Home on the Digital Range
The World-champion chess player Gary Kasparov concluded that "Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkable, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process." He created "Freestyle Chess", pairing a computer and a human to make a stronger chess player. This hybrid combination is sometimes called a "Centaur".
I finally took the plunge and bought a pair of Air Pods. So far I quite like them (although it's only been a few hours). I quite like the way that you can pause the track you are listening to simply by taking one headphone out of your ear. Playback resumes when you put it back in your ear. They are quite expensive though, and I'm fairly sure that I will lose them unless I develop a routine way of storing them.
I received 5 iBeacon transmitter units from ibeaconmodules.us today. They arrived unassembled, so I put them together and configured their local names with my iPhone.
The first hurdle I found in setting them up was getting the battery in the right way around. Each unit comes with a watch battery, and you need to have the side with the plus sign facing away from the circuitry.
The past few days I've been bringing in my new WIFI-only iPad and trying to use it tethered to my iPhone 5. It's been a frustrating experience so far. I've found that it works OK when the iPad is first tethered to the iPhone, but shortly thereafter the internet connection seems to drop out on the iPad, even though the iPhone is still reporting it to be connected OK.