Sadly, what was originally born out of uncertainty and skepticism has devolved quickly into journalists and YouTubers simply wanting to see the product fail. At any minor chance that Face ID has failed, YouTubers and journalists pounce on it.

Let’s take a brief look at Face ID in the news…

The Infamous Face ID Demo

It all started at Apple’s September keynote. Craig Federighi is on stage, excited to show us the first demo of iPhone X. The first thing Craig attempts to show us is Face ID. He lifts the phone, and “ho-ho-ho”, it seemingly didn’t work.

Did Face ID actually fail? Craig Federighi clarified what happened in episode 200 of The Talk Show by John Gruber. Essentially, what happened is that other staff members had unintentionally triggered Face ID when setting up the demonstration table, resulting in too many failed authentication attempts, temporarily disabling Face ID. Credence can be added to this when you simply watch the keynote back. Craig’s iPhone X displayed “your password is required to enable Face ID”.

No, Face ID didn’t fail. In fact, Face ID was working exactly how it was programmed to. Furthermore, Touch ID works the same way! If you haven’t authenticated your iPhone X within 48-hours, Face ID will require you to enter your passcode. Likewise, Face ID will also disable itself if there have been too many failed attempts at unlocking the device — just like Touch ID. This is a security feature that prevents adversaries brute forcing their way into a victim’s iPhone.

Unfortunately, people want to see this product fail. YouTubers jumped on the bandwagon. In one video, the host went on to hypothesise that the unlock feature may have “failed” due to sweat on Craig’s face. This merely adds fuel to the skepticism people have/had about Face ID. The host also suggested that you always have to hold iPhone X unnaturally up to your face for Face ID to unlock, which is simply not true.

My point is that the video was delivered in a way that reinforces this fear surrounding Face ID; it was almost conspiracy-like, as if Apple are knowingly trying to sell us an inferior system. The truth is all biometrics systems have some trade-offs.

Troubles with Twins

Then came the twins videos. YouTubers would get twins together to break Face ID. Some of these videos were cool, and it makes perfect sense too. Apple even stated during the keynote that one of the trade-offs with Face ID is that close relatives, especially twins, have a higher likelihood of fooling Face ID. Surprisingly, in one of these videos, iPhone X actually wasn’t bypassed by an identical twin — well, not until the twin entered the passcode.

One of Face ID’s strong points is its ability to adapt to a face over time. If you start growing facial hair, Face ID will adapt to it. Every time you successfully unlock your device, be it by passcode or Face ID, your face will be scanned and Face ID will learn and adapt to your changes. More specifically, if the scan of your face is mathematically similar to the enrolled face — if it reaches a threshold of similarity — it will learn and adapt to the latest scan.

So, originally when Face ID failed to authenticate the second twin, they proceeded to enter the iPhone’s passcode. The identical twin naturally looked very similar to their sibling, and so it could be possible that Face ID reached that threshold of similarity. From there on, Face ID would now recognise the twin.

The takeaway from this is that, given the visual similarity of the twins, it was actually impressive that the second twin was not able to fool Face ID on their first try. Face ID seemingly had to learn their face first through its adaptive algorithm.

Face ID Hacked with 3D Mask?

The latest headline is that Bkav Corp security researchers have “wrecked”, “tricked”, “broken” and “hacked” Face ID. From the headlines, you’d think that your original skepticism was right - Face ID is weak, insecure and a terrible idea. It sounds like the whole system has been utterly defeated and it didn’t even take two weeks!

Again, people want to see this product fail.

Based on the video, Bkav Corp may indeed have fooled Face ID, but they aren’t giving enough information to actually prove it.

What we see in the video is a researcher successfully unlocking their iPhone X using their face. They then lock the device and point it directly at a 3D mask of themselves, and voila Face ID unlocks.

If only tech YouTubers and journalists applied the same level of skepticism to these headlines as they do to Face ID itself.

Firstly, the video showed Face ID approving two different faces — the human face, and the mask. Does this sound familiar? It very well could be the case that Face ID learnt the mask as a valid face as the researchers were testing it out. The proper way Bkav Corp should and could have proven this not to be the case is by showing the initial Face ID setup, the Face ID approval of the human, and then the approval of the mask. We’re missing way too much data here to make anything of this video. Alas, that won’t stop YouTubers and journalists from jumping on the bandwagon. Though, credit to Ars Technica!

Secondly, let’s suppose that the mask did truthfully fool Face ID; what are the ramifications of this? How does this compare to Touch ID?

In both cases, the adversary would have to obtain the victim’s iPhone. Now, remember in order to fool Face ID, iPhone must be unlocked within 48-hours before requiring a passcode to re-enable itself. The adversary now has a hard time limit to 3D print a mask of the victim and obtain pictures to glue onto the mask. Furthermore, in order to print a 3D mask, the adversary needs a decent 3D model of the victim’s face… I can’t help but be reminded of this XKCD comic.

