Hardware

Hardware

Want: Uiee battery charger

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uiee2This has just started raising money on IndieGoGo – Uiee is a small battery charger for topping up phones. It looks like a roll of tape but I think its biggest advantage is that distinctive shape and unmissable bright colour. I have a small slate-gray Mophie Juice Pack which I’ve actually forgotten to pack because a) it blended in with my desk and 2) I’m stupid. I don’t see Uiee fixing the latter, but it could help a lot with the former.

Mophie’s Juice Packs do charge you more in both senses: they has more power in it for topping up your phone and they do cost more. Uiee looks like it will retail for $50 US (no UK pricing yet that I know) where I spent around $80 on the particular Mophie I bought. (Have a look at the range of Mophie battery chargers on Amazon UK, Amazon US). When I got my Mophie, it was able to recharge my iPhone twice over; now, about two years later, it’s down to doing a little under once. Uiee claims to top up your iPhone by 55% so that’s a lot less than a full charge but it’ll add hours to your working day.

I wish we didn’t need these things but we do and nobody’s expecting the next iPhone to be any better with its battery power. Have a look at the Uiee video and then go its IndieGoGo page to lay down some Kickstarter-style cash.

 

 

Writer’s recommendation: Doxie scanner

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It’s a scanner, I’m surely going to be telling you that it’s X fast and Y quiet and does many, many Zs. But actually I want to tell you that it is therapeutic.

Maybe that’s a little bit because we’ve all slogged through using naff scanners before, the kind built into naffer printers and my Doxie is flawless. But it is also genuinely relaxing and even calming as you sit here watching the telly and gently feeding in A4 pages as you go.

There are much faster and there are more convenient scanners – I’ve still got my eye on the Fujitsu ScanSnap range – but just now Angela needed something scanned urgently and I barely blinked before sending it back to her as a multi-page PDF.

Mine is specifically the Doxie One which is currently £113.05 from Amazon UK or $127.27 from Amazon US. But there are others.

Take a look at it in action too. This isn’t my video, I don’t have a tidy enough desk to let you see anything here, but:

Quick fixes for a slow Mac

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spinning beachballIf you’re getting that wretched beach ball it means your Mac is struggling – and you’re getting it while doing something as intensive as just opening a folder – then do this:

1) Quit your browser
Especially if you’re not actually using it. And especially, most especially, three times most especially if you the sort to leave a lot of windows and tabs open. Each one is taking up some effort from your Mac as it tries to keep each one updated all the time.

For your own sanity, get into the habit of closing a tab when you’re done with it. Bookmark it if you’re going to come back to it later, but close it now.

In the meantime, though, quitting the browser is a one-click device for speeding up your Mac.

2) Delete things and then empty the trash
I believe the general consensus is that you need to keep about 10% of your hard disk space clear in order for your Mac to work away merrily. (Because it uses some space as it’s going.) If you can possibly do it, go for a third instead.

It makes the most enormous difference, says William who this morning found he had 200Mb of space left on his MacBook Pro’s 250Gb drive. Which Wolfam Alpha tells me is 0.08%.

Yep, I beach balled a lot this morning.

Evernote Market reaches Europe

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The Evernote company has just announced it will now ship to addresses in Europe. What it will ship is a collection of bags and clothing that are fine but also some hardware that is rather good. In particular, there is this:

evernote-scansnap-e1380217395237

That’s an Evernote edition of a ScanSnap scanner of which the company says:

The ScanSnap Evernote Edition, a collaboration between Evernote and Fujitsu, is not only the first of its kind – it’s the best in its class. You can put nearly anything in it, push one button, and with lightning speed it scans, senses, and autofiles your photos, receipts, business cards, and documents into your designated Evernote notebooks. Before you can walk away for a cup of coffee, you’ll get a simple notification to let you know Evernote has done your filing for you.

Except, you pay a lot for the Evernote colour and logo. I mean, a lot. This model costs £475 through Evernote Market but is functionally equivalent to the ScanSnap iX500 which you can currently get from Amazon UK for £318. In the US, the Evernote edition is $495 and the iX500 equivalent is $424 from Amazon USA.

I started telling you this because I thought it was good that Evernote Market was expanding outside the USA but now I’m just going to stick to Amazon. Still, take a look at Evernote’s description of the scanner as it’s good – and the market has other products.

MacPowerUsers podcasts hits 200th edition

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This is now a weekly fix for me: every Monday there is a 90-minute audio podcast on a single Mac topic such as Evernote or handling email. There’s the odd edition that has just no interest for me or, whisper it, when it’s focused on a guest who is a bit dull, but otherwise, MacPowerUsers is now an automatic thing on a Monday morning.

It started for me when I wanted to know about the Hazel application and a Google search came up with one episode of MacPowerUsers. Listened to that, bought Hazel, barely use it.

But instead I kept coming back to look up more episodes and after a while I realised I must’ve listened to eighty. That was a year or more ago now so the odds are that I’ve listened to forty more since.

