair (fitted wth bigger easy-rolling single castors) while I collected the bare minimum needed for a short stay in hospital. I just needed a way to get there, I made an emergency call requesting ambulance service and was told my case wasn’t urgent enough to warrant taking a paramedic vehicle out of service. But they did call for a taxi and pay the $48 fare to the nearest emergency department. 30 hours later I was transferred to a bigger hospital for further treatment and/or surgery.

The surgical team then dicked around for over four more days while my condition worsened before performing keyhole surgery to drain a bacterial infection and flush the knee joint with antiseptic. For the next month I was having IV antibiotics every six hours. Cannulas used for IV purposes need to be changed every three days and I was running out of places in both arms to hook one up effectively. The answer was to run a PICC line through a vein in my upper arm terminating just above my heart (evidence at last that I seem to have a heart), with the dressing to be changed once per week. Unlike a cannula, a PICC line (Peripherally inserted central catheter) can be used to take blood samples for pathology tests.

My condition is oddly called Septic Arthritis even though it’s neither related to sepsis nor arthritis. The surgeons explained I had copped a “quadruple whammy” the septic arthritis, gout, pseudogout and the existing osteoarthritis. Pseudogout has the same symptoms as gout but the crystals deposited in the joint are calcium rather than uric acid.

At this major hospital I was lucky to see a physiotherapist every second day. When told I could go home (which wasn’t based on any discernible logic that I could envisage) I mentioned I had private health insurance with a fund that had a special arrangement with a rehab hospital some 8 km away. Suffice to say that when a bed became available there I was transferred asap. Here we get two physiotherapy gym sessions on weekdays and one daily on weekends. The hospital has been undergoing renovations and they had progressed in the ward I was in to a stage where there was a danger to the safety of patients so yesterday I was transferred to another room in another ward, this time a single room so I’m no longer bothered by others in the room falling asleep with the TV volume up loud or other cohabiting issues like bathroom access.

My planned discharge date is April 20th, I need to be able to “walk” using a rollator walker at least 50 metres. Yesterday I estimate I went around 110 metres in total, including 80 m back the the room from the gym. This took about 20 minutes and required 5 rest stops but I managed it. Today I’ll be starting in a different gym, there are several in this rehab establishment.

The occupational therapist will refer me to a Government run aged care program which can provide help with shopping, transportation for medical reasons, home maintenance, garden maintenance and modifications to my dwelling to make it easier and safer to manage my condition until no longer required. I’ll also be referred to a local rehab clinic and have a range of in home exercises to perform.
It’s goig to be an interesting and likely a long recovery. I’m not managing the stress and pain terribly well at present.

A funeral was held a couple of days ago for a family friend who’d almost made it to 100 years, missing out by 5 months. He and his twin sister were born on the family farm, where he’d lived all his life barring a few hospital visits. For example, an accident on the farm when in his 20s left him unable to join the armed forces for the duration of the 2nd World War but he recovered sufficiently to become a wily and feared opponent on the district tennis & badminton courts.

In his teens he’s been a keen runner and while growing up he participated in tennis, cricket, the peculiar local Australian version of football, badminton, music, reading, athletics. He was a well respected drummer in many local bands & orchestras and met his future wife at a dance some fifty minutes drive from home. Becoming profoundly deaf in his early 60s was very distressing and curtailed his musical performances.

This was alleviated somewhat in his late 70s by the fitment of a cochlear hearing implant, learning to how recognise the signals as sound didn’t seem to take him very long at all. He & his wife spent their married life on the dairy farm, raising five children & 18 grandchildren plus an unspecified number of great-grandchildren.

I recall New Years Eve parties on that farm as fabulous affairs, more-so because his wife produced fantastic prize-winning cakes, scones & biscuits (hard cookies) in local competitions and didn’t skimp on anything when entertaining. There’d be music and dancing, singing, drinking, telling of tall tales, all great country entertainment & a chance to see friends who otherwise had limited social lives.

He was always a convivial chap, always willing to stop for a chat & it didn’t hurt at all that we followed the same city-based football team. Jack, it was a great honour to have known you and your wonderful, if somewhat colourful family.

