Apple Pay unlimited: Where can you use your iPhone or Watch to pay more than £30?

With contactless payment in the UK becoming more popular and services like Apple Pay becoming part of everyday life, a number of shops on the high street have started to allow Apple device owners to pay for things way beyond the £30 contactless limit.

Sadly, not many of them are good at communicating it. So while you can pay more than the limit in plenty of places, using your iPhone or Apple Watch, it’s hard to know where exactly. And you don’t want to attempt it in public only to find that the cap is in place and you look like a fool.

For things like a London Tube ride or lunchtime sandwich at Pret, it’s pretty much a no brainier (unless you’ve opted to buy the whole office lunch), you’ll barely need to go over the contactless limit anyway. But, did you know that at Waitrose you can pay for your whole weekly shop with a single tap? Or pay for a tray full of ramen at Wagamama’s without battling an eyelid?

That’s why we’ve found out the stores, restaurants and even petrol stations that now accept payments via Apple Pay in the UK regardless of the cost. Here they are:

Where you can pay more than £30 with Apple Pay: Grocery

• Marks & Spencer
• Waitrose
• Lidl
• Aldi

Where you can pay more than £30 with Apple Pay: Clothes and fashion

• New Look
• Uniqlo
• Burberry
• Dune

Where you can pay more than £30 with Apple Pay: Restaurants

• Pizza Hut
• Bill’s
• Wagamamas
• TGI Fridays
• Starbucks

Where you can pay more than £30 with Apple Pay: Fuel

• BP
• Shell (rolling out)

Where you can pay more than £30 with Apple Pay: Other

• Boots
• Halfords
• Harvey Nichols
• Apple Retail
• Liberty
• Cabs
• Transport for London

Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released an experimental version of its Linux-based Pixel OS for Windows and Mac PCs. The OS, originally designed to run only on the Raspberry Pi hobby board, comes with the Chromium web browser and a suite of productivity and coding tools. “We asked ourselves one simple question: If we like Pixel so much, why ask people to buy Raspberry Pi hardware in order to run it?” founder Eben Upton wrote in a blog post.

Built on top of Debian, the OS is light enough to run most old machines, provided you have at least 512MB of RAM. “Because we’re using the venerable i386 architecture variant it should run even on vintage machines like my ThinkPad X40 (above),” Upton said.

It’s easy to try out, but Upton urges you back up machines that may have valuable data. After downloading the image, you burn it either to a DVD or USB stick, then enable booting of those devices. You can normally do that by tweaking your PC’s BIOS or by holding the “C” key down when you boot up a Mac.

From there, it’ll run the OS with no need to install anything. If you booted on a USB stick, you’ll get the option to run “with persistence,” meaning any changes or files will stick for the next session. If you’d rather just play around and start fresh next time, you can run without persistence or reset it. As mentioned, you get a full suite of apps and a browser, but unlike with the Pi version, there’s no Minecraft or Wolfram Mathematica because of licensing issues.

There are plenty of lightweight Linux distros for older PCs (including Debian itself), or you could use Neverware, which turns your old laptop into a Chromebook. However, the Pi Foundation supplies a lot of useful Linux apps with Pixel, and aims to make it as easy to use as possible. By porting it to desktop machines, Upton also feels “we can more easily see where [the operating system’s] weak points are and work to fix them [on the Pi].”

The group thinks it could be a perfect for schools (where the Raspberry Pi already has a big foothold) to help students learn programming and various apps. The idea is that they can learn at school, then using the persistent boot option, continue working at home with exactly the same setup.

As mentioned, the Pixel OS is still in the experimental stages, and doesn’t run on all machines. On his own modern Mac, Upton said, “the machine fails to identify the image as bootable.” They’ll be releasing more updates going forward, but if you’re interested in giving it a try, you can hit announce post to find it.

Source: Raspberry Pi

AirPods User Creates Charging Cradle With 3D Printer

The launch of a new Apple product usually comes along with the debut of many third-party accessories, but the only viable option for AirPods currently being sold are cables that attach to each headphone to prevent drops. One alternative that might see fruition down the road by a few companies is a charging dock that cradles the AirPods case in one convenient place.

This week, Reddit user jimbojsb shared a project on Thingiverse that was created with a Wanhao Duplicator i3 V2 3D printer, resulting in a desktop charging cradle for the AirPods and their charging case. The dock has a hole underneath to pass a Lightning cable through, so when the charging case is placed into it, the AirPods begin charging up again.

If you have the requisite 3D printer, Thingiverse provides all of the files you’ll need to download and print the AirPods Charge Dock for yourself. You can also simply order one that’s already been printed through the site’s “Order This Printed” button.

Check out more pictures of the dock on Thingiverse.

Tag: AirPods
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AirPods Shipping Sooner Than Expected to Many Customers

AirPods became available for purchase on Apple’s website on December 13, and customers who ordered quickly began receiving their shipments as early as December 19. Orders quickly became backlogged, however, and Apple’s shipping estimate slipped to four weeks in less than two hours, and to six weeks by the following day.

For customers that ordered within the past nine days, the six-week wait potentially meant waiting until late January or early February to get the all-new wireless earphones. Fortunately, as is often the case, Apple is now shipping many of those orders sooner than expected, with some deliveries now slated for late December.

AirPods delivered to MacRumors forum member iPhenom
“Just received my shipping notice for my AirPod order,” said MacRumors reader York in an email. “The original delivery date was January 12, but it should arrive on December 28th.” Likewise, another reader with an original December 29 delivery estimate has now seen his AirPods ship with an estimated delivery date of December 23.

In the AirPods order tracking topic in the MacRumors discussion forums, a handful of other customers with estimated delivery dates ranging from December 29 to January 12 claim their AirPods have now shipped for delivery as early as this week. For some of those customers, AirPods will arrive just in time for Christmas.

