How to Speed Up/Slow Down Podcasts
Ever wanted to speed up/slow down a podcast? Start your podcast and simply tap the center of your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad screen to get to the second menu screen.
Main screen of currently playing podcast
Podcast options screen. Tap the “1X” in the upper-right-hand corner of your screen to increase the playback speed.
Podcast playing at twice the normal speed. Tap the “2X” in the upper-right-hand corner of your screen to decrease the playback speed.
Podcast playing at half the normal speed. Tap the “1/2X” in the upper-right-hand corner of your screen to increase the playback speed to normal speed.
You’re back to the beginning!
My Favorite iPhone Apps
Shazam Encore
What does it do: Ever heard a song but didn’t know who sings it or on what album it can be found? Just tap Shazam and it’ll listen to the song and compare what it hears against its massive song library and it’ll tell you. It’s amazing! 500 years ago, this kind of technology in the palm of your hand would’ve gotten you burned at the stake! The Pro version costs more but allows unlimited tagging and is, in my humble opinion, worth every penny versus the free version.
Car Care
What does it do: Car Care allows you to keep track of your vehicle’s maintenance and mileage records. I’ve been using this app longer than almost every other app on my iPhone with exception to Shazam (see above). Not only does it track your mileage and record your maintenance history, it also allows you to set reminders for yourself as to when your car is due for maintenance (i.e. you’ll get reminders saying that it’s been X months or Y miles since your last tire rotation or tire balancing or oil change, etc.). One of the main reasons I keep using this program is its author, Karl Becker, consistently updates it and he listens to suggestions from users as to how to improve it. If you the least bit interested in keeping track of your car’s maintenance and mileage, this is the app for you. There’s a nominal cost but it, too, is worth every penny.
Flashlight
What does it do: Have you ever been to the movies and dropped something only to wish you had a flashlight the item? If so, this is the app for you. It will allow you to turn on the iPhone 4’s LED flash on for as long as you need it. You can also choose to illuminate the iPhone’s screen instead of using the LED flash. Please note, though, that the LED does use a fair amount of battery so you’ll want to using it sparingly. Although this app is no replacement for your Mag-Lite, as long as you have your iPhone with you, you’ll have a flashlight! It’s free.
CheckPlease Lite - Tip Calculator
What does it do: It’s a tipping calculator that allows you to quickly figure out what you should tip the waiter/waitress that’s serving you. You can select the tipping percentage and you can choose to have it round up (or down) the amount to the nearest whole dollar. It also allows you to easily divide the bill and appropriate tip across the number in your party. There’s a pay version and a free version – the free one works for me.
Dragon Dictation
What does it do: Dragon Dictation allows you to speak to your iPhone and have it transcribe what you speak into editable text that can be, among other things, emailed or sent in a text message to someone else. It’s not flawless but it’s close. It does a good job of transcribing what you’re saying when you cannot take a moment to compose a message using the keyboard. It’s free.
Amazon Mobile
What does it do: With this app, you can search for things on Amazon, buy them, or add them to your wishlist, as well as add items to your cart to purchase later. You can even view your Gold Box deals! Long story short: if you ever buy things from Amazon and want to be able to do that with your iPhone in the palm of your hand, this app’s for you! It’s free.
eBay Mobile
What does it do: this app will allow you to search for things on eBay, research completed items, bid on items you’ve found, and add things to your watchlist. If you buy and/or sell on eBay, you need this app. It’s free.
Fandango Movies - Times & Tickets
What does it do: If you’re a movie buff and like to take in the latest movie, you need this app. You can enter your Zip code or allow the Fandango app to find you using your iPhone’s built-in GPS capabilities and it will display a list of the available movies in your area. You can also search by theaters instead of by movie titles. You can also set the maximum distance you’re willing to travel and the app will show you the closest movie theaters or movies relative to your present location. It’s free.
Peggle
What does it do: In the modern vernacular, this game is “a complete time suck.” Yeah, it’s addicting! For a while there, I was what is known as a “Peggle Widower” as my wife was playing Peggle every free moment she had. Need I say more? The game reminds me of the video equivalent of pachinko. Get the paid version and find a comfortable spot to play because you’re going to be for a while!