That said, I think generally speaking it’s still easier to lift a fingerprint from a device than to obtain a 3D mapping of someone’s face. Admittedly, in the case of a targeted attack, this could still spell trouble for the victim — but I again go back to that XKCD comic.

Lastly, the researchers stated that Face ID isn’t as secure as Apple claimed. This is simply false. During the Apple keynote, Phil Schiller spoke about how Apple’s engineers have trained Face ID to recognise Hollywood-style masks and recognise them as fake. Apple never claimed anything more than built-in resistance to mask-based attacks.

Double Standards

As a brief aside, I also feel it’s worth mentioning how YouTubers in particular have responded to this.

I truly wish tech YouTubers would hold other companies to the same standards they expect from Apple. For example, Samsung’s “facial recognition” can be fooled by a photo, it doesn’t work in the dark, and the iris scanning requires you to hold the phone unnaturally in front of your face. Essentially, all of the fears people had for Apple’s Face ID exist in Samsung’s flagship phones. Why isn’t there more outrage? Why don’t people demand better from Samsung? Nobody seems as surprised when Samsung doesn’t live up to the hype. In this case, Apple has lived up to their promises and gets trashed by the tech community.

When companies sell phones in the price range of Apple’s iPhone, they should be held to the same quality expectations.

Closing Thoughts

Face ID hasn’t been destroyed, it’s alive and well. Apple have lived up to their claims regarding Face ID’s security. Face ID is still a solid 20-times better than Touch ID in terms of average false-positives. The level of sophistication to bypass Face ID with a mask (if claims are true) is significant and not something the average person should worry about.

That said, no biometric system is perfect. If you have an evil twin, Face ID could very well be a drawback for you.

Finally, keep the true skepticism alive. Not for the sake of wanting a product to fail, but for the sake of wanting products to succeed and surpass your wildest expectations.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that YouTube needs to make money in order to cover their costs, and I also understand that content creators need support to continue producing amazing videos. It’s not that I can simply enable AdBlock, and it’s not that YouTube Red is expensive. The reason I refuse to subscribe to YouTube Red is because it’s downright insulting. Let me explain…

This may sound counter-intuitive, but if YouTube Red was purely a service that offered ad-free YouTube and nothing else, I would pay that subscription in a heartbeat. That’s right, forget the ability to download videos for offline viewing. Forget background playback and picture-in-picture functionality in the mobile app. Forget all those features and just give me ad-free.

It’s 2017!

Come on, YouTube. Stop treating us like idiots. We’re the ones willing to pay you money! Background playback is a standard, fundamental feature of any modern computing device. We’ve had it for years with practically any webpage in any web browser, including YouTube itself. Sure, picture-in-picture arrived in iOS back in 2015, but that doesn’t mean you have the moral right to charge users to unlock simple OS-level functionality. In fact, it’s against Apple’s guidelines.

Putting aside the fact that I believe it’s just a basic consumer right for a user to be able to consume media in the way they choose, you’re essentially asking me to pay you to flip a switch on the API that Apple developed. It’s insulting!

Imagine if any other app in the world asked for $10 a month in order to unlock fullscreen and windowed mode. Nobody would pay for it. Sure, you’re bundling other content with that feature, but the message it sends to your users is loud and clear - user experience is not a priority.

Right now in the official YouTube app, I can’t use any other app while playing a video. If I try to open another app or switch apps, YouTube will pause the video immediately. That is, of course, unless I pay $10 a month. This is borderline ransomware. The only reason I won’t call it that is because you’re offering a legitimate, useful service.

I think what frustrates me most is that Google touts how they want an open web, freedom and doing “what’s right”. I don’t see this reflected in the YouTube app. It’s not an incentive to restrict users from expected and basic functionality. It leaves a bad taste in users’ mouths and therefore generates a negative attitude towards the wider company as a whole.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen with other platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music, people are more than happy to pay for content when the platform provides an amazing experience. In order for customers to feel valued, they must actually be valued. All YouTube users have helped grow YouTube to this point, and to put a price tag on basic and traditionally free functionality is insulting. We are no longer valued.

I will consider YouTube Red once they correct their ways. In the meantime, I will continue to use AdBlock and have videos play in the background via Safari on iOS. I will also continue to directly support the YouTubers I watch by purchasing their merchandise, but until YouTube stops restricting my basic consumer rights, I will continue to avoid supporting the service.

The user experience should be free, even if the content is not. Agree with me? Spread the word and let YouTube know!

Case and Portability

The first thing you see when you get your AirPods is the “dental floss” case. It is super sleek! Yes, it’s plastic, but it has a solid construction and some nice weight to it. It just feels of quality and fits comfortably in my pocket. In fact, it’s easier to retrieve from my pocket than my wired ones since I don’t have to untangle them.

