Neil Turner

Netgear Nighthawk EX7000 review

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A photo of the Netgear Nighthawk EX7000

Since we moved into our new house, we’ve had a few wifi issues, so I was pleased to be contacted by Netgear to review their Nighthawk EX7000 wifi range extender.

Our house was built over 100 years ago, with thick stone and brick walls. Whilst our router (a BT Home Hub 4) is in the centre of the house, the signal is very weak in places – especially the kitchen at the far end of the house. So a repeater, like this one, will allow us to extend the range of the Wi-Fi signal.

Setting up

In the box, there’s the extender itself, a stand (so that the router stands up vertically), three detachable aerials, an AC adaptor and a quick-start guide.

The Nighthawk EX7000 supports Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS). Fortunately, so does my router, so I just had to press a button on each device to configure the connection. Once set up, two new Wi-Fi networks appeared – a 2.4 GHz one, and a 5 GHz one – each following the same naming convention as my existing router. They even used the same Wi-Fi password.

Improved signal

Once I’d configured my iPhone to connect to the extender, rather than directly to the router, I found the signal much improved. At the extremities of the house, it dropped to two out of three bars, but this is significantly better than before where it’d lose connection altogether. It now means that everywhere in the house has a reasonable signal, which is a big improvement.

Extra features

The Nighthawk EX7000 isn’t just a Wi-Fi extender, however. On the back of the extender are five gigabit Ethernet sockets, so you can attach any devices without their own wireless connection using a cable. This will be great for my Raspberry Pi, for which I haven’t bought a wifi adaptor, but I’ve also plugged my Mac in as well. So far, the connection seems more stable than before although I’ve yet to play World of Warcraft on it – that will be its biggest test.

At the front, there’s a USB 3.0 port (type A). This can be used for sharing either a printer, or a USB storage device. As my printer is a multi-function device, I’ve kept it connected to my computer (although it is shared with Christine’s laptop using Bonjour anyway). Instead, I’ve plugged in a USB hard drive, and its contents are shared across the network using DLNA so that smart TVs and similar devices can access it.

FastLane

By default, the EX7000 uses both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands simultaneously, but you can enable ‘FastLane’ mode to increase speed. I turned this on, so that it uses a 5 GHz connection to the router but a 2.4 GHz to my connected devices. As only my iPad and iPhone support 5 GHz, I decided that it would be best to use 2.4 GHz.

All in all, the Netgear Nighthawk EX7000 is a very powerful device that fills several roles. It can extend your wireless signal, but it can also share a printer, files on an external device, and connect devices without a wireless capability of their own. This explains the £130 recommended retail price, as it’s a premium product, although Amazon sell it for around £100 at present. There are cheaper devices out there that can do one or two of these things, but if you want a powerful, fast Wi-Fi extender that combines several features in one box, then I can recommend the Nighthawk EX7000.

Update (January 2025): This model is no longer on sale.

Professor Elemental

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Professor Elemental

Sunday’s visit to Thought Bubble wasn’t our only Steampunk-related outing last week. On Thursday, we went to see Professor Elemental, again in Leeds at The New Roscoe.

Christine and I have been fans for a while, but this was our first opportunity to see him perform live. His music is in a rather niche sub-genre called ‘chap hop‘ – imagine hip-hop, but with moustachioed English gentlemen rapping about tea and splendid trips to the seaside. Consequently, Professor Elemental has a major following in the steampunk community.

Biscuithead and the Biscuit Badgers

Local band Biscuithead and the Biscuit Badgers were the support act, in somewhat reduced circumstances as their drummer had a family medical emergency. Their music is wonderfully whimsical, with songs about David Attenborough, model railways, tweed jackets, and the folk who live on their local street. Whilst a rather different style of music to the main act, it fitted the offbeat nature of the gig.