I tried using iMazing app yesterday to update my iPod Touch to iOS 15.3.1 because that app can do it at minimal battery levels (iMazing is a Mac app). The iPod was at 9% & rising but OTA (Over-The-Air) updates need at least 20% battery.
I thought I had a recent backup on the iMazing external HD but this proved to be false. There was a backup on another iMazing external HDD but that was done in July 2021 on iOS 14.8.
The update failed, leaving the iPod in an unresponsive state. The Mac could detect the iPod but not do anything with it. At this point I made an Apple Store Genius Bar appointment for the following day.

Come the morning the iPod’s battery was discharged & after connecting to the Mac for 15 minutes, was now in recovery mode. I downloaded the 5.21 GB package to restore the iPod to factory specs & waited for it to do its stuff. After about an hour it was a bare iPod with iOS 15.3.1 installed. I then cancelled the Genius Bar appointment.

This is when I found the 2021 backup, I used iMazing to restore from that backup & eventually had the iPod up and working on the new OS with the old app selection from 7 months ago. Into the App Library to delete unwanted apps & used the app store to download the ones I wanted, all that remained was to sync the Music Library & download the desired playlists so I can have lots of music for long car trips.

If I had waited until the battery level was OK for an OTA update I’d have avoided all this angst & frustration!

On the dairy farm we grew up on there was a dumping paddock, covered in volcanic rocks culled from all the other paddocks over a 60-year period. I recall being given 10 days with a small tractor & hoist-mounted platform, instructed to gather all the rocks remaining in an adjacent paddock that was going to be cut for hay later that year. Any remaining rocks & stones would have played merry hell with the baling equipment. All was well, as it happened. This dumping ground was on the side of a hill, exposed to the weather & the vigorous north wind. No owner of the place ever contemplated even building a shed in such a location.

This was driven home (so to speak) to the physiotherapist & the garden designer who bought the property from my parents. They started construction of a rather sumptuous dwelling & terraced garden on the northward-facing side of this hill. Fully exposed to howling winter storms & hot, arid summer winds. Just when the construction had reached frame stage with the roof tiles in place, along came one of those howling storms which added thousands of dollars worth of tile to the volcanic rocks strewn about that paddock.

The new owners have converted the old farmhouse into a bed & breakfast establishment of good repute & now the completed house and grand garden form a magnificent showpiece accentuated by the apparently idyllic rural setting.

The owners have collaborated to produce a book called "The Charmed Garden At Broughton Hall." (The B&B trades under the name of Broughton Lodge.)

One of my brothers has bought the book as a Xmas gift for out mother who's a resident in a Covid-locked aged care facility. We have no idea when she'll be able to have visitors again so she can peruse this intriguing publication.

The superseded MacBook Pro’s is backed up to a faulty ext HDD. The fault is in the interface between the micro USB 3 port and the HDD circuitry itself. There’s no traditional SATA connection as such, from HDD’s bottom surface, there are a few terminals linking back to the USB port. The fault is such that the extra connections in a micro USB 3 port vs those of a micro USB 2 port are not making connection & data transfer is at USB 2 speeds. This drive was last used in Sept 2020 when it was replaced by better & faster drives. I use those newer drives are now being used for Time Machine & clone backups of the M1 MacBook Air.

It’s a 2 TB drive partitioned into 1.5 TB for Time Machine & 500 GB for a clone. The MacBook Pro has a basic version of Monterey installed, occupying 37 GB in total, whereas with the M1 MacBook Air the Music folder alone is almost that size. When the drive was backing up the Mac in 2020, it was running Catalina and Time Machine was not encrypted.

But for Time Machine to work properly under Monterey, the drive has to be encrypted &/ that's what's taking so long. At the current rate of "progress" it might be completed in four more days, even though it's at least 70% of the way through the encryption process. This is because the damaged micro USB 3 interface can only work at a maximum of USB 2 speed, up to 480 Mb/s.

As intimated in my last blog post, I have bought a refurbished M1 MacBook Air (7 GPU cores/8CPU cores/8GB Unified Memory/256GB SSD) from Apple, this is still a current model & is covered by the same warranty as a new Mac. I've been using it for almost eight days now, most of the time with the power supply disconnected & it has yet to complete five full battery charge cycles. That is impressive performance.

I've noticed a physical difference between the Thunderbolt 4 ports on this Air vs the Thunderbolt 3 ports on the old Pro: peripherals connect far more firmly when pushed in. An internal difference is each Thunderbolt 4 port has its own dedicated Intel Thunderbolt control module, the older Pro had the two ports sharing a single controller. This spreads the load faster & more efficiently.