You can see Apple has even paid attention to the design of the case, something you’ll use for only a mere few moments every day. The lid flicks up, but is held on with a metal hinge. I’m not worried about snapping it off since the way you hold the case will ensure your finger acts as a buffer, but even then, it feels like you’d need to apply a decent amount of force to snap it off. I’m also not concerned about it accidentally open in my pocket. The magnet that holds the lid down is fairly strong, and even then, the AirPods themselves are held magnetically within the case.

From a user experience point-of-view, it’s a pleasure dropping my AirPods into their placeholders, it’s almost as if they retract down smoothly into the case. If you look directly down into the placeholders, you can see two gold-plated connectors for each AirPod, hidden away from typical view.

I love how Apple have even hidden the regulatory stamps within the top of the lid, on the front-side, so you never see them in general use. This is also true for the AirPods themselves, which have the regulatory logos printed just behind the earpiece.

Battery and Charging

Now, I’ve only had these AirPods for around six hours and haven’t had the chance to conduct more scientific tests, but I can say the following. The AirPods came charged around 72% each, and the case was around 65%. I used the AirPods for a good two hours before they dropped to somewhere around 30-35%. That means I was losing just around 1% for every three minutes of playback, which matches nicely with Apple’s 5 hour battery life claim. Though, I suspect that the five hour number is a little conservative and probably closer to around 5 hours and 20 minutes.

Apple claims that for three hours of listening, AirPods require a fifteen minute charge. I got 70% (or 3.5 hours worth) of charge in under 20 minutes. This is just purely impressive!

Sound Quality

The common argument I’ve seen against the Apple AirPods is that $169 USD ($229 AUD) can buy you a much higher quality pair of headphones. I actually understand this argument, and agree to it to some extent, but I think it’s unfair to compare these two product categories with each other. Let’s be real here. The reason earphones are so popular is because most people want something convenient, portable and sound great. People like myself want something to wear while we’re out and about, perhaps commuting to work or uni. If you’re an audiophile and you want the best sound possible, you’re probably not going to use earphones, much less wear them in public due to all the environmental sounds that would interfere with your listening experience.

With that said, I’ve actually found the sound quality of the AirPods to be better than that of the typical wired Apple EarPods. However, you do have a little bit of that typical ambient “white noise” lingering around that you get with any Bluetooth earphones/headphones at low volume. Once you pass about the second notch on the iPhone’s volume, this disappears. It’s completely unnoticeable in practice, and quietens down if no audio is playing after about 2 seconds.

Unlike my Bose wireless headphones (which also sound great, by the way), I can’t notice any lag whatsoever with the audio. Everything syncs perfectly!. Videos play in sync. These things can go super loud too!

Won’t They Fall Out?

I tried shaking my head around like an idiot to see if they’d fall out, they didn’t. I will also be testing how well they work during exercise, and I will update this post in time.

However, if Apple’s standard EarPods don’t fit you well, then there’s a good chance you might accidentally flush one down the toilet. Though, I suggest you try them out, since being wireless, there’s no cable to accidentally pull on to rip them out of your ear. Don’t confuse poor fit with the hassle of the traditional cable.

The Apple Ecosystem

Switching between devices with AirPods is super easy, but there is a delay.

After iCloud automatically pairs the AirPods amongst all of your enabled devices, you can literally just hit play on any of your devices and the AirPods will automatically switch to them. No bluetooth menu required.

On the Mac, I had to initially select AirPods as the device I wanted to listen to. I did this via the iTunes AirPlay menu, but I believe this is the same through the Bluetooth menu. Now that I’ve done that, I can switch between listening to music/audio between my iPhone, Watch and Mac by merely pressing the play button on the device I want to listen to.

I am experiencing a delay switching between devices ranging from 2 seconds all the way up to 30 seconds (not hyperbole - actually 30 seconds). However, that 30 second delay occurred only once and it was also when I was listening to music on my iPhone via the AirPods and then attempted to play a song on iTunes on my Mac. Typically, delay is significantly shorter if I’m not playing music on a device while switching. Huge disclaimer: this could also be because I’m running iOS 10.2.1 beta. I’ll be conducting further tests to find out if the issue was with me/beta software or the AirPods themselves.

Switching between iPhone and Apple Watch only takes a couple of seconds - and by that, I mean actually streaming music directly from the Watch. Much faster than digging around for the Bluetooth settings, as you would with any non-W1 enabled headphones/earphones.

In practice, I don’t think the delay of switching audio source will be that noticeable since I don’t switch between devices the often when listening to music.