Professor Elemental came on later, having sat in the audience for the support act; this was a small venue and there were only around 50-60 attendees. After powering through a medley of songs, he improvised a rap based on word suggestions from the audience, which included ‘antiquity’, ‘flange’, ‘antidisestablishmentarianism‘ and ‘nipple’. It was an impressive feat. Audience participation was also requested for his newer song Don’t Feed The Trolls.

Christine and I had come straight from work, and the weather was inclement to say the least, so we had left our steampunk outfits at home to save them for Thought Bubble, but many others were dressed up in appropriate attire. At one point, someone dressed as a giraffe crawled across the stage, and that probably wasn’t the strangest thing that happened.

Whilst it helped that many of the audience were genuine fans, it was a great, intimate gig – equal parts enjoyable and amusing. Professor Elemental isn’t on tour, per se, but he has a few more live gigs coming up around the country in the run up to Christmas – I’d definitely recommend going to see him.

Thought Bubble 2015

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Christine and I at this year's Thought Bubble

After enjoying it so much last year, Christine and I made a return trip to the Thought Bubble Comic Con at the Royal Armouries in Leeds yesterday. I wore basically the same steampunk outfit as last time, but Christine had to wear something rather different as she’s now seven months pregnant. Sadly, her octopus headpiece (called Derek) was not playing well with her and so it was left in the car this time.

As with last year, we spent rather a lot of money, although our most expensive purchase was a babygrow from Genki Gear, so technically it wasn’t for us. We also picked up a couple of books, some comics, some decidedly bizarre Christmas cards and a few small pieces of artwork that we’ll frame and put on the (still mostly barren) walls of our new house.

We saw some great costumes – the £4 entry discount for cosplayers once again acting as an incentive to get people to dress up. I saw at least three female Thors, suggesting that Marvel’s decision to pass Mjölnir to Jane Foster has been well-received, several Starlords and a small boy dressed as a TARDIS. There was also a Hogwarts cosplayer with an actual owl, although I understand she was a paid professional. And the owl later did a poo on the floor.

It was great fun, and I’m sure we’ll be back again next year – all three of us.

20 is plenty

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20 is plenty

Across my home town of Sowerby Bridge, small white discs with red borders and the numbers 2 and 0 are appearing at the sides of the road. It’s the latest area in Calderdale to receive blanket 20 miles per hour speed limits on all suburban side streets, plus some major roads where required.

In Sowerby Bridge, this includes the main road through the town, the A58 – variously called Wharf Street, Town Hall Street or West Street depending on which bit you’re referring to. This makes sense; the road is quite narrow in places with parked cars and lots of pedestrians – particularly in the evening due to the town’s high concentration of pubs and bars. Although at peak times, 20 miles per hour is something of an aspiration as the traffic is regularly nose to tail in both directions.

The signs started to appear last week, following a consultation process. However, as yet there isn’t complete signage coverage and so it’s probably arguable as to whether the new lower speed limit is actually in force yet. I’ve been driving at the lower speed just in case, and to get used to it, since it’ll be the norm soon.

Although I’m now a driver myself, I’m in favour of the lower speed limits. I actually credit them with helping me pass my driving test in August; being able to get away with driving more slowly meant that I had more time to do my observations at junctions. Where the main roads remain at 30 mph, but the side roads are 20 mph, it discourages rat-running through housing estates. And where people actually obey the speed limit, it’s safer; as anyone who has recently taken their theory test will know, cars can brake more quickly at slower speeds. On residential streets, that’s very welcome.

Dara Ó Briain’s Crowd Tickler

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dara6
Dara Ó Briain at the 2014 Festival of Curiosity, by Sandra on Flickr. CC-licensed.

Wednesday last week marked 30 months of marriage for Christine and I. Co-incidentally, the Irish comic Dara Ó Briain was performing his latest show Crowd Tickler in Halifax on the same day, and a handful of tickets were still available the week before, so we went to see him.