Quickoffice Connect
What does it do: This app allows you to wirelessly copy all sorts of files to your iPhone so that you can refer to them later. You can copy Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, photos, and PDFs, among others to your iPhone. You can also email any of those files to anyone right from the palm of your hand. How cool is that? If I’ve had a nickel for every time I’ve used this app, I’d be a very rich man. Get the paid version as this app’s utility will more than pay for the price of the app itself.
RedLaser
What does it do: RedLaser allows you to scan an item’s Universal Product Code (UPC) which is also known as its barcode. It will look up that item and provide you with a brief description but, most importantly, provide you a list of all of local and online retailers selling that item as well as the price for which they are selling it. Very handy app to use when you want to make sure you’re getting a good price on an item. It makes comparison price shopping easy and fast. It’s free.
Shopping List
What does it do: This app is overwhelming at first, but I have found it to be the best shopping list app out there. The thing about Shopping List is that you have to think about how you're going to organize your items before you can start using it. Be patient and give yourself a chance to like this app before you judge it. It’s not free but worth it as it’s a lot easier than writing your shopping list down on a piece of paper.
Yahoo! Sportacular
What does it do: You can track all of your favorite sports teams (e.g. professional and college as well as international sports clubs) so you’ll know not only who they’re playing but when. You can look up any current scores as well as historical ones. Find out your favorite team’s standings and the team’s roster. Very handy! I use the free version and have just learned to tolerate the small banner ads. If you love sports but don’t like banner ads, get the paid version.
Theodolite Pro
What does it do: Quoting the app developer’s website, “Theodolite is a multi-function augmented reality app for the iPhone that serves as a compass, GPS, map, zoom camera, rangefinder, and two-axis inclinometer. Theodolite overlays real time information about position, altitude, bearing, and horizontal/vertical inclination on the iPhone’s live camera image, like an electronic viewfinder. Uses are endless, and the app is great for hiking, boating, hunting, golf, sports, sightseeing, photography, and navigation. The app is used by surveyors, geologists, architects, engineers, military personnel, competitive sportsmen, and search and rescue workers around the world.” I find more and more reasons to use this app every time I use it. I have the paid version...it’s very, very cool!
No Safety Net?
When I first got my Mac in 1989, I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, this Mac has a 20 megabyte hard drive! I’ll never fill that up!” Nowadays, I have individual data files that are 20 megabytes or larger in size. We sure have come a long way in the amounts of hard drive storage space available to us on our Macs. Not only do we have space for many programs, we have lots of space for those things that are near and dear to us: our photos, our music, and our videos. Can you afford to lose these? For many of you, the answer is probably no and this is why you should consider a backup plan. This blog entry is for those of you who answered, “No.”
“Backup” defined
Merriam-Webster defines “backup” as “3 : a copy of computer data (as a file or the contents of a hard drive); also : the act or an instance of making a backup”
Some considerations you should make when developing a back up plan for your Mac(s): How many Macs do you want to back up? Are the Macs networked? If so, are they on a wired (i.e. Ethernet) network or a wireless network or a combination of the two? Are the Macs desktops or laptops or a mixture of both?
My personal experience has been that all successful backup plans should be ones that you don’t have to think about or do anything beyond the initial setup. If you have to think about doing a backup, you’ll probably procrastinate doing it...I know because it is human nature to want to put off onerous tasks like data backups.
I’m often asked how one should backup their Mac(s). The answer depends on what you’re hoping to accomplish. There are many ways to backup data on a computer. I’ll only touch on a few ways here. First, there are “full backups” and “incremental backups.” Full backups are complete backups of your data. In other words, if you do a full backup of one drive to another, the second drive should be identical to the first drive (although the second drive may not necessarily be “bootable” - more on that later in this blog entry). If you do an incremental backup to another drive, it will only back up the data that has changed since the previous full backup. Full backups can take quite a while depending on the amount of data that needs to be backed up. Incremental backups generally are much faster. The most important thing is to find a backup routine that works for you and one that you will continue to use.
Time Machine
Time Machine is a backup application installed on every Mac that is running either 10.5 “Leopard” or 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” The default location for the Time Machine’s icon is in your Dock so it’s probably still there. If not, check to make sure it’s in your Applications folder. When you first configure Time Machine, you indicate which drive it should use to perform backups. Once configured, Time Machine will keep hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months. When the backup drive gets full, Time Machine will automatically delete the oldest backups. Time Machine does a full backup the first time you configure it and then incremental backups afterwards. It is important to note that Time Machine backups are not bootable.
