iPhone - Look! No Home button

Is the Home button on your iPhone getting a bit sticky or is it broken? Or maybe you just want to give it a bit of a rest to make it last longer. Well then this article is for you. Find out how to operate your iPhone without touching the physical Home button (or any buttons). Note that you have to be running iOS version 5 to use the feature explained in this article.

Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> AssistiveTouch

Go to the Settings app and navigate to the menu as indicated above. Below are some screen shots to further help you out. Hope you don’t get lost.

Once you get to the AssistiveTouch menu, turn it on.

Press the Home button to get back to the Home screen. You’ll now notice a white button in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. After a while it fades a bit, so it’s less distracting. You can also move it around the screen to the other corners and the right and left hand sides. Also, if you have it in the bottom half of the screen, it will move itself out of the way of the keyboard when it pops up.

Now here’s the key feature. Tap the white button and a menu will appear on screen. You can now press the virtual Home button, which will behave just as the physical Home button. That includes double tapping on the virtual Home button to bring up the running apps display.

You can also operate all the other physical buttons on the iPhone virtually. Pressing the Device button will bring up the following menu screen.

Most of this menu is all rather self explanatory. The Shake option will simulate you physically shaking the phone. The arrow in the middle takes you back to the previous menu.

Make multi-touch gestures with just one finger

Going back to the initial menu screen, the Gestures option allows you to perform multi-touch gestures with just one touch. The ones programmed are just 2 - 5 finger touches.

If you go to Favourites, you’ll see you can do a Pinch operation with just one touch. You can programme any multi-touch gesture to appear on the Favorites menu by going back to settings and tapping on Create New Gesture… option. You then just record the gesture on the screen and give it a name.

Hope this article has been of some use to you. If you have any questions, put them in the comments section below.

Titanic - William Weller remembered

My Mum and I popped along to a local BBC studio a few weeks ago to record an interview about my great granddad William Weller, who was a surviving crew member on the Titanic.

Here’s a clip featuring us from a 30 minute programme that was broadcast by BBC Sussex radio on 15th April 2012 at 4:30pm. It features other stories of connections to Titanic in the Sussex area. You can listen to the full programme on the iPlayer here and skipping to 1 hour 30 minutes.

Photo - The Fawley Cloud

In the right conditions (no wind, right humidity) a cloud gets formed over Fawley oil refinery. You can just see a connection to the smoke stacks. The cloud is not pollution, just that the particles coming from the refinery have seeded a cloud of water vapour. I’ve seen and photographed it before.

Photo - Isle of Wight ferry in the mist

This shot was taken on 11th March 2012.

Racing Thoughts - Malaysian GP

For a rain affected race that was suspended on lap 9 for around half an hour, there were very few retirements. Just two; Kobayashi and Grosjean (his 2nd DNF this year). Amazing really.

Alonso winning the race means the Ferrari car is not all bad. Alonso seems to be able to get good race pace out of the car. I wonder just how hard he’s working inside the car to get it though. The three week break will allow Ferrari to attempt to fix the issues. Then maybe Massa can yield better results.

Driver of the race has got to be Perez. He probably should have won, but if you’re in the Ferrari Young Driver programme and your car is powered by a Ferrari engine, it’s worth thinking long term and not ticking them off too much. He has certainly proved to Ferrari how good he is and that’s all he needs to do to secure a drive for them in the future.

Hamilton put in a solid third, while Button made mistakes and slipped down the field. Just one of those days I hope.

I was surprised to see Schumacher losing it in the wet on the first lap. What happened to the rainmeister?

Sky F1 Review

I managed to find a cheaper way to watch the live Sky coverage for this race. For a limited time you can get access to the Sky Sports TV app for £4.99 a month (usually £10/m). This is an iPhone app, but works well enough on the iPad so the picture is a lot bigger. Much better than the £22.50/m with Virginmedia.

The quality of the stream was not that great. I could follow along and just about read all the numbers on the screen. Sky do need to provision some more bandwidth for their mobile streaming services, for sure.

The coverage style is typically Sky. Flashy with some useless generic presenters. In race was OK with Brundle and Crofty. Overall though, looking forward to a nice race weekend live on the BBC again.

iPad 3 Camera - Stills

 

Above are a selection of test shots I quickly took in the garden. Click on an image to download an unscaled version of the jpeg that the iPad produces. These photos have not been changed in any way. I’m pretty pleased with the resutls.

Racing Thoughts - Australian GP

Great start then to the 2012 F1 season for Button and McLaren, with Hamilton coming home in 3rd place. It really looks like beauty equals speed. Hopefully this year McLaren have found how to be fast in both qualifying and the race. A repeat performance at next weekend’s Malaysian GP will firm up these early conclusions about the McLaren car.

Red Bull showed great race pace and improved a lot from their positions on the grid. Will still be a threat this year, but hopefully won’t dominate this year like they did last year. This alone will make the 2012 season more interesting.

Ferrari look to have massive problems with their rear-end grip. Alonso probably did an incredible drive to get that car hope in 5th.

Sauber looked great again at Australia. Perez pulled off a 1 stop special again. However, this could be to down to the track matching his driving style. Like last year, he won’t do this every race.

Renault look strong in theory, but an unfortunate incident for Grosjean and poor qualifying for Kimi masked this in the final race result.

Maldonado proved to be unreliable, yet again. He had more points than Williams had at the end of 2011 in his pocket and he just went and blew it. Whoops!

BBC Highlights Review

In general I was quite happy with the programme the BBC put out. However, I am a bit perplexed why they have to keep us waiting until 2pm on a Sunday. Why not 1pm? That’s the usual European race start time and is handy to watch the GP highlights with some lunch. Do they really need that extra hour of editing time? Not for Australia, but maybe Malaysia.

The race started about 10 minutes into the programme, thus throwing away any of the usual magazine-style content. I wonder what the reason for this is? Is it to get viewers to the start of the GP as soon as possible? Or are they just cutting costs? I’m guessing the usual 50 - 60 minute built-up programmes will come back for when they have live races.

The race review after the highlights were solid as usual. Though no Forum, as previously promised, but maybe that’s only for European races.

Overall thoughts

The race had plenty of action in the first half and towards the end. But then Australia always produces great racing.

F1 Qualifying Thoughts – Australia 2012

Well apart from the front row of the grid, which I'm very happy with (an all McLaren front row, wow!!) what very topsy-turvy grid it is. Ferrari outside the top ten - will have to maybe rethink my Badger GP Fantasy choices. Swapping Ferrari for Mercedes might be in order.

Grosjean in third is amazing. Shame about Kimi. Hopefully just a bit of bad luck, as the car seems fast enough. Red Bull are still handy for the race. But the big take away is that the best looking car is the fastest - at least in qualifying away.

BBC Highlights

I watched the BBC highlights package at 1pm. It was good. Made qualifying go a bit quicker. Often times last year I was getting a bit bored of the live qualifying. Or maybe it was just today was exciting.

No Eddie Jordan, so there was a little bit of energy lost. The new lead commentator, Ben Edwards, was OK. Didn't annoy me, but a bit bland. Maybe his character will come out over the season.

Overall pretty satisfied. Will see how they do tomorrow in the race highlights. At least it's only a few times during this year that I'll have to watch race highlights.

Photo - Ancient wooden post

Taken on 6th March 2011.

Photo - Tracks in the sand

Taken 6th March 2012.