Why I can’t get my Head Around Evernote’s Work Chat Feature

December 23, 2014 | Comment

In the last major release of Evernote a new feature called Work Chat was introduced. It is described by Evernote as allowing you to “discuss your work in Evernote, in real time, with the people who help you get it done.”. So it is sort of like an inbuilt chat facility and as that it works as described.

The problem is that what is the most natural thing to want to do while chatting over a note? For me it is to update it with the other party and for both to see the updates but when you do that … Read the rest

Seeing Double – Duet Display for iPad

December 19, 2014 | Comment

There has been a lot of noise this week about a new iOS app called Duet Display. This allows you to turn your iPad into an extra display for your Mac. This has been done before but the difference with Duet Display is that it claims to have no lag as it is connected over the lightning/dock cable rather than using wifi.

Duet Display was release yesterday afternoon and I installed it on my iPad Mini and iPhone 6 along with the mandatory companion app on my iMac.

The good news is that it certainly works as described. I … Read the rest

Fitbit vs Misfit on the Pebble Smartwatch

December 10, 2014 | 2 comments

I’ve been a happy Fitbit Flex user for some 18 months now but when Pebble released an update that allowed activity tracking I thought that I would give it a go to see how the two compared.

The first thing to point out is that I am only interested in two things: accuracy and battery life. The second thing is that while I am happy with both the watch and fitness band on my (non-dominant) wrist I would prefer it all in one package.

I chose to run the test over a couple of weeks. The first when I would … Read the rest

Your Own Link Shortener (Yourls)

December 4, 2014 | Comment

I have written about the Yourls system previously that allows you to host your own link shortener. I have been using it for years now and it works incredibly well.

However, when I logged in last week I noticed that it had been flooded with spam entries. I immediately changed my api key and password but neither stopped the entries. I was confused until I read this post on the Yourls blog.

I removed all the sample-*.php.txt pages and all the spam went away so I strongly suggest that you do so too. I ave looked at the latest … Read the rest

iStick – USB Flash Drive for iPhone and iPad

December 3, 2014 | Comment

When I upgraded my iPad Mini I made a huge mistake by not checking the memory size of my existing device. Consequently I got home and discovered too late that I had purchased one with only 16gb. I was (and am) distraught over having to judiciously manage the apps and the space they use in order to be able to do what I want and need to do. If only there was a way to increase the capacity of an iPad.

Well, thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that successfully funded last June there now is a way. Effectively it is … Read the rest

iOS 8 Quality Control

November 24, 2014 | Comment

Since it was first released there have been a couple of upgrades to iOS8 but, for me at least, problems continue, particularly around keyboards. Some of the issues I get you can see below but they seems to be concentrated around spotlight search and the messages app.

Now I don’t know if this is something that is only affecting me but I suspect not, so the question is why aren’t Apple dealing with it? The quality of this release is without doubt the worst of all that I have used so, I believe, that Apple need to concentrate to making … Read the rest

Flic: The Wireless Smart Button

November 21, 2014 | Comment

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There is something about the simplicity of Flic that I like. That it has no interface and is just a single button but can do so much really appeals to me. Example of what can be achieved with the Flic are:

  • play music
  • control lights and heating
  • take a picture
  • send a distress signal
  • notify someone of your location.

There are also a good number of integration partners:
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Of course like other crowdfunding products what is delivered might not live up to the hype but this is sufficiently different to have a reasonable chance of delivering on its promises. Come … Read the rest

Can you have too much cloud storage as Microsoft offers unlimited space?

November 18, 2014 | Comment

Recently Microsoft announced that everyone with an Office 365 subscription would be granted unlimited storage on OneDrive, their Dropbox and Google Drive competitor. If it doesn’t seem long ago that they bumped up the storage from 15gb to 1tb then it’s not, because that announcement was made just last June.

On the face of it this seemed like great news – all the space to store whatever you want. However, the reality is somewhat different. Firstly this is a syncing service (as they all are) and so the absolute maximum you can sync is the size of your hard drive … Read the rest

Enforced Posting Silence

November 14, 2014 | Comment

You may have noticed that there haven’t many (any) posts for a while. This is due to the following email I received from my existing server host:

Thank you for your years of loyalty. We regret to inform you that VPS Unlimited will be closing permanently on November 17, 2014. All customers must move their data off to another provider before this date. This is a hard deadline. All data will be destroyed on November 18, 2014. There will be no way to access your VPS after this date.

Insert your own expletive here.

Given that I have about eight … Read the rest