David Thacker Blog

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.

This week I officially became a: Scrum Certified Product Owner I have always had an interest in ways to optimise team efficiency, first beginning when I took operations management at University, studying Lean, Agile, Sigma 6 to name just a few. Last year I became interested in Scrum, first reading "Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time" by Jeff Sutherland. It intrigued me but due to my job at the time I never really took it much further not having a need to optimise team efficiency at the time. New Team This was until I changed teams and became responsible for business operations. The main challenge was to revolutionise the entire purchase process to make it scaleable, measurable and also successful. But we had some issues: -- Monolithic Legacy apps -- Individual projects -- Highly specialised team members with little cross functional capacity. As this was a new team we did not want to alienate them so we started a evolution rather than the revolution bringi...

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...

If your HTML and CSS skills are lacking or are not as good as they should be then you should consider an HTML editor ( https://html-cleaner.com/ ) that will allow you to copy and paste plain text, edit it and then copy out the marked up HTML. Now I will only use this method if I need to quickly change or update a basic HTLM template usually you can edit the template in a WYSIWYG editor inside MailChimp or similar but if you need to create a basic HTML for your email something like :  https://html-cleaner.com/ is not a bad choice for quickly getting the text out. If Mandrill the service we used included a editor inside Mandrill and not in another service (MailChimp) then this would be perfect.   If you would like to get in touch or have any questions then  please do not hesitate to get in contact.