Apple’s Service

In the case that you do lose a single earphone, you can purchase a new one for $69 USD ($99 AUD). Even though it’s the popular thing to hate on Apple these days, this is actually the best offering I’ve seen from any wireless earphone manufacturer. I haven’t seen any other manufacturer even offer the ability to purchase a single earpiece, instead you have to buy an entirely new set. Even then, it’s a fair and expected price, being under half the price of an entirely new AirPods package.

Other Things to Note

• I charged my AirPods from ~30% to 100% in under 20 minutes.
• The casing has some weight to it, it just feels like quality, despite being plastic. There’s a metal hinge, so I’m not worried about the cap snapping off when I open the case.
• They work well with the Apple TV, but there’s no fancy iCloud pairing. Understandably so, given the TV is a multi-user system.
• Removing an AirPod while playing YouTube in Safari on the Mac will pause the video (presumably other HTML5 videos too).
• I actually tried to grab the remote on my old EarPods to adjust the volume before realising they don’t exist. I am now getting used to using my Apple Watch as my remote control for AirPods.
• Double-tap is a bit hit-and-miss, but I think that’s just a matter of me getting used to it. I’ve changed my setting to play/pause music, rather than activate Siri on my Mac.
• Using Siri on Mac sounds heavily compressed, as in super-low quality. Hopefully this can be fixed in a software update.

Conclusion

Overall, I give the AirPods a 9.5/10. I’m extremely happy at how easy it is to switch between devices, and the audio quality is definitely a slight, but noticeable step up - as long as you’re listening above ~15% volume to hide that obligatory bluetooth white noise. The whole package just feels like quality. It’s Apple through-and-through, and I love how Apple have even hidden the certification logos within the case and under the AirPod’s ear piece. Very clean design.

Compared to what else is on the market, and given the comparatively low price, AirPods win hands-down in the wireless earphone arena.

About the Touch Bar…

The Touch Bar seems like a solid middle-ground where Apple doesn’t have to incorporate a touchscreen on the main display of the laptop. This has a many advantages to the user experience, in my mind.

The thing with touchscreen laptops is that the displays tend to wobble every time you touch them. Now, even ignoring the cheap feeling and annoyance of distracting glare with a wobbly screen, using one creates fatigue if you’re constantly lifting your arms to reach it. Integrating the Touch Bar into the keyboard is therefore a clever move, in my opinion.

Even if the MacBook Pro did have a touchscreen, macOS isn’t optimised for that kind of interaction. We’ve all seen how Windows has attempted to be a one-size-fits-all offering, and I personally think that effort, although ambitious, has only made the user experience more complicated. I would hate to see that happen to macOS.

When I was a kid, I had always wondered what the function keys were for. They had no clear meaning until I started learning various shortcuts, and it seems the Touch Bar solves this with a very human perspective. It offers a far more user-friendly, understandable, and powerful interface that features some of the benefits of a touchscreen, without having to lift your arms.

One of the cooler demonstrations of the Touch Bar was the ability to adjust the colour of a brush in Photoshop on the fly. Interestingly, that reminded me of the Microsoft iPod Click Wheel… err, I mean… the Microsoft Surface Dial accessory. In all seriousness, it’s interesting that both companies have made a new controls dedicated to extending software capabilities at the same time.

However, I think the Touch Bar is far more versatile - it’s not limited to strictly artistic use cases, and even then I think the Touch Bar will trump the Surface Dial for artistic use cases, and I’ll explain why…

Since Touch Bar has a fairly customisable display (and multi-touch), there are many different interfaces which can be provided. The Dial, on the other hand, has a very specific interaction - rotation. You can’t go from 0% to 50% to 100% without first visiting every point in-between. The Touch Bar, however, you can jump to any value. This means you can use Touch Bar with far more artistic freedom. One aspect that remains to be seen is how precise you can select, for example, a colour on the Touch Bar vs the precision of the Surface Dial.

The Touch Bar is also built-in to the MacBook Pro and is unobtrusive. Reports state that the Touch Bar matches fairly well with the brightness of the physical keys, so it doesn’t look out-of-place. Using the Touch Bar also doesn’t block your display, which has benefits when screen real estate is so valuable, especially with a laptop form factor.

Update: It turns out that the new MacBook Pro will automatically turn itself on when the laptop is opened, even when fully shut down. This is incredibly cool, and renders my criticism about the power button below moot! I saw this in action in a video by EverythingApplePro and another video from MobileTechReview.

The only thing I would alter about the Touch Bar is the Touch ID/power button. In my opinion, it’s unclear where the power button actually is on the keyboard. Sure, Mac users all have the learned behaviour that the power will be in the top-right, but it’s not immediately obvious to a new user. I also dislike that the Touch Bar has to point an arrow towards the Touch ID sensor when you want to use Apple Pay. That said, I’m sure in future iterations, Touch ID will eventually be incorporated directly into the Touch Bar.