This was the second time we’d seen Dara in Halifax; we also saw his previous show, Craic Dealer, a few years ago. If I’m honest, I was a bit disappointed with Craic Dealer, having not found it as funny as some of Dara’s other material. We’d seen This is the Show (or ‘TITS’ for short) broadcast on TV, which is worth watching as and when it’s available, and we always make time to watch Mock the Week when it’s on.

Fortunately, Crowd Tickler is a great show. It’s part-improvised, based on interactions with the audience and some local factual knowledge that Dara has gleamed either through research or previous visits. If you get front row seats to one of Dara’s gigs, expect to be asked a number of questions throughout the show. Thankfully, Dara isn’t the sort of comedian to utterly ridicule you but there may be a few laughs at your expense.

My favourite routine was about TV dramas, particularly on streaming services like Netflix, and how there are so many and that they can sometimes tend towards the utterly ridiculous – ‘a Scandinavian crime drama about a detective who smells crime scenes!’. Which was funny in itself, until Dara pointed out that this is basically the plot of Marvel’s Daredevil.

And then he went about improvising our own crime drama, based on audience suggestions. So we ended up with a detective with Tourette’s who used to be a taxidermist, investigating a ping pong player who killed someone with a rollerskate.

Another of my favourite routines of his was about tunnel boring machines. Doesn’t sound like the most interesting subject but if you see people tweeting him ‘Poor Chuggy!’ after a gig, then you’ll know why.

Crowd Tickler is almost at the end of its run with only a few more shows left – Dara has been touring it for over a year now. There’s just a couple of UK dates, a few nights in Dublin, and then he’ll be off to tickle various European nations in the new year. Fortunately, a DVD of the show is due out in a little over a week (sponsored link), and based on what we saw, it should be a very good show to watch.

Brewing my own beer with Brew Barrel

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The Brew Barrel kit - a barrel and a box with ingredients

The folks at Brew Barrel approached me to review their eponymous home brewing kit. For £25, you can get everything you need to make 8 pints of beer, with a choice of different hops and flavouring to make different styles. It’s made by a German company, which, considering that Germany is famed for its beers, means it should be good.

The Brew Barrel kit includes a five litre barrel, and the ingredients – hops, yeast, flavourings and rather a lot of malt syrup. To make the beer, you combine all of these in the barrel, along with lots of water. Instructions are, of course, provided. It takes around 10 to 15 minutes of preparation initially, but after that it doesn’t require much attention – you have to turn the barrel after 24 hours, and then refrigerate it after five days. Two days later (so a total of seven days since starting), your beer is ready to serve from a small tap at the bottom of the barrel.

A photo of the Brew Barrel ingredients

I decided to brew an IPA, which is one of my favourite beer styles. Putting it together was quite easy – all the components are numbered so that you can be sure of the required order. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the barrel in the fridge – our fridge is rather small, and full. As you have to keep the barrel upright, I would have needed to extensively re-arrange the fridge and get rid of the contents, which I doubt my wife would be best pleased about. Especially as she doesn’t like beer.

So when it came to trying the beer, it probably wasn’t at its best. Despite this, I liked it – it was rather sweet and very, very foamy, but drinkable and certainly nicer than some other homebrews that I have tried in the past. Once opened, the beer in the Brew Barrel should keep for around two weeks, if kept refrigerated.

Should you buy one? If you want to brew your own beer, but are completely new to it, then yes – the Brew Barrel keeps it simple for you and doesn’t require too much effort. Those with existing home brew experience may find it useful to have all of the necessary materials in one package, but could feel limited as it’s aimed more at novices. Financially it’s probably more expensive than just buying eight pints of beer to consume at home, but where’s the fun in that?

The trouble with relying on free things

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Screenshot of the announcement that Sunrise is no longer in development

For some years now, I’ve been a user of Sunrise. It started off as a daily email with your events from Google Calendar and Facebook, but over time it evolved into a series of mobile and desktop apps, and a web site, where you could combine all of your various calendars together in one, intuitive interface. This meant that you could have events from Google, iCloud, and any Exchange server, all combined together with your Evernote reminders, gigs from Songkick, Eventbrite bookings, TripIt itineraries and more besides.