As an aside, for Mac laptops, I wholeheartedly recommend the combination of a Time Capsule (a wireless router with a built-in hard drive made by Apple) and Time Machine. Once configured properly, backups occur wirelessly and, most importantly, in the background. You don’t have to think about anything...it just works. In my humble opinion, this combination is the most convenient and easiest backup method for Mac laptops. Should your Mac’s hard drive mechanically fail and need to be replaced with a new hard drive, you’ll have to reinstall the operating system and then use Apple’s Migration Assistant to restore the Time Machine-backed up data to your Mac. You could potentially be dead in the water until you replace the hard drive and install the operating system and restore the Time Machine data. You can also use Time Machine with your Mac laptop and back up to external hard drives as well but the backup process may not be as convenient and easy.
SuperDuper!
For desktop Macs, I usually recommend SuperDuper! It’s an inexpensive, shareware application that completely automates the backup process and tells you, in plain English, what is going to happen the next time the backup begins. By purchasing the software, you can also schedule backups to run by themselves even when you’re not at your Mac. It can also create bootable backups which not all backup programs do. What that means is that should your original drive stop functioning, you can actually boot your Mac from the backup drive. SuperDuper! can create full and incremental backups, too. You can run SuperDuper! without paying for it but you cannot schedule backups which, in my humble opinion, is not the easiest or more effective plan. If you have to think about doing a backup, you probably won’t so I respectfully suggest that you help the software developers at Shirt Pocket software buying paying for and registering your copy of SuperDuper! The software works with both internal and external (i.e. FireWire 400/800, USB 2.0, and eSATA) hard drives. So whether you have an extra internal hard drive in your Mac Pro tower or an external hard drive connected to your iMac or MacBook, SuperDuper! has you covered! Trust me, SuperDuper! is worth every penny of its $27.95 price tag. Please note that you can also use Time Machine with desktop Macs and back up to external hard drives but the backups will not be bootable.
Final Thoughts
Regardless of which methods you implement, implementing them is half the battle. The other half is to occasionally test your backup drives to ensure that they are really backing up the data you think they are. You don’t want to wait until it’s too late to discover that the backup plan you thought was in place and working, was, in fact, not working.
If I can be of service in developing an effective and efficient backup plan for you and your Mac(s), please don’t hesitate to contact me as I will be glad to assist you!
Archiving Computer Data – A Constant Struggle
Recently, I was asked to pull data from a 3.5" 800KB floppy disk for a local church. Remember floppy disks? For Mac users, this was the primary means of "backing up" data from the Mac's inception in 1984 to a few years after Steve Jobs introduced the iMac without a 3.5" floppy disk drive (1998) and declared the floppy disk was dead. My first "modern" Mac laptop was a 2000 G3 "Pismo" PowerBook and it had all "modern" ports such as USB 1.1, FireWire 400, and a whopping 12GB hard drive and 128MB of RAM. It, however, lacked a floppy disk, which frankly, I did not miss one bit. Just to be on the safe side, though, I bought an external 3.5", USB-based 1.44MB floppy drive in case I had to read a 3.5" disk on occasion. Truth is - I rarely, if ever, used it. Getting back to my data recovery efforts, I realized I could not use the external USB 3.5" floppy drive to read this disk. See, external USB 3.5" floppy drives cannot read any disk format other than 1.44MB floppies. So, if you have a 400KB/800KB Mac-formatted floppy disk or a 720KB PC-formatted floppy disk, you're "up the proverbial polluted tributary without means of locomotion" if you catch my drift.
As time goes by, new media styles come out and replace old media styles. For example, 8" floppies were replaced by 5 1/4" floppies which, in turn, were replaced with 3.5" floppies, which in turn, were replaced by Zip disks as files got larger, which in turn, were themselves replaced by CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. People are starting to use USB pen drives or "thumb" drives now in place of burning CDs and DVDs. The question you have to ask yourself is "Will the computer I'm using in the future be able to read the media on which I archived my data in the past?" Put another way, "Will the computer I'm using in the future be able to read [Gentle Reader, insert media choice here] on which I archived my data in the past?"
