Jay Lagare – Page 36

First Impression: Apple Watch Sport

By Jay Lagare on Wednesday, June 24, 2015

I got my hands on Edong’s Apple Watch Sport and, with his permission, I unboxed it, took some photos, and played with it a bit.

The packaging is unusually big and bulky for Apple who have been steadily reducing the size of their product packaging for years. But it seems to be part of their premium and luxury message for the Apple Watch.

The 42mm case is rectangular and made of aluminium with a space grey anodized coating. Everything is smooth and rounded with no sharp edges or corners to be seen or felt. Knowing beforehand that it is 42mm, I wasn’t expecting that it would be quite small and light. But it is.

The Ion-X screen covers the whole face and is rounded at the edges. It is black and shiny when off and the display is very sharp when on. Nice to look at in either state. It has force-touch which means touching it with varying levels of force result in different actions. It is also very responsive though force-touching needs some getting used to.

The digital crown on the right side is big and quite effortless to turn and push. So with the other button.

The back has those scifi-looking sensors for reading your heart-rate.

The strap is black silicone rubber with a clever clasp. You button it on and slip the excess strap under the clasp. Very neat. And you can change straps or bracelets without any tools.

The whole watch is well-built. It looks and feels the high-end device you expect from Apple. Even more, it looks and feels like a futuristic device from science fiction. But aside from small nods to traditional watches it doesn’t pretend to be a watch but instead steps ahead and defines itself as a new class of wrist wear, the so-called smartwatch.

It looks like Apple has another winner on its hand (or wrist).

General

Orient Mako

By Jay Lagare on Monday, June 22, 2015

Since the demise of my Suunto Observer, I’ve been looking on-and-off for a stainless steel watch that is more casual and less toolish than my Casio G-Shock. After a whole lot of research, I finally got an Orient Mako.

Heard of Orient? I haven’t until fairly recently. Orient is supposedly Japan’s largest manufacturer of mechanical watches. It was founded in 1950. Since 2001, it has been a subsidiary of Seiko Epson Corporation, one of three core companies of the Seiko Group. But it operates independently from Seiko Watch which is owned by Seiko Holdings, another core company of the Seiko Group. It has its own product line and manufactures its movements in-house. To me that means it is a serious watch maker instead of someone who designs the outer bits and just throws in someone else’s movements.

The Mako uses the Orient Cal. 46943 movement. It is a tried and tested automatic movement but it doesn’t have manual winding and hacking (stopping the seconds hand). However a few shakes is all it takes to get the watch started and you can approximate hacking by very slowly turning the crown clockwise when adjusting the time. The movement also has day and date complications with quick set. The day is set is done via a pusher at 2 o’clock. The date is set the conventional way by pulling the crown further out and turning it.

The dial is a very deep metallic blue with a radial ray pattern. It is absolutely gorgeous to look at. On the upper half of the dial there’s an applied Orient logo and just below it is “Orient” and just below it “Automatic” in script. On the lower half, there’s “Water Resist” in script and just below it “200m”. It has big applied Arabic numerals at 6, 9, and 12 hours and rectangular indices for the remaining hours. All are chrome-outlined and lumed. The hour and minute sword hands are also chrome-outlined and lumed. The seconds hand is chromed with a red arrow tip. No lume this time.

The bezel is a deep blue and often appears black in dim lighting. It is unidirectional with 60 clicks. It has scalloping all around with slightly bigger scallops at the 5 minute mark and every 10 minutes onward. The scalloping appear to have been stamped instead of machined. Or maybe it was overpolished. Anyway, the result is that the scallop edges are smooth and makes it a bit harder to grip and turn the bezel.

The 41.5mm case is round and made of stainless steel. The sides and bottom are mirror polished while top is circular brushed. The face, unfortunately, is just mineral glass. The caseback has nicely detailed engravings including the Orient logo. The screw-down crown is big and easy to grip. It is signed with the Orient logo. The day pusher has a screw-down collar that prevents accidental pushing and changing of the day (and flooding if you were underwater).

The bracelet is stainless steel and based on the popular Oyster design. It has polished sides and brushed top and bottom. The links are solid (not folded) but the end links are not. Adjustment is done with split pins. The clasp is made of sheet steel. It has a triple locking design and signed on the outside with the Orient logo.

The overall look and feel of the watch is unmistakably that of a quintessential dive watch as heavily influenced by the (in)famous Rolex Submariner. But it is different enough to have its own identity and just as refined enough to be worn on a day to day basis and not just on dives.

But the best thing is that for all these good qualities, it is a quite a bargain at less than $200.

Rating: 5/5

General

PlexConnect: Connecting Plex and the Apple TV

By Jay Lagare on Monday, May 18, 2015

The Apple TV is a nifty little device but it’s nowhere close to being able to play anything you want. It cannot play from USB drives. And it can’t play network shares either. Not from AFP, not from SMB, not from DLNA. There’s no app store for the Apple TV (yet) so there’s not installing and running the Plex Player app. So it can’t play from from Plex Media Server either. At least not directly.

Fortunately, there is a workaround: PlexConnect. And it is genius! You see, some of the built-in Apple TV apps get their UI and content from remote web servers. So it was a matter of hijacking the web traffic to from one of these apps and redirect it to PlexConnect running on local machine. PlexConnect then communicates with Plex Media Server and serves up modified UI and content to the hijacked app on the Apple TV. Of course, the hijacked app won’t work as before anymore.