It was great, but at no point did Sunrise ever ask for money. Surely it must have cost money to run, and funding from venture capital only goes so far. So I wasn’t all that surprised when, earlier this year, Sunrise announced its acquisition by Microsoft. At the time, they promised to keep everything running, and for free.

At first, there were promising developments. Integration with Wunderlist, another recent Microsoft acquisition, a new keyboard for iOS and Android designed to help you plan meetings whilst in another app, and support for the Apple Watch are all additions made following Microsoft’s takeover. But then the Sunrise team dropped a bombshell this week: development of all of Sunrise’s apps has ceased.

Sunrise’s development team have joined the team working on Outlook for mobile devices. Mobile Outlook was also the result of an outside purchase by Microsoft, this time of Acompli. As you’d expect, the aim of the integration of the Sunrise developers is to improve Outlook’s calendaring capabilities, and, sure enough, a new version of Outlook for iOS was released this week. There’s a bit more background on the Microsoft Office blog, and an update for Android is due soon too.

As it stands, Outlook isn’t yet capable of doing all of the things that Sunrise can do, and so the Sunrise apps will still be available to download for a little while longer. But once Outlook has fully absorbed Sunrise’s features, I expect the apps will be withdrawn.

For me, this is a bit of a bummer. I used both Sunrise and Outlook on my iPhone and iPad; Sunrise to manage all of my calendars, and Outlook for my work email. I deliberately keep my work and personal email separate, and, crucially, don’t have notifications turned on for work messages. My job doesn’t require me to be reachable out of hours; therefore, whilst it’s useful to be able to use my phone to access work email whilst at work or in an emergency, I want to be able to completely ignore it away from work. But I do like to be able to see my work calendars outside of work, and get a holistic view of my diary across both personal and work calendars.

I won’t be able to do this once Sunrise has gone. If I make Outlook my primary calendar app, then it’ll have all of my work emails in there, whether I want to see them or not. Outlook on iOS, as it stands, is still an email client first and foremost; opening the app takes you to your email inbox by default.

So, reluctantly, I decided to take the nuclear option and delete Sunrise from my devices. Sure, it’ll carry on working for a while – probably. But it’ll disappear eventually and I don’t want to be hanging on to a product during its deathrattle.

For now, I’ve gone back to the built-in iOS calendar, which is okay, I guess. Part of the reason why I switched to Sunrise was its superior interface when compared to the stock iOS calendar in iOS 6 and below. More recent versions have been less ugly, but it’s still not got a great user experience even in iOS 9.1, in my opinion. I’m open to suggestions of alternatives – I may give Fantastical a shot, which is £3.99 on iPhone and £7.99 on iPad, both sold separately.

I suppose I shouldn’t have put so much faith in a free service which has no obvious income from users or advertisers. And I think that’s a good lesson in general – if you can’t work out the business model for something, it’s probably best not to rely on it.

Taking a Thames Clipper

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This is the third in a series of posts about what we did on our recent trip to London.

After lunch, we decided to head back towards central London. We could have caught the DLR from Cutty Sark and gone back the way we came, but instead, we caught a Thames Clipper waterbus from Greenwich Pier. The Thames Clippers are a fleet of catamarans that run up and down the River Thames in central London, and are currently sponsored by MBNA. Recently, they have started accepting Oyster cards as payment, and so we thought we’d give them a try, seeing as none of us had been on one before.

Although they operate on water, as they are catamarans rather than regular boats, they’re actually very quick. Certainly quicker than catching a bus, and probably competitive with the Tube – worth knowing the next time there’s a strike or signalling problems. You can sit outside at the back, but there’s a large amount of indoor seating too, and the seats are very comfortable – far better than most other forms of public transport. There’s even on board bar serving coffee, snacks and alcohol. And whilst I’m not usually one for getting sea sick, the Thames Clippers are pretty smooth and so even if you normally get queasy on a ferry, you shouldn’t have issues with these.