About the Ports…

As with every technological transition, there are teething issues. Moving to pure USB-C/Thunderbolt is no exception, but the simplicity of having four universal ports will be fantastic once I upgrade my accessories too. It also looks strikingly elegant.

One thing that surprised me was the inclusion of the 3.5mm headphone jack. What surprised me was not so much that the headphone jack was retained, but that the optical output was dropped! If anyone was going to use optical out, it would be a Pro user. That said, I’m looking far more forward towards a wireless future with the extremely powerful I/O that Thunderbolt offers when you need it.

Truly, the one thing I am quite sad to see go is the MagSafe port, but I guess it was only a matter of time with how thin devices are becoming and thus the cost of ever-shrinking space increasing. At least it’s still possible to achieve the same functionality with third-party accessories.

About the Display…

I am so excited that we finally have vibrant wide-colour P3 displays across all of Apple’s major product lines. That means I can shoot a photo in P3 on my iPhone with P3 display, edit it on my P3 MacBook Pro, and show it to my friends on my iPad Pro with P3 display. That’s a lot of P3, and everything will now look more vibrant than ever no matter what Apple device I’m using!

The glowing Apple logo on the rear of the display has been removed. It truly is the beginning of a new era! I can only speculate that this was inevitable with MacBooks becoming so thin these days.

About the Trackpad and Speakers…

The trackpad is huge! I hope it has some fantastic palm rejection software. That said, I am a huge fan of Apple’s trackpads. Having the entire surface area clickable is something I wanted before Apple even implemented it. The haptic feedback, though, gives an amazing illusion of a press, and it purely feels stronger and made to last.

The speakers are said to be significantly improved. I’m glad Apple hasn’t forgotten audio. Audio has been improved across all of their range, now - iPhones, iPads, Watch, and now Mac. Sound is often a hidden aspect of computing devices that’s not immediately noticeable when you’re window shopping.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m extremely happy with the direction Apple is taking with these new MacBook Pro’s. The insanely fast solid state drives are going to be incredible. I’m a little sad that MagSafe is gone, and I do miss the iconic backlit Apple logo, but I understand why they had to be cut. The ability to power four 4K displays with the 15” MacBook Pro is really impressive. That’s four times as many as my 2013 topped-out MacBook Pro can power!

I look forward to seeing them in-store, and I will post a followup if any of my thoughts change!

The teaser image appears to show an Apple logo, perhaps made up from various light sources at different distances. Some circles are in focus, while others are more blurry. This leads me to speculate if the new iPhone 7 Plus’ dual-lens camera system will allow users to adjust the focus of their photos after they have taken them. After all, Apple did purchase LinX last year.

I’m a huge fan of Linkin Park, I’ve been listening to their music since all the way back in primary school! Hands down, my favourite song of theirs is By Myself, from Hybrid Theory. It’s an artistic masterpiece and, I think, one of their most underrated songs.

The synth in the background gives such a feeling of isolation, and the lyrics are intense - “If I’m killed by the questions like a cancer, then I’ll be buried in the silence of the answer”. My favourite part of the song is probably where Chester raises his vocals the third time around when he sings “I can’t hold on”, it screams of desperation. It’s attention to detail like this that makes me love Linkin Park so much! They don’t just design catchy beats and heavy riffs, they tell a story.

So, with this song as one of the main inspirations for me to learn how to play guitar, I decided to purchase a sleek, black Yamaha Gigmaker FX! Hopefully I can learn to play along with the instrumental in time.

Yamaha Gigmaker FX

Since I purchased the guitar as a pack, I also received the VOX Mini3 amplifier. This thing sounds so great! Like any amplifier, I can get a really heavy sound, or a really clean sound by messing around with the gain and volume. Originally, I was going to purchase a cheaper guitar pack which contained an Essex AGA1065 amp, but the sound quality the Mini3 provides is so much better for what I want - distortion!

A New Journey

So, I’m finally learning guitar! Once I can actually play something decent, maybe I’ll upload a track here. For now, the list of songs I want to learn how to play on guitar includes:

• Linkin Park - “A Place For My Head”
• Linkin Park - “By Myself”
• Linkin Park - “Faint”
• Linkin Park - “One Step Closer”
• Three Days Grace - “Animal I Have Become”
• Three Days Grace - “The Good Life”
• Three Days Grace - “Riot”

In the meantime, I’m watching some awesome free online video tutorials from Guitar Lessons. So far I’ve learnt four main chords - Amin7, Cmaj, Dmaj, and Gmaj. Now I need to practice actually transitioning between the chords. It’s super fun!

The Good

Let’s start with the basics. A watch has historically been an item focused around helping the user manage their time. During my days at university, I no longer have to pull out my phone and check where my next class is, I just glance at my wrist and it tells me where I need to go. This isn’t about me checking the time so much as it is keeping me on time. In fact, the calendar complication takes up the largest amount of space on my Apple Watch, with the clock coming in second. I also have a secondary clock displaying the time in San Francisco, which helps keep me in line with friends from the “Land Up Over”.

