Neil Turner's Blog

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February 4, 2012
by Neil T
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January 28, 2012
by Neil T
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January 26, 2012
by Neil T
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TeckNet iPod External Battery review

iPhone with external batteryThe iPhone, like most smartphones, doesn’t have great battery life when compared to the more basic ‘feature phones’ which can usually last several days between charges. I tend to charge my iPhone every night, although with normal usage (basically reading Twitter and Facebook on the train, and a few checkins on Foursquare) I only use around 30% of the battery capacity so I could get away with only charging it every other night.

With heavier usage the iPhone can very quickly run down its charge, especially when GPS is involved. Making heavy use of maps, logging outdoor activities with RunKeeper or Geocaching can easily take up 40% of the iPhone’s battery in not much more than a couple of hours. As I use RunKeeper for logging walks, and also Geocache a lot, this is a problem.

iPhones don’t have user-replaceable batteries, and even if they did, it’s unlikely that there would be any way of fitting a higher capacity battery inside it. And there tend not to be any plug sockets out in the middle of fields, nor any extension cables that are more than a few metres long.

The solution is therefore an external battery, and so I bought this TeckNet battery pack from Amazon. It charges up using USB, and then when your iPhone’s internal battery is getting low you plug it in to transfer the power from the external battery to the internal one. It connects using the iPhone’s dock connector at the bottom, and has a series of LEDs that show how much charge is left in it.

Yesterday I went walking, and used RunKeeper to track my route using GPS; I also spent time looking for Geocaches. When I got off the bus at around 9:40am, the battery was at around 90%, but by 12pm it had dropped to 50%. The manual that came with the external battery claims to be able to charge your phone up by 65%, so as I’d stopped for lunch I decided this would be a good time to try it.

Charging isn’t quick, however, with the external battery plugged in, by 2pm the iPhone had returned to 100% charge on its internal battery. For most of this time, GPS was on, and I was also using it quite a bit too, so I am minded to believe the claim that it could restore 65% of the internal battery’s charge. So, it works quite well. Plus, although I’ve only talked about the iPhone here, it will also work with most iPods with a dock connector, including the Nano, Classic and Touch. It won’t work with the iPad though.

Caveats? Although you can still use the phone with the external battery attached, it does make it significantly longer – about two inches. There’s the aforementioned slow transfer of charge, and the plastic on the battery outer casing is a bit cheap and easily scratched. The battery also takes over 5 hours to fully charge. But on the whole I’d still recommend it for those of you who make heavy use of your iPhones while out and about.

January 25, 2012
by Neil T
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App of the Week: Snapseed

Today’s app is Snapseed, a photo editing app for iOS devices.

The iPhone, especially in its later incarnations, has a pretty decent camera, and is also quite a powerful computer if you think about it. So it makes sense that you should be able to edit photographs on the phone itself, rather than waiting until you get home to edit them in something like iPhoto. That way, you can upload edited pictures straight to sites like Flickr.

So this is where Snapseed comes in. You can start either by taking a picture, or using one that’s already on your device, and then opening it in the app. There’s a one-click Automatic fix button to adjust lighting and colour, but you can also adjust the brightness and contrast manually as well; furthermore you can adjust specific parts of the photo and remove red-eye. Images can be cropped and straightened as well, and Snapseed makes good use of the touch screen here.

Then there’s a series of filters, which Instagram users will recognise, and you can also apply a tilt-shift filter to get that miniature effect. Finally, you can export pictures to Flickr, Facebook or Twitter, save it back to the Photo Library, email it, or print it if you have an iPrint-enabled  printer.

So it’s quite a powerful app. Unfortunately the interface isn’t the best and takes a little getting used to – the use of arrows on the filter screens is a little non-intuitive, for example. And there’s not as many features as, say, iPhoto or Picasa on the desktop. But it does work well for quickly sprucing up images before you upload them.

Snapseed costs $5 (£3) and is available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, although I got a free copy as part of the iTunes 12 Days of Christmas promotion a few weeks back.