Normally the hijacked app is the Trailers app. But since I didn’t have the Trailers app on my Apple TV, I used the WSJ app instead. If you have the same situation then in the instructions below replace of “trailers” with “wsjapp” and replace of “trailers.apple.com” with “video–api–secure.wsj.com”

Here are the consolidated instructions (from https://github.com/iBaa/PlexConnect/wiki/Install-Guide) for Mac OS X:

1. Install Plex Media Server
2. Download PlexConnect (https://github.com/iBaa/PlexConnect/archive/master.zip)
3. Extract and drag PlexConnect-master to the Applications folder
4. Open a terminal window (Terminal.app on Mac) and run the following command

openssl req -new -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -out ~/Desktop/trailers.pem -keyout ~/Desktop/trailers.key -x509 -days 7300 -subj “/C=US/CN=trailers.apple.com”

openssl req -new -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -out ~/Desktop/wsjapp.pem -keyout ~/Desktop/wsjapp.key -x509 -days 7300 -subj “/C=US/CN=video–api–secure.wsj.com“

5. This will create two files on your desktop: trailers.key and trailers.pem (or wsjapp.key and wsjapp.pem). Next run the following command:

openssl x509 -in ~/Desktop/trailers.pem -outform der -out ~/Desktop/trailers.cer && cat ~/Desktop/trailers.key >> ~/Desktop/trailers.pem

openssl x509 -in ~/Desktop/trailers.pem -outform der -out ~/Desktop/wsjapp.cer && cat ~/Desktop/wsjapp.key >> ~/Desktop/wsjapp.pem

Three files should now be on your desktop trailers.pem, trailers.key, and trailers.cer. (or wsjapp.pem, wsjapp.key, and wsjapp.cer).

6. Place the .pem and.cer files into the following folder:

/Applications/PlexConnect-master/assets/certificates/

7. If you’re hijacking the WSJ app, you need to edit the PlexConnect configuration:

/Applications/PlexConnect-master/Settings.cfg

Set hosttointercept to “video–api–secure.wsj.com“:

hosttointercept = video–api–secure.wsj.com

8. If you’re hijacking the WSJ app, you need to edit the Settings script:

/Applications/PlexConnect-master/Settings.py

Change line 35 to (note the red dash):

(‘hosttointercept’ , (‘trailers.apple.com’, ‘[a-zA-Z0-9_.–]+’)),

9. Run PlexConnect by first opening a terminal window (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal), then type the following:

sudo “/Applications/PlexConnect-master/PlexConnect.py”

Provide your Administrator password to complete PlexConnect startup.

You should now see messages like these in the terminal window: PlexConnect Terminal

Write down the IP_Self: ###.###.###.### address. This is the IP of your PlexConnect server

SelfIP

On the Apple TV, choose Settings > General > Network > Wi-Fi. Then Choose your Wi-Fi network Name WifiSettings Change the DNS setting from “Automatic” to “Manual”. WifiDNS Enter the IP of your PlexConnect server as the DNS server. DNSIP

Go to the AppleTV settings menu. Select “General” then scroll the cursor down to highlight “Send Data To Apple” and set to “No”.

With “Send Data To Apple” highlighted, press “Play” (not the normal “Select” button) and you will be prompted to add a profile.

Enter (without the quotes): “http://trailers.apple.com/trailers.cer” (or “http://video–api–secure.wsj.com/wsjapp.cer“)

Launch the Trailers (or the WSJ app).

Now you can play media from your Plex Media Server library on your Apple TV.

Enjoy!

UPDATE 6-22-15: Changed from old “secure.marketwatch.com” to new “video–api–secure.wsj.com”. Based on discussion at https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/topic/168109-plexconnect-suddendly-stopped-working/.

General

Laiya

By Jay Lagare on Sunday, March 8, 2015

We decided to go on a weekend trip to Laiya to celebrate Michelle’s birthday. We’ve been there before but this time we decided to use Google Maps and Waze which then proceeded to direct us to all the wrong places (as usual). As a result, we reached Laiya later than expected and we had to choose resorts with daylight running out (again). After hurriedly checking out resort all the way towards far end of the cove, we went back and settled on Kabayan Beach Resort which we felt had more reasonable rates.

Kabayan is your typical beach resort and is definitely not as fancy as the neighboring White Cove but they had a pool which we thought the kids would love. As it turned out we spent more time at the beach than at the pool. The sand is not exactly white but it’s white enough and pretty fine. The water is shallow for quite a long way and the bottom is soft and sandy. Definitely kid-friendly. They have a banana boat and other rides but those small-kid friendly so we skipped those.

The room we had was what they call “hotel type” which means it has what you would expect from a hotel room: a bed, a bathroom, a tv, and a refrigerator. I’m not asking for more and it’s nice and clean. That said, some fixtures and equipment are getting rather dilapidated.

Food is available from the in-house restaurant. But the food is frankly nothing special and quite expensive for the quality. Unfortunately, there are no nearby standalone restaurants and we figured the restaurants at the other resorts either have the same fare or have costs commensurate to their room rates.

Still, overlooking such minor niggles, you can have a great time at the beach. And we did!

General

AirPrint Through A Mac

By Jay Lagare on Thursday, December 18, 2014

If you don’t have an AirPrint-compatible printer, you can still print on your iDevices with the help of a Mac. Of course, you’ll need to keep said Mac on while printing :P

You have several options: Printopia ($20), Handyprint ($5 donation), and NetGear Genie (FREE). Free is good so NetGear Genie is it. It’s also the easiest to set up.

On Mac OS X:

Download and install Genie.
Start Genie and go to “AirPrint”. Select the printer you want to make available for AirPrint.

On your iDevice:

On the pertinent app, select the “share” button.
Select “Print”. This will take you to the Printer Options screen
Select Printer
Set the number of copies if you want
Select “Print”

That’s it.