This thing does not lack for performance despite being the base model in the Mac portable range. There are four power cores rated at 3.2 GHz & four efficiency cores of 2.4 GHz. It's no contest against the old Pro's 2.3 GHz dual-core Intel i5. It refuses to run hot, the internal temperatures don't get wildly high despite it being a fan-free design.

Its M1 series SoC (System on Chip) is derived from those in iPads & iPhones, so there are some iPhone/iPad apps that run perfectly well on this Mac. To access such apps you have to be running Monterey & have installed the apps previously on an iPhone or iPad. Go to the App Store, click on your Apple ID in the lower left corner then you'll see two tabs at the top reading "Mac apps" and "iPhone & iPad apps." Most when selected will have the disclaimer that they were developed for mobile devices & are not verified for macOS. Download them anyway and try them. I have so far found 29 such apps to be viable on macOS.

In 2018 I bought what has to be the most disappointing Mac I ever owned, a 2017 base model 13-in MacBook Pro. It was to replace a used 2014 ex-Apple executive 11-in MacBook Air that suffered water damage.
The Air had a 1.7 GHz i7 processor with 8 GB RAM and 512 GB storage. The only reason I didn’t buy another Air was it lacked a Retina screen.
What made the MBP disappointing was the horrible keyboard and the fact that accidental damage necessitated the replacement of the two Thunderbolt ports plus the entire top case (which included battery, keyboard and trackpad. Also the battery was due for replacement anyway. Repairs came to over ⅓ the cost of a new Mac of the same specification. This was March 2020, before the arrival or announcement of the M1 series of Macs.
But now both of the Thunderbolt ports have failed making the thing unusable as it can’t he charged.
My computing needs are modest and would be completely covered by a “binned GPU” M1 MacBook Air (7-core GPU/8-core CPU). An Apple Refurbished Mac of those specs is around 10% less than the cost of a new one with the same warranty & new battery. The only real difference is it comes in a plain white box. I shall probably buy one next week.

Just thinking about various digital cameras I’ve had over the years. My first one was a 2 MP HP piece of junk, soon sold to an associate. This was replaced by a Ricoh Caplio RR30 3.34 MP device. This was joined by an interesting Olympus C-750 UZ - a 4 MP camera with 3 x digital zoom & a 10 x optical zoom Carl Zeiss lens.

Then I managed to spill a cup of tea over the Ricoh, prompting the purchase of the Canon IXUS 95 IS (aka PowerShot SD1200 IS). But I was still missing certain features of the tea-soaked Ricoh so I bought a Ricoh R10 10 MP camera to regain those features. The next purchase was a Nikon D 5100 DSLR now equipped with four lenses & a spare battery.

There have been a number of Apple mobile devices with cameras over the years, starting with a 5th gen iPod Nano, with a 720 p VGA video-only camera. This was followed by a used iPhone 3GS, iPad 3, iPad Mini, iPhone 4S, iPad Mini 3, Nokia 1020 (Windows phone with 41 MP sensor & Zeiss lens), iPad 5, iPhone SE, Nokia 1520 Windows Phone, Nokia 7.1 Android phone; iPhone SE 2, iPad Mini 5 (raffle prize), iPad 8 & now an iPhone 13 Mini! Plus 5th, 6th & 7th gen iPod Touches.

Most of those Apple devices have been used as trade-ins on new Apple gear, I currently have a 7th gen iPod Touch, iPad Mini 5, iPad 8 & iPhone 13 Mini. The original SE wasn’t worth anything but still worked, so it was donated to the Men’s Shed group to be used mainly as a wireless hotspot for the Shed’s new 27-in iMac a year ago.

I sold the iPhone 3GS & iPad Mini 3 to friends in the Mac User Group.

Trade-ins: iPad 3 & original iPad Mini funded most of the cost of the iPad Mini 3. The iPhone 4S contributed $100 to the cost of the iPhone SE. The iPad 5 saved $275 on the price of the iPad 8 & just in the last few days, the iPhone SE 2 shaved $255 off the 13 Mini’s cost.

Digital cameras I own that are still working: Olympus C-750 UZ (Ultra Zoom); iPod Nano 5; Canon IXUS 95 IS; Ricoh R10; Nokia 1020; Nikon D5100 DSLR; 7th gen iPod Touch; iPad 8; iPad Mini 5 & iPhone 13 Mini.