With the size of phones increasing, the Apple Watch has become even more “handy” for me. Although this might sound bizarre, it’s actually really helpful if someone is texting or calling you when you’re unable to reach for your phone. This has been particularly true when eating messy food… and apparently I’m not the only one using my nose as an input device.

Finally, it’s also a fantastic gizmo for entering codes generated with two-factor authentication. It’s nice when I have to login to my online accounts on an unknown computer. I don’t even have to lift my hands from the keyboard, I just flick my wrist and type in the security code that appears on my Apple Watch.

The Badass

Apart from feeling like a secret agent talking to my wrist, when I’m actually just texting Mum, the Apple Watch has some really cool apps available for it too. Shazam, for example, brings up the lyrics of the song playing in the background and moves the text in-sync with the song - it’s crazy! Withdrawing money from my bank account is as easy as tapping the icon, pressing “cardless cash”, and selecting an amount - it’s arguably more secure than typing in a pin code at an ATM. Even using Apple Watch as a clicker for Keynote presentations is an example that there are apps that really were made for the watch that can’t be done as elegantly on iPhone.

More than anything, I love controlling the music playing in the car from my wrist. It’s so natural, and feels like I’m using a tiny, powerful iPod Nano. What’s more enjoyable is having my iPhone in another room of the house, or connected to the TV. Then when someone is sitting down, unexpectedly, I can start blasting this through the house.

Other apps exist, or likely will exist in the near future that I’m looking forward to as well. It’d be awesome being able to control the heater and air conditioner, even after I’ve left the house, or when I’m too lazy to get off the couch on those hot summer days. Opening locked doors and the garage is also something possible already with the iPhone - but how cool would it be on your wrist?

The Brilliant

Now, everything up to this point, I think is worth more than the price of an iPod Nano alone. The fact that I can even store songs on the Apple Watch itself basically kills any interest in the iPod Nano/Shuffle, for me. Here’s the real kicker, though. Health and fitness.

I have never been a “fitness freak”. Sure, I like to feel good like everybody else, but it’s hard trying to get into a good exercise and eating routine. Although my diet still isn’t quite as good as it should be, the Apple Watch has helped me at least improve my exercising patterns.

The Apple Watch displays three coloured rings for your day-to-day fitness. The red circle indicates movement, the green circle in the middle is for exercise, and the blue circle counts how many hours during the day you’ve stood up and walked around. The ability to actually see your progress helps to teach you how exercise correlates with your mood, motivation and overall feeling. Even outside of exercise, seeing how my heart rate changes throughout the day or when I’m put in certain situations teaches me things I never knew about myself.

One could argue that other smartwatches offer fitness tracking. The Apple Watch offers something that competing smartwatches don’t, though. It’s not just about the fitness. It’s about the range of apps, ease-of-use, the gorgeous high-res display, the vast range of bands, the deep integration with iPhone. All of this combined makes me want to wear this device every day. Just check out my history from July to November.

You can see I made several attempts to start exercising consistently. With each attempt, I made a little more effort than the previous one, until one day… it just finally stuck!

Yep! 45 days and counting!

This is my best me in nearly 23 years, and that’s worth it.

A bit of information - even though we’re subscribed to Internode, we’re connected to the Internet via a sub-exchange (RIM) on the Telstra Wholesale Network. This is the only way that we can receive decent Internet speeds. Generally, we top out at about 690 KiBp/s downstream and 98 KiBp/s upstream.

Back to the story. We arrived home and turned the router back on (which had been switched off for the entirety of the holiday). I turned on my Mac and started downloading lectures from Monash that I wanted to grab before they were removed from the Monash servers. Everything seemed fine, I was getting decent download speeds. Things got strange, though, when I tried to download two or more lectures at once. After a few moments, my download speed would drop to ALMOST 0 KiBp/s, but not quite. This was temperamental, though. Speeds wouldn’t always drop to near-0 KiBp/s, sometimes they would drop to around 19 KiBp/s - a very random number, I know.

So, obviously the problem is with the Monash website. Clearly they’re doing maintenance and that’s preventing me from downloading too much at the same time, right? Well, that’s what I thought… until I tried to access Google.com. In fact, every time the downloads cut to those insanely slow speeds, I had to restart the router to get the Internet working again.

On one occasion I noticed that Chrome was sitting there trying to connect to Google. It wasn’t that Google was downloading slowly, it was that I wasn’t even connected yet! So I pinged Google, and found some pretty horrendous results. Out of eight packets, three timed-out. A 38% packet loss pinging Google?… and the packets that did make it through had ping times of up to 600 ms (over half-a-second). How is this possible!? I usually get no longer than 50 ms ping times. I ran SpeedTest.net (when it eventually loaded… by the way, why is their website made with Flash? It takes forever to load on slow connections!), and the results speak for themselves.