The 200th episode, now available, is look back at the series so far which is probably therefore more interesting for existing listeners. It’s fun for existing listeners. If you’re new to it and fancy a dabble, try the recent Evernote episode, Calendars and Contacts and just keep on going.

Persuasive argument for Android Watches

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Let’s be clear here, I think this is a persuasive argument for a watch that connects to your phone and relays information. A smart watch. An iWatch, if you will. But I don’t think it’s persuasive enough to make me want to buy an Android phone. Plus, the fella is a fan of Google Glass so you have to make allowances.

But otherwise, I think he has some good points. I have been a bit on the fence about this. If Apple really does release such a watch then I will look at it because of how useful other Apple gear has been to me. If Microsoft really does release such a watch then I won’t – because of previous experience there too. (Remember: Windows for the D’oh!)

I was also put off the topic by recent torrential rumours of Apple’s one being tied to health topics and health monitoring. I don’t want my watch telling me to exercise more.

And I am put back on the topic every time I see a Moto 360 image like this:

Moto-360

Nobody’s saying when that will be released or what it will cost and there is an issue over how it’s apparently bigger than you think. Plus, I think it requires a phone to connect to and that this phone can’t be an iPhone one. But still, every time I see that, I think I could handle wearing a smart watch.

That’s not a reasoned or experienced analysis, but even though it is heavily Android-weighted, this is:

As was the case with the iPad, the experience of using an Android Wear device is transformative and completely unlike what you might imagine it to be. You have to experience it to understand its pull.

Yes: Android Wear is flawed, clunky and not ready for prime time. The LG G watch I’m using is too bulky and square — the round ones will be much better. And even the coveted round Moto 360 is too big.

But Android Wear watches are the first smartwatches to cross the line from awkward to awesome, because they’re the first to completely abandon the smartphone’s icons, menus and widgets paradigm and massively leverage subtle contextual cues, images, icons and colors to present tiny nuggets of information in their most essential and quickly graspable form.

…

I jumped back into the car and started slowly clawing my way through city traffic to head back home to Petaluma. At my first red light, I began wondering about the exact definition of a word that I sometimes use with a general but not exact understanding of its definition. Without even removing my hand from the wheel, I turned my wrist slightly and said in completely natural speech: “OK, Google: Define rife.” About a second later, the definition silently appeared on my wrist. I scanned the definition and said “Wow!” Then the light changed and I drove off.

Looking up a word is the least powerful, least interesting thing one might do with wearable technology. Yet it was thrilling because of where and how the interaction occurred. The wrist is a perfect place for instant, quickly scannable data. All the we-don’t-have-to-accept-ignorance qualities of the smartphone revolution are multiplied when an Android Wear watch is on your wrist.

Over the next few hours, simple notifications appeared, which gave me nice nuggets of knowledge without causing any disruptive shift in attention. It was like Google Glass, but more subtle and therefore more intimate and personal.

Here’s the most important takeaway from this column — the wrist is a spectacularly perfect place to get notifications, launch voice commands and get Google Now cards. Like the iPad, it feels so good — you’ll know it when you feel it.

Why Android Wear is the new iPad – Mike Elgan, ComputerWorld (28 June 2014)

Want: Transporter drive

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I’m taking my time over this because I want to get a storage system that suits me best and that suits me enough that I can forget about it for years and years and years. Right now, I suspect that it’s going to involve a Transporter and I am so taken with this product range that I want you to know about them too.

Oh, does that not sound like a sales pitch? Seriously, I won’t get any money for you buying one – wait, hang on, I can change that just a teeny bit. If you bought a Transporter drive through these links to Amazon UK or Amazon US, I would be quids in. Or pennies, really. But pennies-in isn’t a phrase. And anyway, I think I’m more likely to directly profit from this if someone who really likes me sees this sometime nearer Christmas.

So.

Transporter by a firm called Connected Data (here’s the official site) is like having your own personal cloud. Just as an aside, isn’t that still a deeply strange kind of sentence? But it’s true. Where I currently use Backblaze to backup our Macs to their servers somewhere in the world and I currently use the hell out of Dropbox for getting me quick access to my files wherever I am, I could use a Transporter. It would work exactly the same. But instead of my documents being on Backblaze’s servers or on Dropbox’s servers, they’d be on mine.

And unlike Backblaze and Dropbox and all there rest, there wouldn’t be any monthly charges. Buy a Transporter and you’re done.

It’s not so much the lack of ongoing fees that I think is appealing, it’s the convenience and maybe the security of it all. Intellectually I do like that it’s got to be more secure having your own cloud than using everyone else’s but in practice I’m probably not that fussed. Since I do have our Macs backed up online all the time, the problem I really want to solve is that I have a lot of data. A lot. I’m writing to you from a 3Tb iMac and it is near-as-dammit full.

