Apple - Stephen Radford

Install High Sierra Emoji on Older Versions

29 November 2017 by Stephen Radford

I'm being extremely stubborn and refusing to update to High Sierra at the moment for good reason. The only thing that's really been annoying me is the fact I can't see emoji sent from iOS 11 or macOS 10.13 on Sierra but there's an easy fix. Emoji is just a font that renders the unicode characters. On a Mac this is called Apple Color Emoji.ttc and is located in /System/Library/Fonts. Because of this it's very easily overriden by placing a newer version in /Library/Fonts. Note the directory to place the new font in is /Library/…

Downgrading iOS 9.3.5 to iOS 6

04 October 2017 by Stephen Radford

Contents Introduction Jailbreak with Phoenix OpenSSH Downgrade to iOS 6 Introduction I may be one of the only people left still rocking an iPad 2. The only purpose it has in my life is to consume video through YouTube, Netflix, and Put.io and for that it mostly works fine but at times it is painfully slow on the latest version of iOS it will run — 9.3.5. It wasn't always slow though. I remember when I first got it and was amazed at how fast it was. Around iOS 7 when transparency, blurring, and all that crud was…

Iconic: The Other Apple Book

06 December 2016 by Stephen Radford

So by now I'm pretty sure anyone who hasn't been living under a rock the last few weeks is aware Apple released a ridiculously priced portfolio book of their products since 1998 and Jobs' return to Apple. The book is pitched as telling a story of Apple design over the last 20 years and is priced at $299 or $399 depending on the size of the book (what happened to one size fits all 'eh?). As much as I love Apple products it's not unlikely you'll spit your coffee out when you hear how much they're trying to charge for…

Cheap HomeKit LED Strips

23 October 2016 by Stephen Radford

After my success with Homebridge and LIFX I wanted to get some more HomeKit compatible lights for my house. LED strips provide an easy way to hide versatile and flexible lights away and make the perfect mood lighting. Philips Hue already offer LED strips with LIFX's "Z" strip coming in November but there was no way I was gonna drop £70 a few LEDs. Granted that's for a 2m strip but I'd guess most people don't have a 2m surface to tuck one of these behind. In my case I wanted to stick it to the back of…

Restoring an Apple Extended Keyboard II

12 May 2016 by Stephen Radford

I've been looking to foray into the realm of mechanical keyboards for well over a year but never took the plunge. I'd been looking at either a modern keyboard such as a Pok3r or something vintage like an IBM Model M. Something I didn't realise was Apple also used to make mechanical keyboards — right up until 1996 when they discontinued the Apple Extended Keyboard II. I had a look around for an ISO version for a while but for some reason the only ones I could find on eBay were in the US and postage was often as much as…