Tower Bridge

As well as being quick, you can get a very different view of London’s landmarks. We travelled from Greenwich to London Bridge Pier, which took us under Tower Bridge and offered a square on view. It was worth it to take photos.

The two main downsides of the Thames Clippers are waiting times and cost. Although they are regular, we just missed one at Greenwich and it was around 15 minutes until the next one. Whilst that’s more frequent than many bus and rail services outside the capital, it doesn’t compare so favourably with buses or the Tube.

It’s also rather on the pricey side. I think we paid £8 for our journey on our Oyster cards, which is significantly more expensive than other forms of public transport. Whilst people can and do commute to work on the Thames Clippers services, they’re really aimed at tourists who are happier to pay a higher price. Still, you get a comfy seat, a fast journey, and get to see parts of London from new angles, so it’s worth the extra cost.

The Old Brewery, Greenwich

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Lunch at the old brewery

This is the second in a series of posts about what we did on our recent trip to London.

After visiting the Cutty Sark, we took the short walk to The Old Brewery. Originally, this was the brewery of the Old Royal Naval College, opened in 1836 in Greenwich. In 2010, the Meantime Brewing Company moved in; at first, this was their main brewery but nowadays most of their beers are brewed elsewhere. Some brewing equipment remains, but the rest of the brewery is now a bar and café, owned by Meantime.

Meantime is one of my favourite brewers, and I’ve sampled most of their range of beers before. So I was pleased to have the opportunity to visit, even if it was just to have lunch in the café. As you’d expect, the full range of Meantime’s beers are available, either on tap or in bottles, and we had a happy couple of hours getting merry on good beer.

A northerner like me would find the food and drink a little pricey, but then it is in London, and slap bang in the middle of a UNESCO World Heritage Site to boot. Meantime’s beers are on the expensive end of the spectrum anyway.

The Meantime Brewing Company had humble beginnings, back in 2005, and was one of the first ‘craft beer’ breweries in the UK. However, this year it was taken over by SABMiller, the world’s second largest brewing conglomerate. This has seen some of its production moved to the Netherlands, where its beers are produced alongside Grolsch. SABMiller is itself in the process of being acquired by its largest rival, Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Whilst Meantime may no longer have its hipster credentials, they still produce good beer, and The Old Brewery is worth popping in to if you’re in Greenwich. You may struggle to get a seat at lunchtime, although there is plenty of outdoor seating if it’s a nice day.

Going back in time

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Hebden Bridge Millennium Clock

Yesterday, clocks in Britain went back an hour, marking the end of British Summer Time. We’re now following Greenwich Mean Time, through the winter until the 27th March 2016.

It used to be that people would have to change every clock manually, when daylight savings time started or ended. But as computers and devices got smarter, they could be pre-programmed to change the time automatically.

My parents’ first PC originally didn’t change the time by itself, as it wasn’t supported in Windows 3.11. But we later upgraded to Windows 95, and I was pleasantly surprised to see a message one morning on the screen, telling me that Windows had automagically changed the clock for us. Later versions of Windows just did the time change on the quiet, and most other operating systems do the same nowadays.

We’re now in that stage of technological innovation where some of our devices can change the time automatically, but not all. Our phones, computers and tablets are all capable of it. Our Freesat satellite TV set-top box just needed turning off and on again to update the time. Even my Fitbit Charge changed automatically too, which was nice.

I still had to manually change the central heating controls, though. We’re planning to get a new central heating system sometime in the next couple of years and I expect we’ll get a smart thermostat which will have daylight savings capability, so changing the time for heating won’t be an issue in future.

The only other device that I had to change was our basic analogue clock in the kitchen. Short of wiring up some kind of Arduino device to it, I doubt I’d ever be able to make it change automatically.

Still, it’s nice not having to spend all morning re-programming things like we did in the past.