The Bane of Family Tech Support

January 12, 2013 | Comment

One of the occupational hazards of working in the IT industry is that you become official tech support for family and friends.

There is a expectation that you will be an expert in all forms of technology.

My mother-in-law regularly asks me questions about her android phone, for example, despite I having never owned or used such a device. My requests for her to move to an iPhone or use my wife who has exactly the same phone as her have so far gone unheard!

Sometimes, however, the job is made so much harder by mischievous software vendors and I … Read the rest

Slingshot

January 10, 2013 | 1 comment

At the end of last year a friend give me an early Christmas present in the form of a SlingShot.

As the picture left ably demonstrates the SlingShot is a device to hold your phone to aid stability. Hidden in the hand there is also a kickstand that additionally allows it to work as a mini tripod too.

As the name suggests SlingShot looks like a catapult but rather than firing your precious phone off into the distance it holds it securely. The SlingShot works with many phones due to its flexible design. It will even work if you … Read the rest

Roll your own Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi

January 7, 2013 | Comment

Following the success of hooking up my Raspberry Pi to my BT Home Hub the next step was to do something useful with it.

I am a very active user of cloud services, particularly Dropbox and Google Drive. Both work well but in order to gain additional space you have to pay but what if you could run your own service and add as much storage as you liked? Enter ownCloud a Dropbox lookalike that you run on your own server.

In my case the server is my Raspberry Pi and a 500gb harddrive attached providing the storage and it … Read the rest

Google Chrome 2012 A-Z

January 5, 2013 | Comment

John Rentoul in the Independent produced an A-Z list of sites Google Chrome takes you to if you just press the first letter and press enter. If you are logged in to Google then these results will be tailored to your usage.

I thought that it would be interesting to do the same and my results are below. What was interesting was that it was quite narcissistic in that several of my own sites appear on the list, although not this one. I was also surprised by what was missing. For example I would have expected to see Autosport under … Read the rest

Do Not Disturb (Ever)

January 3, 2013 | Comment

So here’s a fun way to start the new year, with a bug courtesy of those kind people at Apple.

In iOS 6 they added this great new feature called Do Not Disturb (DND) which allows you to either manually or automatically silence your phone but still allow incoming calls from certain groups of people, those marked as your favourites for example.

It works really well, or at least it did until the turn of the year. Since yesterday Do Not Disturb is staying permanently on. You can see that on the picture left with DND supposed to go off … Read the rest

Pi Powered

December 30, 2012 | 1 comment

The Christmas break has given me an opportunity to get leave aside the pie and get out the Pi. In doing so I have discovered a really neat way of being able to keep the device permanently powered and connected.

Our broadband is provided by BT and as part of the package you are supplied with a router called a “BT Home Hub”. I have always known that there was a USB port on the back of the hub but until yesterday it hadn’t occurred to me to plug in the Pi. Lo and behold it provides enough power to … Read the rest

Acoustic Speaker for iPhone

December 27, 2012 | Comment

Just a quick update with an interesting gadget received this Christmas, the odd looking object shown on the left. When I asked my Facebook friends what they thought it might be I received a few responses that I cannot reproduce here.

It is, however, an acoustic speaker for an iPhone or an unpowered speaker booster, if you prefer. As you can see from the picture below you shove your iPhone into the slot at the top and all sound get amplified as it is redirected out of the large hole in the front.

I can confirm that it works well … Read the rest

Time to re-evaluate Flickr

December 18, 2012 | Comment

The blogsphere is all abuzz with Instagram’s proposed change of terms of service from the middle of next month which some have already dubbed “Instagram’s suicide note”. Basically the changes give Instagram (or parent Facebook) to sell your pictures of which you get no portion of that sale or any choice in the matter.

You can read a good summary of the situation over at c|net but I am already considering whether I want someone else to have such control over work that I produce and I am thinking that I don’t. I still have a Flickr account that I … Read the rest

Virtually, the UK Leads the World

December 17, 2012 | Comment

Fascinating new report from OFCOM which shows the the UK is still a world leader in one thing and that is consuming online content.

According to the report the UK is top dog when it comes to:

watching TV from catch-up services, such as the BBC’s iPlayer
online shopping. We spend an average of £1,083 per person per year online
accessing social networks on our mobiles

Watch a slightly surprised Yank go through the numbers in the video below or see the data courtesy of the Guardian here.

Go Team GB!… Read the rest

Google Analytics – the Videos!

December 16, 2012 | Comment

Shopping online can be an absolute godsend but it can also be a complete pain in the arse. Google clearly recognises that’s a problem for many and that the issue is the user experience offered by so many websites.

How do I know that they understand the issues? Because they have produced a series of humorous videos that highlight a set of common issues on shopping websites and apply those issues to real world scenarios. The three videos are embedded below, my favourite being the checkout one.

What I found quite surprising about the videos is that they are clearly … Read the rest