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Showing posts from May, 2014

Where is your stuff? Is it safe? Is it convenient?

I heard a quote recently that said if your data isn't backed up to three locations; it doesn't exist. This is clearly nonsense, although it's not a bad philosophy to have. Last week I suffered a catastrophic (albeit self inflicted) Mac failure. This caused me to restore everything from my Time capsule which hadn't done a complete back up for a couple of weeks, due to the fact that I'd moved a huge amount of images out of iPhoto and into normal folders (For Adobe). The restore took an astonishing three days and in the middle we also suffered a blip of a power cut, which caused the Time Capsule to reboot, but fortunately didn't interrupt the restore process. 14000 photos, a few Gigabytes of home movies and 9000 songs all in the balance. Except that they weren't really, as I had other backups. All of my music is backed up to a second HDD, in normal folders on an external HDD. It's also on Google Music, which lets me stream it to my iPhone. Although I

Box vs Dropbox

I've been using both Box and Dropbox for a number of years. Pretty much in the same capacity. Had you asked me two years ago which was best, at the drop of a hat and without doubt I'd have gone with dropbox. I would have understood however if Windows owners would have argued that Box was better, but as a Mac user, the sync function was miles behind Dropbox and riddled with bugs, at least for me it was. I have persevered though, eventually I got the app running satisfactorily, and have ran the two applications pretty much side by side. I've been rewarded with massive allowances from purchasing HTC handsets by dropbox, but have stuck with my generous allowance that Box gave me from the outset. Unbeknown to me, the dropbox allowances were only temporary though and have recently been taken off me. However logging in with an upgraded handset has restored similar allowances, but, for me, dropbox is currently a temporary cloud world. Now however, it's a tougher decision to s

Avoid costly iMessage picture fails

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iMessage can be great, but it can also prove costly, when an iMessage with a picture attached fails. Send a good few of these in a month and you can find yourself with a few more $$$ on your bill than you expected. The solution is simple. At your phone up so that text iMessage fails are sent as SMS, but disable MMS. How... Set your phone up under settings/messages like this below. NB. This does also mean that you're unable to receive MMS, but it also means that you'll avoid bill shock. Who sends MMS nowadays anyway? Besides my Mum? - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Smart TV's DLNA iPhones and Youtube.

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If you have a Smart TV, a newish blu-ray or DVD player, or perhaps a Smart Freesat or Freeview box, which is connected to your home network; and a smartphone, you may be missing a trick or three. Apple TV users, for the past few years, have been able to blast content from their iPhone or iPad to the Apple TV unit connected to their Television. The upshot is that what they're watching on their smartphone or tablet, will show up on the big screen. Handy if you want to show guests a picture, or a funny video like this one ..... One direction Parody Furthermore, via the remote app on an iPhone, it's also possible to use your smartphone as a remote control. These useful functions however are now commonplace to many other smart devices, but several people I have spoken to haven't realised that they own the equipment that can do it. If your 'smart' AV device is switched on (and is DLNA compliant), when you watch a movie via the Youtube app on your smart phone, if i