Category Archives: Tech

Switching to Apple Music from Spotify

Leave a Reply

AppleMusicLogo It may seem fairly logical to use Apple Music if you’re already an iPhone or Mac user, but truth be told I had been using Spotify since before I had an iPhone or since others in my family were using either.

Pricing for family plans for both are very similarly priced, but realistically it’s a no brainer if more than one of your family use an iPhone or Mac as with Family Sharing you can share one subscription with up to 6 family members — but what makes this worth while is that Apple Music is just one of the subscription services that you can share.

If you have Apple TV+ or  additional iCloud storage you want to share, you can do so, as well as others.

As well as music being of the highest streaming quality compared with others (Lossless 320kbps), the music catalogue is growing day by day and even some abstract smaller bands that I follow are now on there too.

To conclude, Spotify is great and I’ve used it for years. I was going to say if you’re on Android, you may as well continue to use it BUT you can get Apple Music for Android too!

Check out this Phone Mount (Best I’ve found)

Leave a Reply
Simple, just how I like it!

I don’t know about you but I have a really hard timer finding a mobile phone mount that is both cheap and reliable. I don’t like vent mounts and I like it on the windscreen, so a good suction mount has to work. I know these tend to have problems in warm weather but I’m in the UK and only ocassionally does it hit 30c.

I’ve previously bought the Griffin WindowSeat, and when that broke last time round I bought it again, as it did the job. But now, I’m finding it harder to get hold of so had to go hunting for another. The first eBay special I came across cost around £5 and had a bunch of positive ratings, but in reality it stuck to the windscreen for about 5 minutes and I then proceed to break it by trying to get it to fit with the suction mount from my old one – that’ll teach me!

So in my effort to get a better alternative, I hit Amazon…. and found this Arteck mount. It was equally as cheap but the reviews were all good and seemed genuine.

The mount is neat and not dissimilar to my old Griffin mount, it’s been there for a week now and hasn’t fallen down yet on it’s own so it’s got to be a win! (Having just double checked the description it seems to employ the use of 3M window mount adhesive, probably the same as the Griffin as that came with spares).

Bit of a boring post, but hope it can help you out too 🙂

Ripping movies using My Movies software

Leave a Reply
My Movies Logo

I thought I’d write a bit about what I’ve learnt about ripping movies from DVD. The process is a lot more in depth then it first may seem.

Logically, you may think it’s as easy as ripping a CD. Unfortunately, as I have now found, there is more to it.

I first started getting interested in this topic, when I got recommended a very useful movie cataloguing app called “My Movies“. I love stats, and tracking what I watch. I love IMDb, and being able to track actors across films, and genres.

I started looking into how to to import DVDs using the My Movies for Windows app which has an import feature. It works well but this is where I started getting caught up in the DVD encryption issue. So, logically, DVDs have encryption to prevent you from simply copying them with built in software.

Import disclaimer

My Movies works with either DVD Fab Passkey or AnyDVD to decrypt the movie and import it into the My Movies database. Together they work very well but a disclaimer is shown, so check local laws before proceeding (does anyone really check?).

I tested importing some DVDS for as long as trial copies of both import tools worked (around 1 month each). From what I found:

  1. The speed of your PC directly impacts the conversion process.
  2. Ideally, you want the fasted optical disk drive you can get to reduce the copy process to a minimum.
  3. You need plenty of local disk space – the movie is copied from the disk first, and then converted to a format your TV/console/player can deal with before giving you the opportunity to remove the imported version.
  4. If you have foreign language films, dealing with subtitles is the biggest pain in the ass — something which has led me to take a break from the whole test.

For now I will continue to use My Movies for it’s cataloguing and database apps. I have the iOS app and the features on that are great. I love being able to scan the barcode of a film to add it to your collection. You can also mark films out “on loan” so you don’t lose anything! Great product, overall.

I’ve only scraped the surface here but will probably write a followup post somewhere soon.