What could have possibily gone so wrong between the time that I switched the router off on my way out the door, and two weeks later when we got back home? Was someone hacking our systems? Was the router getting too old? Have our lines worn out? Are Telstra upgrading the sub-exchange?

Well, it doesn’t seem characteristic of a dying router to drop to such slow speeds, only to bounce back up after a restart… and I doubt that our lines had worn out, we’d only been gone for two weeks and we were still able to receive full download speeds before the issues would arise - they weren’t instant. Perhaps something was going on at our sub-exchange? I do remember reading a pamphlet from Telstra stating that ADSL2+ is available in our area now. Something just doesn’t feel right about that, though. What could maintenance workers possibly be doing to the network that would create these issues? Having said that, the idea that we were being hacked didn’t sit well with me either. Our router (as far as I knew) had been off for the entirety of the holiday.

Now for something really strange! After restarting the router I, once again, proceeded to download lectures from Monash. Chrome was telling me that I was crankin’ down at the full 690 KiBp/s. So I opened Activity Monitor on my Mac to see if perhaps another app was hogging the bandwidth - maybe there were software updates, since I hadn’t updated in two weeks. I switched to the network tab only to find that, hey, I’m actually getting faster speeds than ever! 790 KiBp/s downstream. An exact 100 KiBp/s extra than usual! Chrome’s download manager strongly disagreed, still displaying 690 KiBp/s at the time. Of course, a few moments later my speed plummeted to near 0 KiBp/s in Chrome… and strangely stuck at a solid 100 KiBp/s in Actiity Monitor.

So there rang a thought… perhaps it’s an issue with something internal. If I’m getting 790 KiBp/s over Wi-Fi, while I’m still getting the full (standard) 690 KiBp/s, the extra 100 KiBp/s must be coming from another device on the network.

I double-checked with my sister to make sure that she wasn’t downloading anything. I turned off the Wi-Fi on my iPod Touch to ensure that it wasn’t iTunes Wi-Fi Sync. In fact, we switched off all the wireless devices we could think of in the house. It’s worth mentioning here that my sister’s Mac was also displaying a solid 100 KiBp/s down in Activity Monitor. How weird is that?

By this point, I was on the phone to Internode. The support rep, Adam, was very helpful and asking similar questions I had asked myself. Even he was stumped. Now, with all devices with Wi-Fi switched off, I turned Wi-Fi back on on my Mac. Still, I received that dreaded 100 KiBp/s download. I had never seen anything like this before. Maybe this was an issue with Wi-Fi? Adam directed me to connect my Windows computer via ethernet to the router, which I did. Downloading a 1 GiB test file, speeds seemed okay, though they did fluctuate from 690 KiBp/s to 450 KiBp/s, back up to 500 KiBp/s, and then down to 300 KiBp/s before I cancelled the download.

Adam told me he was running a line test, and I’m guessing that’s what disconnected our call. Thankfully, Internode’s support and services are top-of-the-line, and they immediately called us back.

I went to our router’s settings page and discovered that, actually, not all Wi-Fi enabled devices were switched off. Here’s a video of my actual reaction. There was an unknown device on the network! We’re being hacked!.. or so you might think. It was only an unknown device because I hadn’t bothered to name all the devices that I had authorised access to over the years. Then my sister (or was it Dad? I can’t remember) asked, “what about the printer?”

Well, I had forgotten to turn off our wonderful(ly terrible) Canon wireless printer! Boy, that printer has had no end of troubles. Anyway… I switched it off. After a few moments the router’s settings page reflected that no devices were connected via Wi-Fi. Jumping back on my Mac, the 100 KiBp/s download had disappeared. I turned the printer on and off a few times to verify. Indeed, when the printer was turned on, the 100 KiBp/s download returned.

So it was the printer, that’s all fine and dandy, but what on Earth is it uploading to my Mac, and my sister’s Mac too… and I now even wonder if all Wi-Fi devices were being fed this 100 KiBp/s stream of data? Honestly, I don’t know what the data it was sending was. What I do know is that both my sister and I had just reformatted our Macs around the new year, and we hadn’t installed any drivers for the printer. How, then, was the printer allowed to stream data to our Macs? Perhaps because it was authorised to via the router’s firewall, and having the Mac’s firewall disabled would have allowed the data in.

I still intend to call Canon to find out what’s going on, though I suspect they’ll just get me to restore factory settings on the printer. Right now, though, I should be able to switch the printer back on and experience the 100 KiBp/s phenomena. I really want to find out what’s going on before I reset the system. One thought is that perhaps data from a previous scan is stuck in an infinite loop, trying to find the computer to send it to and thus flooding the network.

