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Installing Older Versions of Apps (e.g. NPR One) on Older Versions of iOS on a New Apple ID

Monday, December 7th, 2020

Hmm… quite a long gap between blog posts… again. It’s amazing how time flies.

Here is a quick workaround I figured out today on how to get an old version of an app installed on a new-to-you device that is running an older version of iOS than the minimum required by the current version of the app. (Run on sentence much?)

My specific situation: I just got an old iPhone 5S, it’s actually a hand-me-down-and-back. I wanted to run some streaming audio on it in the kitchen. Unfortunately, one app, NPR One, required a minimum iOS version of 13. The last major version of iOS for the iPhone 5S is version 12.

The Apple App Store will prompt you to install the last compatible version of an app (from App Store >> Account >> Purchases), but ONLY if you had installed it previously under your Apple ID.

I didn’t want my real Apple ID sitting around on a device with a “throwaway” PIN, so I had created a new Apple ID with a secondary (actually tertiary) email account I have. This brand new account did NOT have the NPR One “purchased”. So I was stuck. Or was I?

My workaround was to log into my primary Apple ID on the new-old phone, then go to the App Store and install NPR One from “Purchases”. The App Store happily prompted and allowed me to install whatever older version of NPR One is supported by iOS 12. This worked great.

Then I logged out of my primary Apple ID on the old phone, logged back in with the new disposable Apple ID, and I was happy to see that the application was still there!

I am crossing my fingers that this old version of NPR One will continue to stream for 2-3 years until I do another round of waterfalling device upgrades.

P.S. Weirdly, this ended up forking my Wallet. I had my Wallet items on my regular phone under my regular Apple ID, and a copy of Wallet (except credit card, I think), on my 5S phone under it’s new “not secure” Apple ID. I manually removed the Wallet items from the 5S. I guess this is a design feature, except, I didn’t want someone picking up this old phone from my kitchen and going wild spending my collected loyalty points!

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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

fping (Windows) – Download the last version.

Friday, November 10th, 2017

Hmm… two posts in a row about stuff I’ve used for years that have now gone offline. There’s a statement here about the so called longevity of things in the digital era. Hey, looking at the calendar widget at the right of this blog, it just hit 10 years of age!

fping, apparently short for “Fast Pinger”, is a really handy tool I use when I want a simple way to monitor an IP address over a period of hours or days. A ping response implies that at least the Internet connection and router/firewall at the remote location are up – so any claimed problems would be further downstream. The built in ping in Windows does not have a date or time stamp, so it isn’t useful for longer term tracking. And a lot of intermittent problems really do need to be monitored over periods of time.

e.g. fping google.com -D -T -l -c -L F:\temp\log.txt

will get you results something like this (on screen and in the text file):

2017/11/10 17:13:57.780 : Reply[1] from google.com: bytes=32 time=42.6 ms TTL=56
2017/11/10 17:13:58.824 : Reply[2] from google.com: bytes=32 time=43.1 ms TTL=56
2017/11/10 17:13:59.869 : Reply[3] from google.com: bytes=32 time=43.1 ms TTL=56

There are a ton of other options… but, I haven’t played with them much.

Originally from http://www.kwakkelflap.com (which is now just serving ads). By Wouter Dhondt – Thanks Wouter!

I haven’t been able to find any new address for the tool, so, I’ve decided to host a copy.

This is the latest version that I could find (using archive.org from September 2015): fping300.zip

Not to be confused with fping on Linux (Unix?) which is entirely different.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Fido Fail… Where is that email invoice notification?

Friday, May 26th, 2017

So, my fears of paperless billing have struck again. My Fido email invoice notification did not come in last week. I only happened to realize this while processing my BC Hydro (hard copy) invoice.

No, it’s not in my SPAM folder, nor is it in my trash. The Fido customer website seems to have had a major update, so I’m betting it is related.

I hope not too many people get burned by this one!

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Posted in annoying, canadian, cellphone, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Brother Network Scanning Installation Error – InstallNetworkDriver

Sunday, February 19th, 2017

I recently had to set up a Brother DCP-L2540DW. For whatever reason, on one Windows 7 Pro machine, the installer would not complete. I got various error messages, all with InstallNetworkDriver in the description, some coded IS034 and IS052.

The printer worked out of the box with a USB cable. But I wanted to move it to a networked connection. This required the proprietary Brother software to get the network scanning to work.

The official Brother support page, The error message “IS052 InstallNetworkDriver” appears when installing the MFL-Pro Suite from the CD-ROM or the Full Driver & Software Package is downloaded from the “Download” section.  didn’t help. Neither did random results from Google.

In the end, I ended up installing under a different administrative account!

The user account I had been using had full administrative permissions… but it just didn’t work. I suspect it’s my use of EFS encryption on multiple of my user folders, or maybe some weird conflict with the networking setup in my day to day user account, or something weird involving the virtual machines that I sometimes run, or maybe with the multitude of programs and devices that I end up installing or uninstalling via my account.

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Posted in scanner, Uncategorized, win7 | 5 Comments »

Bulk-Adding “To” and “BCC” Recipients to a Thunderbird Email

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

I found a new use for our Web Tools by Perceptus website.  I was sending a bulk email to friends, family, clients, and co-workers about my team’s upcoming race in the Red Bull Soapbox Derby in Vancouver.

But the list of email addresses I selected in Outlook, my PIM, would not copy and paste into a new email in Thunderbird, my email client.*  Outlook separates recipients with semi-colons, Thunderbird… doesn’t.  It’s not immediately obvious to me what Thunderbird will accept as a separator in a single “to” line. It took several Google searches (or was it trial and error?) to figure out that Thunderbird will accept line breaks, i.e. “enter”.

Now all I needed to do was find quick way to convert the list which looks like this “<Leonard> me@perceptus.ca; <Me too> me2@perceptus.ca” from Outlook.  In this case, the extra name information that comes up in angled braces was just in the way.

Fortunately, The Email Grep Text Wizard! from our tools site, tools.perceptus.ca, handled the job well.  Just paste the list from Outlook and let our website return a clean simple list of email addresses.  One email per line.

* My PDA syncs to Outlook so it has to be the personal info manager, but I prefer the email features of Thunderbird.  Yes, it’s cumbersome, and no, I’m not entirely happy with the setup, but I haven’t found anything better, yet.

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Posted in annoying, email, tools, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

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