“Awesome, mine were scheduled for delivery on the 29th, but suddenly they are supposed to get here tomorrow, the 22nd,” said one person. “Order scheduled for delivery on January 12th has shipped with a delivery date of December 28th,” said another, noting his shipment was still in China.

With only three days remaining until Christmas, customers may now be pushing their luck to find AirPods in time for the holidays, but a lucky few have managed to find a pair at an Apple Store or place an order through resellers such as Best Buy and the United Kingdom’s Carphone Warehouse over the past few days.

Other resellers such as Sprint and Verizon have unfortunately been less reliable, as some customers were able to purchase AirPods from these vendors only to later receive an email saying the order could not be fulfilled at this time. AT&T also has AirPods on sale, but it is unclear when orders will ship.

AirPods are Apple’s all-new $159 wireless earphones. The cord-free earphones instantly turn on and connect to your iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, or Mac when taken out of their charging case thanks to Apple’s custom W1 chip. Likewise, audio automatically plays as soon as you put them in your ears and pauses when you take them out.

AirPods are controlled mainly by Siri. Doubling tapping an earpiece invokes Siri, and voice commands can be used to adjust the volume, change the song, make a call, and so forth. AirPods deliver up to 5 hours of listening time on one charge, and a 15-minute fast charge provides up to 3 hours of listening time.

Tag: AirPods
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Tesla’s UK prices are about to go up by 5 percent

Tesla has sent out an email informing customers and anyone else that’s registered interest in the company’s EVs of an impending 5 percent price in the UK. From January 1st 2017, any custom order will become costlier, while second-hand and showroom vehicles are safe from the hike. It’s not an insignificant jump when you consider it will up the price of the base Model S by almost £3,000 — from £58,900 to £61,845.

It’s actually the second time Tesla has increased UK prices in the past few months, after a roughly 3 percent bump in early October. In the email concerning the 5 percent increase next year, Tesla attributed the decision to “currency fluctuations,” which almost certainly refers to significant drops in the value of the pound following the Brexit vote in June.

Many, many companies have taken to protecting their bottom lines by increasing prices, of course. OnePlus added £20 to the cost of its flagship OnePlus 3 just a couple of weeks after the referendum vote, and recently, Apple quietly hiked the prices of its desktops at the same time it announced the new MacBook Pros.

The 5 percent price hike isn’t the only thing that’s due to impact the cost of Tesla ownership, as any newly purchased vehicle won’t include free, unlimited access to the firm’s Supercharger network from next year (we don’t know what Tesla intends to charge at this point). You can bet the company is thinking long and hard about local pricing for the Model 3, which it intends to announce next year.

With a starting price of $35,000 in the US (roughly £28,000 at the current exchange rate), the Model 3 will be Tesla’s attempt to break out of the luxury niche with a mass-market EV. The more prices increase across the board, though, the more your potential customer base shrinks by default.

Canada sets aggressive targets for minimum broadband speeds

Canadian regulators have declared that all citizens should have access to high-speed internet, even in remote areas. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has ruled that minimum broadband speeds of 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds are now a “basic telecommunications service.” Furthermore, it said all customers should have unlimited data options and not be capped, as they often are in rural areas.

The Canadian definition is now double that of the US, and that’s not an accident, as the CRTC carefully considered targeted speeds in other nations. “They are ambitious targets but I think they’re realistic,” CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais told the Globe and Mail. “The U.S. is at 25 [Mbps], Australia’s at 25, Europe generally is targeting 30 and Germany is at 50. So we didn’t want to be in the middle of the pack.”

They are ambitious targets but I think they’re realistic. The U.S. is at 25 Mbps, Australia’s at 25, Europe generally is targeting 30 and Germany is at 50. So we didn’t want to be in the middle of the pack.

While Canadian cities already meet those targets, many rural areas of the vast country have poor speeds and capped data. To help bring them up to par, the CRTC launched a $750 million fund for projects in areas that don’t meet its speed targets. That will go in hand with a $500 million federal fund aimed at beefing up backbone connections going into small communities. All of that will be “complementary to existing and future private investment and public funding,” the regulator said.

The CRTC added that “broadband internet access services are necessary to the quality of life for Canadians and empowers them as citizens, creators and consumers,” adding it’s also necessary for businesses to compete, particularly in smaller communities. The FCC, under Tom Wheeler, used similar arguments in the US to rule that the internet is a utility, not a luxury, giving it more control over what ISPs can and can’t do. Under a Trump administration, however, all of that is now in doubt.

Via: Globe and Mail

Source: CRTC

Prepare for even more volatile weather in 2017

Ice isn’t just great for keeping your drinks cool at parties, it also helps keep our planet cool by reflecting some of the sun’s heat away. But thanks to our steadfast refusal to address climate change, there’s going to be a lot less ice in the Arctic next year. Scientists are observing record high temperatures in the Arctic circle that’s likely to lead to record low levels of ice coverage in 2017. Long story short, we’re currently melting the wall that’s helped stop the seas boiling for all of these years.

Normally, by November, the global temperature has dropped sufficiently that ice can form again in the Arctic ready for the following summer. This year, however, climate scientists saw a spike to -7 celsius (19f) — 15 degrees celsius (27f) warmer than usual. While the readings have fluctuated since November 11, they’re expected to rocket up again in the next few days.

In the same way you’ll flunk your exam if you only start revising for it the week before its due, the planet has had less time to prepare for 2017 than it needed. The knock-on is that when summer rolls around next, there’ll be less ice to reflect back, further warming the planet beyond its capacity to cope. The cause of all of this is, as usual, anthropogenic climate change, which is making random, freak events like this more common with each passing day.

Via: New York Times

Source: Climate Central