Maybe we will never know… or maybe, just maybe, this is the rise of Skynet!

Over the next several weeks I’ll restore old posts to this new website, and I’ll also be tweaking the design. In the meantime, please continue to visit the old site until I’ve completely moved :).

On Mac

Step 1:

Navigate to your “Applications” folder and find Eclipse. Right-click on Eclipse and “Show Package Contents”.

Step 2:

Browse to Contents > MacOS > eclipse.ini, and open the file in TextEdit.

Step 3:

Add “-Duser.name=Your Name” to your configuration as shown below.

Once you’ve saved the configuration and restarted Eclipse, type the opening delimiter for Javadoc (/**), and Eclipse should auto-fill the @author field with “Your Name” instead of “yourname” (or whatever your username on your Mac is.)

On Windows

The procedure on Windows is much the same. Navigate to your Eclipse folder and locate your “eclipse.ini” file. Add the following line -Duser.name=”Your Name” as shown below. Note the quotation marks around “Your Name”.

Step 1: Nginx Configuration File

You will want to alter your nginx configuration file(s) to include the following:

server{
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:PORT;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    }
}

Obviously you will need to change the port on localhost to the correct port for each website you’re running on Apache - I’m sure you’ve already got that, though. The three lines below proxy_pass simply set the headers to pass to Apache - which will contain the client’s IP.

Step 2: mod_rpaf

The final step is to install mod_rpaf for Apache. This module allows you to set the value of the remote address when using a proxy. If you haven’t already got the module installed (try “a2enmod rpaf” to find out), you can install it via apt-get:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-rpaf

Although you may be retrieving the correct IP addresses now, you’ll want to ensure the module is configured correctly. My Apache configuration file has the following code just below all my other <IfModule>’s:

# The following lines allow client IP to be passed from Nginx to Apache
<IfModule mod_rpaf.c>
    RPAFenable On
    RPAFsethostname On
    RPAFproxy_ips 127.0.0.1
</IfModule>

Where it says RPAFproxy_ips, you’ll want to ensure you’re using the IP that Nginx runs on (this should be the same IP that’s appearing when you were attempting to print your client’s IP address prior to reading this guide). I run Nginx on the same server as Apache, so it’s localhost (127.0.0.1). If in doubt, you’re almost definitely running nginx on the same server as Apache, so just go with ‘127.0.0.1’. Make sure that you restart Nginx and Apache, and you should be set!

Because jQuery allows you to write such minuscule amounts of code, I rarely need to debug nor optimise the small scripts that I make. Today, however, I decided that the project I was working on was at the stage that I really should take a look behind the scenes to see what I could optimise. Nothing was actually wrong with how the script worked or anything, I was really just interested to see if I could make any improvements.

Anyway, this project I was working on had an <input> tag for the user to type into. I noticed, though, as I typed in the input box, my JavaScript console kept throwing this weird warning:

event.layerX and event.layerY are broken and deprecated in WebKit. They will be removed from the engine in the near future.

Well that’s weird!

So I put the error straight into Google, only to find what seemed like an all-too-easy solution on StackOverflow. The top answer with 261 votes suggested upgrading to jQuery 1.7. Surely with that many votes, it must have been the solution for many people (so keep an eye out if you’re still using 1.6.1 or below.) This wasn’t the case for me, however. After updating to 1.7, I still had the same warning thrown at me.

So I went ahead and created a blank HTML page with all the same elements, minus the Javascript… only to find that I get the same error when I type! In fact, I don’t even have to type in the <input>, but even just typing randomly after clicking on whitespace returned this warning. What could it be!?

Well, I’ve known extensions to be a bit disruptive with code before, so I disabled all of my extensions. Voilà! The error was no longer appearing. One-by-one I re-enabled each extension, to find - and here’s the shocking bit - my extension for Buffer was causing the issue. Okay, perhaps it wasn’t that shocking, but still… what could Buffer’s Chrome extension be doing to throw that warning every time I hit a key? I would love to know.

What better way to end the year than to spend the final minutes of 2011 at The Tivoli’s final ever show? That’s exactly what our family did, and I managed to record (in high definition) some of the craziest footage you’ve ever seen! You may know Terry Gill from the classic Australian film “Crackers,” or perhaps from “Carols by Candlelight,” where he plays Santa Claus every year. Terry is married to Carole Ann, together they ran The Tivoli which had it’s final show on New Year’s Eve. Essentially the owners of the building wanted them out unless they paid excessive prices to stay, and so they’re having to close down… at least for now, perhaps in the future they will open a new place.

The Tivoli put on shows focused on music from the 50’s and 60’s. Personally I can’t relate to the music the same way that others in the audience could, yet, even I love the show. It was very entertaining… especially watching the “old farts,” singing Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” I hope Terry and Carole manage to find a new place or somehow work out a deal to stay where they are.