Computers slow down dramatically when the drive is full and I am seeing that even with this fairly new iMac. So the idea of having a Transporter in the loft or at my sister-in-law’s house and keeping all my films and music on there, that appeals. It appeals so much that I’m not sure why I haven’t already done it or at least tried out one Transporter.

I think you should try one. In the UK, you can buy a 1Tb Transporter today for £188.12 and in the States it’s $259.99. Spend that, plug it in somewhere, off you go to the races and back again.

I suspect my hesitation is that I would need a lot more than 1Tb to make this worthwhile. Connected Data sells a 2Tb version and it also sells a no-terabyte version: an empty Transporter shell into which you can add a drive of any capacity you can find, if it’ll fit. So the odds are that I could fit a 3Tb drive fairly easily. I’m just not sure that 3Tb is enough either.

Then the same firm does a device called a Transporter Sync which gives you all of this connected cloud lark but I believe does it to any drive you can connected to it by USB. I’m not very clear on the differences, but I’m pondering.

There. This started out sounding like a sales pitch and now it’s more of a sales plea: if you use one of these things, what do you think of it? And how useful is the 1Tb storage?

Amazon Fire Phone

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My considered opinion after Amazon finally unveiled its own smartphone is that I like the name.

Beyond that I do have a curiosity about exactly how easy this phone will make it for people to spend more money at Amazon. I am immune to this, I am above such trivialities as UNCONTROLLABLE BOOK BUYING ON IMPULSE, or at least I will be via this phone because I won’t get it.

I don’t know that I’ll buy the forthcoming iPhone 6 either – though as I’m now out of contract, I’ll certainly look at it – but there’s no way I’m chucking this for an Amazon Shopping Trollery. I mean, Amazon Fire.

But BBC News has done an interesting roundup of reactions across the web from people who know more than I do.

Eating the dog food

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So I’m after telling you to work more, that you can work more. That you can create more time to write. I may rarely have been so annoying in my life. But, just because this has been an unusual day, I want to show you that I do this too.

You’re reading the fifth posting today on The Blank Screen and all five were written on buses or while waiting for buses. I can do this in part because I am in Birmingham which has a good transport system. (Didn’t stop me getting lost and late, but.)

And I can do it because I have my iPhone with me.

One of today’s stories, Coffee With(out) Me was borne of my own experience and an idea I had for a particular friend who has that problem. Once I knew I wanted you to have this solution too, it was a matter of writing it up.

I could’ve written in the WordPress iPhone app and without exception every one of the stories ended up there for posting. But I just more enjoy writing in the app Drafts. So I did. Drafts is comfortable and somehow relaxing so I write in that, then maybe tap a button.

If I tap a button, it is to squirt the text to somewhere specific like OmniFocus. But I just as often copy and paste the lot over into WordPress.

Once it gets there, I may edit but I really just set the tags and search keywords for when I might want to find a story again. Otherwise, it’s just copy and paste into WordPress, then, wallop, published.

Once published, the stories here get automatically promoted in various places but if I really like a piece, I’ll go promote it with love too.

That writing step, that publishing and that promotion are the same for every piece. The rest of today’s went through exactly that going from me to you. But they also had steps and apps before then

I read a lot of news on RSS through the app Reeder 2. I search around a lot as I think of areas of interest and that’s all done through Safari. Any time I find or I think of something that might be useful, it goes into Evernote. I have a notebook (actually a shared entire account) that I can email in to. That applies as much to the odd stray thought that I email in via Drafts as it does to whole websites in Safari or forwarding actual emails I receive.

I use Safari again when getting a link to a previous story of mine. I use Apple’s iTunes Link Maker website to get me links for apps that work internationally. One irritation is that Apple only shows you the price of an app before you buy it. If I buy a pile to test before recommending one to you, I can’t see its price. So I use the website Appshopper.com which tracks these things.

And – full, whispered disclosure – I use Amazon Associates for links to books or DVDs. If you buy those or take a look and then buy something else, some pennies come my way. I reckon it’s better that I get them than Amazon does, but.

To get iTunes or Associates links like that, you have to log in to your account on those services and I do that repeatedly via 1Password.

So that’s, what? At today’s prices, I’m using:

Drafts: £2.49, $3.99
Evernote: free to try up to a generous limit
1Password (£12.99, $17.99 universal version)
WordPress for iOS: free
Reeder 2: (£2.99, $4.99)
Safari: free and preinstalled on iOS

As ever with these things, if you were to set out doing it today perhaps you wouldn’t rush to buy three apps and use them alongside three others. Put like that, it does sound like overkill.

But these things grow. And then when you are on buses all day, you’re glad they did. Except for finding all the links, that’s five-biscuit job.

I should also say that my iPhone battery would’ve died from all this I’d it weren’t that I have a gorgeous Mophie Juice Pack recharger plugged into it right now. I bought mine at the Apple Store in Grand Central station but I reckon you can get a cheaper deal here in the UK or there in the States.