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Finding your way to a great podcast app

For the past couple of months I’ve been spending a lot of time in the car traversing what Chris Rea famously called ‘The Road to Hell’ to get to an ongoing client contract two or three days a week.
Lonely car journeys have always provided me with an opportunity to catch up on phone calls, but with the increasing amount of time commuting alone I’ve turned to a multitude of podcasts (typically technology themed) for entertainment and education while I’m driving. I find this time is the best to listen to this kind of information as I have no other distractions around me (barring other road users, weather etc. etc.). If I try to listen to a podcast at my office I invariably get distracted by emails and other work, but the car is a fairly sterile environment for learning new things.
OverCast
Anyway, the point of this blog post was that I wanted to highlight a new podcast app I mentioned a couple of weeks ago on twitter, called OverCast. After using it for a few weeks, I have finally thrown away the previous apps I used as OverCast seems to be way better than anything I’ve tried before.

In particular there’s two things I prefer over its competitors; SmartSpeed and VoiceBoost. Most podcast apps allow you to speed up the audio, but they tend to be fairly large speed jumps in my experience. OverCast allows fairly small incremental changes to the playback speed, and the smallest speed change is about 1.13x, and these have been coded so well they don’t hugely change the playback (sometimes in other apps I find it similar to holding down the play and fast forward buttons on an old tape record – […]

By |August 15th, 2014|Apple Software News, Help and Advice|0 Comments
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Holidays – Planning & Researching

Well as we’re in the midst of holiday season for most people, and around a month from my own break this year, I thought I’d talk a little about how I use technology to plan, book and organise a trip. There’s so many facets of this subject to cover I’m going to break it down into couple of different posts, starting today with the research and planning phase. I’ve attached links to the products/services in the text wherever possible.
First Steps & Admin
The first thing I do when planning any trip away is start a notebook in Evernote. For those not using this service, it’s a brilliant way of collecting electronic information into different “notebooks”. Once the information is in there its accessible on any of your iOS, Android, Mac or PC devices, searchable, and if you’re prepared to pay the small monthly (£4) or annual (£35) fee, available to you on all your devices even when they’re not connected to the Internet (you do of course have to synchronise before going offline. Right from the start this means I have a repository for storing all my research on the places we’re visiting (days out, hotels, restaurants etc.). You can also share this notebook with other people in your travelling group to allow them to read or add to your notes.

I’ll also create a Holidays 2014 folder in my email client with subfolders for Flights, Hotels, Car Hire etc. to store email trails for each of the subjects including booking confirmations (which will also be added to my Evernote notebook – I think it’s important to keep multiple copies of important information in case any particular service fails on you).

Finally, I use my TripIt account […]

By |August 12th, 2014|Help and Advice|0 Comments
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Keeping your Mac running optimally

In Friday’s post on viruses, I suggested that often when people worry they may have a virus it’s something less serious. With that in mind I wanted to remind Mac users of a post I made some time ago on a utility I strongly recommend running on an adhoc basis from time to time called AppleJack. The original post is here.

This tool will perform some maintenance on your computer’s operating system, and this often resolves some of the weird problems Mac users experience (e.g. my laptop solemnly refused to connect to any wifi network recently; AppleJack sorted it out for me in less than 10 minutes).

If you’re looking for another Mac tool that cleans up your system, deletes unnecessary files and software, I’ve found that CleanMyMac 2 by MacPaw works extremely well. I run this about once a month to clear down log files and caches (created by the system to improver performance of different things and for technicians to help diagnose issues, but unfortunately rarely trimmed). For example, I ran it a week ago, if I was to run it now it would clear about 4.5GB of data from my system, none of which is required. What you normally find is the first time you run it, you will get rid of a lot of unnecessary system files (things like language files – who needs them if you never run the computer in anything other than English) saving a big chunk of room. Well worth a small investment in my opinion.

That’s it for today, later this week I should have a couple of posts on holidays (planning, booking and helpful techie tips for what to take with you) which I hope to be able to […]

By |August 11th, 2014|Help and Advice|0 Comments
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    Virus protection, your essential actions for PC and Mac users

Virus protection, your essential actions for PC and Mac users

So many times I get called to a job where the client is in a panic because they tell me “I’m sure my computer has got a virus”. Most often this is because their computer is acting odd, maybe running a bit slowly or something else strange. Sometimes, it genuinely is a virus causing this, but quite a lot of the time there is another reason altogether. Today I want to shed some light on what you can do to reduce the chances of you being hurt by a virus on your system.

Rather than muddy the waters with the why’s and how’s, I’m just going to give you straight up advice about what to do, and what not to do.
Mac Users
Do
Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing to stop damaging software being written for a Mac, but at this stage there have only been sporadic and minor breakouts.

My suggestion at this stage for an experienced Mac user with good awareness of the risks they are exposed to on the internet is that they do not need any protection. But for a relatively inexperience user I’d recommend one of the free utilities available, and my current favourite would be Sophos.
Don’t
On the list of DON’T’s for Mac users – never, never, never (I really can’t emphasise this enough) install MacKeeper. Seriously, I’ve had more jobs fixing problems caused by that product than anything else !
PC Users
Do
Because Windows is the most used computer operating system in the world, it is also the one that most bad code is written for to expose the most users to the bad guys. With that in mind I think it’s important to get the best protection software that’s available. Over time things […]

By |August 8th, 2014|Help and Advice|0 Comments
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Password Security about to get much easier

Morning all

One of the messages I seem to bang on about quite a lot is password security. i.e. Use different, hard-to-guess passwords for every service you use. Now this is fairly easy if you use a password manager (I strongly recommend 1Password) on your Mac or PC, but realistically I can understand why people are inclined to use the same password for some services if their primary “computer” is an iOS device – it’s time-consuming to dip in and out of 1Password to copy and paste passwords!

But that’s all about to change with iOS8.

One of the major changes to iOS8 is what Apple are calling extensibility. This allows app designers to create hooks into other apps, making the use and sharing of data between apps much easier. For example, as it stands right now, to get a password from 1Password into a login prompt in Safari, you have to open 1Password (password required), find the service you are logging in to, copy the password, switch back to Safari and paste the password in (I’m assuming you can remember the login name). In iOS8 however, 1Password have released a beta of their extension which allows you to use the fingerprint scanner to authenticate, via the share button in Safari, making the use of secure, unique passwords so much easier.

I did find a video of someone using this beta software, which you can see below, and I’m sure you will agree this is a much easier way of logging into things on the web.

By |July 1st, 2014|Apple Software News, Help and Advice|1 Comment
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