Making your home internet connection fas...

I have a love hate relationship with my broadband provider (VirginMedia).  Their products are pretty great… when they work.  When they don’t work and you have to suffer the hell that is their customer service (in particular the offshored parts), then you are willing to throw everything away and start again.  It’s even worse when they become oversubscribed in an area and don’t seem to have a plan for upgrading the hardware to keep up with demand. This is what happened to me in April of this year.  My internet went down on Friday night at 6pm.  I...

How to use OCR in Evernote

I love Evernote – it’s become my second brain over the past couple of years – but I only just discovered its Optical Character Recognition (OCR) facility.  This means that any images or PDFs you store in Evernote will be processed and indexed so that you can find them again based on their contents. This is a really great feature – here’s a couple of ways you could use it: Store PDF white papers and eBooks that you may want to use as a reference for research in the future Store PDF versions of user / operations manuals Take photo of white...

My favourite methods for music discovery

I don’t listen to the radio.  I dislike radio advertising for both the interruption, volume increases, and the overall quality.  I also don’t like DJ’s generally – with the possible exception of morning radio shows.  I just want to listen to the music – perhaps with some news every now and then. I listen to my own music library on my iPhone or Sonos and I subscribe to Spotify — I am a huge fan of Spotify. The problem is that radio stations are a great source for discovering new music and when you only listen to music that you already...

How to transfer videos and photos from i...

If you have both an iPhone and an iPad and have signed up with iCloud, then when you take a photo on your iPhone it will automatically appear on your iPad’s Photostream.  Pretty neat right?  But what about videos you take on your iPhone – do they appear on your iPad?  Nope.  I recently experienced this shortcoming when wanting to edit a video in iMovie on my iPad that I shot on my iPhone.  So photos make it into your photostream, but videos don’t (understandably if you are on a mobile connection as videos could eat your limits pretty quickly). But have...

Alert Me – a review and how to sca...

Home automation is going to be huge in just a few years and home energy management will play a major part in its growth.  I currently have an ‘automated home’ in terms of lights, cameras, door sensors etc all using a technology called Z-wave.  I wanted to include an energy monitor into this system, but was bitterly disappointed with the devices that are available and compatible with my current system. A couple of weeks back, I went beyond Z-wave and purchased the Alert Me energy monitor that uses the Insteon standard.  It only recently arrived in the UK and...