David Thacker Blog

Over a period of time you will collect many passwords and accounts inside google chrome if you use chrome to manage your passwords. At some point you may wish to remove all these passwords or atleast clean up a large number of them. Dealing with them inside chrome or passwords.google.com can be a longwinded pain if you want to 50+ passwords. It may not be obvious but you can bulk manage passwords in chrome /google quickly and easily at-least you can at the time of writing using chrome 78. Right so before we get started we should make sure that we will be able to re-import the passwords back into chrome once we are done. 1) go to chrome://flags and search for ‘import’ and then make ‘Password import ‘ set to enabled. ) 2) You will now get a prompt to relaunch google chrome, relaunch 3) Now make your way back to chrome://settings/passwords and you will now see the option to import where export once was. If you want to check import works first, do this now. Bulk Managing passwords into Chr...

How to get Fitbit and Pocophone F1 notifications working Latest :Update 24/May/2019 So the Pocophone has been now working flawlessly with the Fitbit and Notifications there have even been a couple of updates on both the Pocophone and Fitbit device and app. MIUI: 10.3.4.0 (Stable) Fitbit App: 2.94 Quick Apps 1.4.1.0 Fitbit Charge 3 SW: 28.20001.60.39 Under 'Settings'/ 'Manage Apps'/ 'Fitbit App'/ 'Other permissions' set to allow 'Home screen shortcuts' - I also allowed it to 'Show on Lock Screen' 'Battery saver' then set it to 'Battery saver (recommended)', If you continue to have issues set it to 'No Restrictions' Under 'Other permissions' allow 'Show on Lock Screen' - I also allowed it to 'Home screen shortcuts' Under 'Auto Start' Set this to 'On' 'Lock Background Apps' Set Fitbit app to Padlock, todo this, press the square button...

When setting up a computer, especially a Family computer - you may want to block application installs if non admin or similar.  Now looking online this is possible if the application is installed via the windows installer -(  gpedit.msc) see link to use: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-prevent-users-from-installing-programs-in-windows-7 But for applications like Chrome & Mozilla Firefox and many others they do not need access to the windows installer to be installed. But what you can now do in the latest version of Windows 10 is to set up an admin account and enable 'Allow Apps from the Windows Store Only' See this guide on how to enable it : https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-to-permit-block-on-apps-installing-if-theyre-not-from-microsoft-store/ Now when you log into the user account they can only install apps from the windows store. So we are almost there. Finally what we need todo is block the windows store : https://docs.microsoft.co...

About this time last year there was a theft at my house. This can be disturbing and unsettling for many of us! So I decided that I needed some surveillance with the one caveat that I did not want to pay for a subscription. The Netatmo Presence seemed to fit the bill with its built in SD card storage and integration to and FTP server or dropbox. Over the last 12 months the Presence has got better and better with every software update. Beyond that I wanted a camera to keep an eye on my dog while I am not at home, I looked and looked and could not really find a suitable solution without a subscription apart from the Netatmo Welcome. Aesthetically the Welcome was not ideal as it was gold and not as subtle as I would have liked - but Functionally its perfect! in reality the gold is closer to silver than the pictures would lead you to believe at about 200 euro some may feel it is a little expensive but remember that there are no subscription fees so compared to a Nest camera within a year it...

Just a quick post as I have not had that much time to put into the blog.  When I first had a taste of a smart connected device I suppose it would of been the Chromecast I already had a FireTV and other digital tv boxes but never really thought of them as smart, sure the FireTV remote had alexa but i found little use for that 3 years ago. So I had the chromecast, it was cool how you could cast to it off your phone tablet or pc. But honestly it was not that easy to use that was until I got my first smart speaker a Google Home mini. This is where the chromecast came alive! Before I knew it i had a google home in every room! Beyond just controlling the chromecast we use the google home morning day and night. In the morning from waking up with an alarm through to checking up on traffic, news and weather. In the day to listen to my podcasts or spotify and in the evening to control the lights or the TV. Recently Netatmo brought google assistant integration it their security cameras both indo...

I have been playing around with the Netatmo Weather station for a few weeks now its a nifty bit of kit and I just wanted to share the Natatmo Weather map, its pretty cool as its all the weather stations in the Netatmo weather network. The unreliable stations are even filtered out! How cool. Zoom in on the map to find the location you are interested in!