Additionally, media used for archiving digital information does have a "life span." Floppy disks don't last forever and are susceptible to damage or erasure by magnetic sources (e.g. stereo speakers, some CRT monitors) and, given they have moving parts, sometimes those parts just fail. Gentle Reader, if you've ever used Zip disks, for example, then you may be familiar with the infamous Zip disk "Click of Death" syndrome. When CDs/DVDs were introduced, it was claimed that they offered a 100+ year life span but some say that life span isn't nearly as long as what we were told. Even solid-state USB "thumb" or "pen" drives have a maximum read/write point and they be very prone to data loss if not ejected properly. The point is the actual media itself may not stand the test of time. If the media doesn't stand the test of time, the data you've archived on it may not last as long as you'd like.
Another point to consider is the application that you created your data file with in the first place may not be around in the future. Even if the application still exists, the current version may not be able to open your old file. For example, will you be able to access that TurboTax tax return from 2003 without having the TurboTax application that created it? To further complicate the matter, your current computer may not be able to even run that application due to operating system incompatibilities and/or physical hardware issues (i.e. lack of a floppy disk drive).
So what should you consider, Gentle Reader, when archiving important data? Consider archiving your data in the most common data formats available at the time you are archiving on media that is the most prevalent. Today, that would be text files (also known as ASCII text), PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and JPEGs (for graphic files). Put those files on the media you reasonably think will be around during the next 3-5 years. Today, that would be CDRs, DVDs, and solid-state USB "thumb" or "pen" drives. You should also plan to copy those files over to new media types as they become available so that your data is always physically accessible. Likewise, you should update your Word documents and Excel spreadsheets so that the latest and greatest Office applications can read the data. If you've used Office over a period of several years, you may know that the file formats have changed gradually over time.
Files like text files, PDFs, and JPGs shouldn't have to be updated very often as those file formats have been around for many years and haven't changed all that much. In fact, text files have been around in their current form since the mid-1980s and PDFs and JPGs have been around since the early 1990s. Chances are that those formats will be around for many more years to come. Give some thought, though, to using "standardized" programs at the time the files are created and then, as time goes by, update those files to the "standardized" programs that you're using in the future. As you may recall, WordPerfect was once the "king of the hill" with respect to word processing programs on the PC platform. In other words, it was once the standard word processing program. Gradually, however, WordPerfect was replaced with Microsoft's Word. Today, it can be said that Word is the standard word processing program. As a result, you should consider upgrading from what was once the standard program to the new standard program. So now is the time to upgrade those WordPerfect files to Word. Mac users may remember a time when MacWrite was the dominant word processing program. After all, it came with all new Macs. Gradually, MacWrite's dominance was overtaken by Word and Word has been the dominant word processor on the Mac since the late '80s or early '90s.
In conclusion, archiving data is not a "one and done" process. You have to remain vigilant as to popularity of the archiving media you're using, its lifespan, and the compatibility of the files you have archived with outdated applications with their modern versions. You should periodically update your files and media to ensure that they will be accessible, readable and useable in the future.
Troubleshooting Home Networks
Once everything has been powered off, plug the Cable/DSL modem in first and wait about 10-15 seconds. After you’ve waited 10-15 seconds, plug in the wired/wireless router (if applicable) and wait about 10-15 seconds. After you’ve waited 10-15 seconds, turn on your Mac or other networked devices. The order in which you power everything on is critical as is waiting a few seconds before powering on the next device. More often than not, simply cycling the power to all components in your home network (i.e. Cable/DSL modem, wired/wireless router, and computers) will help get you back online quickly. In other words, don’t expect to only power off/on half of your network and expect it to work; power all of your network components off/on (see diagram below).
If cycling the power to all of the networking components doesn’t fix your slow Internet surfing, you may have a bigger problem on your hands. Please keep in mind that your Cable/DSL modem and wired/wireless routers (if you have a router at all), stay powered on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year and they do wear out after a few years. If you notice an abrupt, large degradation in speed while surfing and that slowness surfing remains there for more than a few days, your Cable/DSL modem may be on its way out. The cure to slow surfing may be a quick and easy Cable/DSL modem replacement. Contact your Internet Service Provider (ISP) (e.g. Time Warner Cable, BellSouth, etc.) for information on how to do that.
Recommended Way to Power On/Off Your Home Network