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It’s iPhone season (again)

Morning all

I’m sure everyone has been reading all the rumours and speculation that the iPhone 6 will be announced on September 9th, so I wanted to address that briefly and remind you of a post I did about a year ago on how to get as much money as possible for your old phone once you have upgraded.

At this point there has been absolutely no confirmation whatsoever from Apple that there will be an announcement from Apple in September. That said, when it comes to the iPhone, September is usually the month when we see the next model, as well as tying in roughly with the pre-announced next version of its Operating System, iOS 8 .

As normal, I refuse to speculate as to what the new phone will bring to the table (Apple are notoriously secretive when it comes to new products so I’m more inclined to wait to see what they come up with), but I have been watching what my social media contacts have been saying they want.

One of the biggest complaints with the iPhone is, and always has been, its battery life. Like everyone else, 24 hours of use for me is a pipe dream, but I tolerate it because I’m not often in a position where getting a top-up charge is impossible. I always carry my iPhone 5 in a Mophie Juicepack Air case, which doubles the battery size, and have a charger permanently plugged in to my car for top-ups when I’m in it. As a last resort I normally have a Lightning cable and USB charger on my Cocoon Grid-It (I have several of these for different places/uses), as well as an Anker Astro E5 battery pack. Even if I was away from any electrical outlets and the […]

By |August 28th, 2014|Upgrade Hardware|0 Comments
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Holidays Part 3 – Tech to take with you

In parts 1 and 2 of my Holiday blogs, we talked about planning and preparation for your trip away. By now I expect you have your Evernote database populated with all your travel documents and ideas for day trips, and your itinerary entered in TripDeck or TripIt. Today I wanted to give you some ideas for tech to take with you, software you might find useful when you’re away and general advice for travellers.
Data Roaming
First things first, I wanted to remind you that using your mobile phone overseas is not covered in most talk or data plans. Obviously if you’re travelling to an EU country you are covered by the limits imposed on EU carriers for maximum charges (on calls, texts and data), but if you’re a heavy user these could still add up considerably over a two week trip. Take a trip to the USA though, and most UK carriers have you over a barrel. If you don’t turn off data roaming (go to Settings/Mobile and make sure Data Roaming is not green) be warned that you may come back to a bill you hadn’t expected! That was one of the reasons I chose to move to Three as my mobile provider (their One Plan gives you “Feel At Home” which means that I can pretty much use my normal allowances in many of the most popular destinations – check here for the countries covered).
For the flight

Flying long-haul I tend to use this time to listen to or watch a lot of media.As you probably know, the airline normally provides headphones but they’re typically awful. I always carry a cheap pair of in-ear headphones for listening to stuff on the beach or elsewhere, but my […]

By |August 25th, 2014|Help and Advice|0 Comments
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Using Hazel & Automator to prepare images

Hot on the heels of last weeks post about Keyboard Maestro, I’ve also been experimenting with another app called Hazel to automatically tidy up certain files based on pre-programmed choices. In itself, having an app automatically file things out of my Downloads folder to somewhere more appropriate, based on file type and source for example, saves me doing it manually (or not bothering….) but following on that I’ve also found it really useful when preparing blog posts.

One of the constant pains for me, a non-designer, has always been preparing media for my blog posts, be it images of what I’m discussing, or links to apps I recommend. In the past it’s been a bit of a manual task, which for takes too long and consequently I don’t push posts out as often as I’d like because of it. But now I’ve found a way of using Hazel, and Automator workflows to create the images for me to push straight into my blogposts.

For those that don’t know, Automator is a program that comes with every Mac that allows you to create little workflow apps using drag-and-drop to create recipes for automated processes. There’s a huge amount of things you can do with it, but I’ll come back to what I’m doing with it in this case a bit later in to this post.

The problem I had is when I need an image in a blogpost, invariably I’ll acquire an image from somewhere (my own Lightroom catalog, or a stock photography site perhaps) that will be in a different size to what I need in the blog (typically 150×150 pixels). Previously, for every image I uploaded I had to prepare a smaller version manually by scaling it in one […]

By |August 25th, 2014|automation, Help and Advice|0 Comments
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Using Keyboard Maestro for automation

A couple of weeks ago I was looking for a solution to a problem I had with a repetitive task that I wanted to speed up or automate. At the time I figured tha Keyboard Maestro from Stairways Software would be worth a trial, and as luck would have it, the app was part of an offer from MacTrast (ends 27/8/14) so I picked it up.

Now as it happens, I wasn’t able to get the app to do what I wanted it in a reasonable timeframe (I’m sure that I ultimately could get it to do what I wanted but it wouldn’t be an efficient use of my time). But while researching how to do things I came up across a really useful thing that I’ve now got Keyboard Maestro doing for me.
Whether visiting clients or in my own office I usually have different apps or documents open, or I’ll have my machine configured slightly differently, based on where I am. For example, when I’m on one particular site I’ll have a Windows 7 virtual machine open so I can work on the clients Sage system.
The way I use Keyboard Maestro to do that is quite simple. The software allows me to set up triggers to carry out actions (and the list of actions possible is amazingly diverse). Triggers can be things like keyboard shortcuts (Cmd-Shift-Option-Z for example), a tyoed string of characters, a particular device being connected to your computer, or in the case of my Sage using client, a particular wireless network being joined. So Keyboard Maestro sits in the background, and as soon as it sees that I’ve joined the client’s wireless network, it starts up my VMWare program and loads the appropriate virtual machine (as well […]

By |August 22nd, 2014|Apple Software News, Help and Advice|0 Comments
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Holidays Part 2 – Pre Departure

So in my second post about holiday tech, I wanted to talk specifically about that period of time leading up to departure. This is the time that people tend to get stressed and forget things, but with a little bit of planning you can reduce the chances of landing yourself in hot water with your other half for forgetting that important piece of clothing/album/phone charger/hair product (delete as appropriate).
Checklist
There’s a whole heap of ways to replace those handwritten notes that many of us create to remind ourselves of the things we mustn’t forget to take or do before we leave. Personally, I use a couple of different tools to try to stop me missing anything.

In terms of actions, everything action I need to remember to do (work and personal) goes into my OmniFocus task list (available for iPhone, iPad and Mac – database can be synchronised across all platforms). OmniFocus is a fantastic app that really comes into its own after reading the noted book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen (available in paperback, and e-book versions on Kindle and iBooks). Until you’ve read that book or at least a summary of it, a lot of the terminology used in the app will leave you confused, but once you have the background knowledge on David’s methodology you’ll find OmniFocus a great utility. Until I started using it I was, quite frankly, shocking at remembering to do things (I could remember phone numbers at will, but remembering to do something that didn’t excite me, well that was fifty/fifty at best). Anyway, I digress…..

Then there’s the lists of ‘things’. Packing lists would probably be the main one, but then I guess you could also add pre-holiday […]

By |August 18th, 2014|Help and Advice|0 Comments
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