So lately I have seem a couple of posts online about the chromecast is dead etc, I have had a chromecast a couple of years now, one in each room. I have never really used it that much apart from when I have not been able to access the content on a FireTV. Always favouring the FireTV with Remote, this would confirm what I have been reading lately online. But the fact is they are wrong everybody is using the chromecast wrong!   About 2 months ago I got a google home, and thought it was cool how you could use it to turn the tv on and play netflix or youtube content.   But now I almost solely use the Chromecast instead of the FireTV or my Android TV box. It makes things so easy. Play, Pause, Rewind choose a specific content.  I think I have only used the FireTV to watch the Grand Tour.   What is Missing from the Chromecast?   For me there is a limited selection of apps that allow voice control, If they brought this out for Iplayer and PrimeVideo I would only be using the...

So I first experienced a digital assistant a few months ago - it was an Alexa it was cool but as I  have not really bought into the Amazon services (No prime membership). I didn't feel that it was the best fit for me. One of the best parts of the digital assistant for me at the time was telling her (can you call it her?) was telling her to play music and powering on the TV to play a video on the FireTV. So I was in search of an alternative the obvious one was a google home. Not wanting to jump in with too much commitment I picked up a home mini while it was on offer. My initial impressions was that it was cool and much friendlier than alexa, the sound quality of the home mini was far better than the Echo dot too that was something I did not expect, not that it is a very difficult benchmark. Digging a little deeper it was easy to set up with the ‘Home App’ once I had got the mini connected to the Wifi (Which seemed a little frustrating and required a few attempts). So what does the ...

Finding MTU on Mac Right so you have just moved house and your internet falls off when you connect to your works VPN - likelihood is your MTU is set too high for your ISP. Searching for this on the net there is a ton of misinformation. So usually the mac has a maximum MTU of 1500 for some ISP’S this limit needs to be set much lower. So first lets take a look at what your macs MTU currently is. ToDo this: 1.Open ‘Terminal’ 2.Type: " networksetup -getMTU en0" This will return you with what your MTU is currently set at. For Macs this is usually 1500. Now you need to test what is the maximum MTU you can use on your connection 3. In terminal enter: "ping -D -s 1500 www.google.com" ,  You will probably get the message ‘ping: sendto: Message too long' Procedure to find optimal MTU: If your MTU is currently set too low, for example 576, the following procedure will not be able to detect whether you have discovered the "Optimal MTU size"...

Just a quick finding more of a record for myself than anything. So I was trying to update my old TV as the sound would cut out after about 3-4 hours of use. A reboot would resolve the issue. But I wanted to resolve the issue that was apparently fixed in an update. Installing the update on the TV initially failed when it would attempt to install the firmware. Turns out that the USB drive must me formatted in FAT16. FAT16 limits the total capacity of the USB to 4 GB even if the capacity is greater. Once the USB stick has been formatted in FAT16 re-add the firmware image and install on the TV. The install will now proceed correctly.

So in the past when I have had an Issue with my Iphone all I have had todo arrange a time slot and go into the Apple shop and they have always achieved to sort me out with a replacement phone. Now I have not had a my latest Samsung S7 for long but I have now started to experience multiple issues. First was the headphone jack would not allow for Remote control or allow for the headset mic to work. I had contacted Samsung and they said don't worry just drop it into a support center. I first needed to go on a business trip before going to the support center, unfortunately during that time the rear camera glass randomly broke, the phone is protected by an Otterbox, is always in a pocket on its own and there is no damage on the case itself. Apparently this seems to be a well documented issue displayed on many forums. Samsung Forum : https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Galaxy-S-Phones/s7-edge-rear-camera-glass-broken/td-p/2963 https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Galaxy-S-Phones/Samsung-s...

The problem with Samsung Android Devices Samsung has been the market leader in the Android phone market for the last 7 years, depending on the sources viewed with approximately 50% of the Android market . That translates into  just less than 20% of the entire smartphone market .  By any yardstick Samsung Android devices must be successful -  correlating that  performance to consumer satisfaction , it would be expected that Samsung must provide the best Android experience. But the sad fact is that while Samsung's Marketing and Manufacturing Departments are probably some of the best in the world. The day-to-day ability of the phones are lacking. Why are Samsung phones lacking The underlying  AOSP  code that Samsung phones run on which in 2017 is now very mature. Stock Android does almost everything you need and for what it cannot do there is an app that can. Flexibility is the power that lies in Android. Trying to mix iOS and Android But the issue with Samsung is that they have tried...