January 23, 2012
by Neil T
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Elevens

Buskers

Rather than come up with something really original today, I’m going to post a picture of a bagpipe player and a drummer dressed as The Mask and then do a meme that I stole from Dave2. Apparently I’m supposed to come up with my own questions, but meh, whatever.

The first 11 are ’11 random things about you’, the second are 11 specific questions. Firstly, 11 random things:

  1. I’ve always lived in Yorkshire – I was born and raised in York, and then moved to Bradford at 18 to go to university and then Sowerby Bridge at 26 when I moved in with Christine. I’ve never lived anywhere else.
  2. I’ve been to Paris in France five times. This is more times than several places in the UK, although with Christine not having a passport yet I am getting to see more places in my own country. Bristol is the biggest UK city that I’ve yet to visit, but plan to.
  3. I can’t play any musical instruments. My parents once encouraged me to learn the recorder at primary school, but I got frustrated with the slow progress and gave up. Despite this, I really enjoy listening to music.
  4. I’m a chronic asthmatic. I don’t write about it much because asthma has been a part of my life since I was three years old – when you’ve had something as long as that, you tend not to think about it. On the whole, it’s well-controlled and I’ve only been to hospital once with breathing difficulties. Moving out of the city and getting more regular exercise has also improved my symptoms.
  5. I am a relatively quick typist, but I’m not a proper touch typist and tend to just use a couple of fingers on each hand. I’m also not terribly accurate – thankfully, someone invented the inline spellchecker.
  6. I have never seen any of the Star Wars films. I’m sure I will watch them someday, but I’m not sure whether to watch them in the order that they were made, or the order that the story flows. Do I watch A New Hope or Phantom of the Menace first? (Ironically, there is a radio and TV series called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars where a celebrity is interviewed about things they haven’t done, and then asked to do them and rate them out of 10).
  7. I have smaller than average feet for a bloke – I generally take a UK 7, which is a 40 in EU sizes and around an 8 in US sizes. Finding cheap shoes that fit can be very difficult.
  8. I have a British Canoe Union One Star Award for kayaks and tandem canoes. However, it’s been years since I was last in a canoe and I’ve lost the certificates.
  9. I’m a fully-paid up member of CAMRA – the Campaign for Real Ale – but I don’t really like beer much. I’ll drink premium lager, fruit beer and some pale ales, but I tend to prefer my poison in cider or perry form. I don’t like bitter or stout.
  10. I’ve had a poem published in an anthology. I wrote it at primary school when I was 10 years old, and it was about a hamster. Other than the odd letter in a newspaper (including these two in the Guardian), that’s about all I’ve had professionally published.
  11. Some of these were taken from a draft entry I started months ago called ’100 things’ – i.e. 100 random facts about myself, modelled on a similar list by Meredith. I only got to 47 before giving up.

And now I’m answering Kim’s Eleven questions…

  1. What is your dream job? Honestly, I don’t know. Something where I could travel a lot, work with fantastic colleagues and meet lots of interesting people, but I’m not sure exactly what I’d be doing. I enjoy my job right now but it’s not my dream.
  2. What is the farthest (furthest?) you have traveled from home? Barbados.
  3. Do you think you can you have more than one best friend? Definitely. I have a few: Christine is one – she’s a best friend as well as my fiancée. Life has taught me that you need to like someone as well as love them.
  4. What is your favorite cuisine? Probably Italian, but I also like Kashmiri and Arabian food.
  5. Who is the first person you want to share news with? Christine usually, but depends on the nature of the news. My work colleagues hear a lot, since I spend most of my daylight hours with them during the week.
  6. What are people likely to ask you to help them with? To fix an issue with their computers.
  7. What are you likely to ask someone to help you with? DIY. I can assemble flat pack furniture but tend to tread carefully with anything else. Especially if it’s not something I own, like a fixture in a rented property.
  8. Why do you read blogs? I enjoy the insight into peoples’ lives, especially those that are very different from my own.
  9. Who knows you the best? Christine. We don’t keep secrets from each other (bar things like buying engagement rings of course)
  10. Do you believe in karma? Not sure.But I do believe you should be nice to other people.
  11. What’s something you are really interested in, that most people don’t know about? (that you are interested in it, not the thing itself) I try to keep my interest in public transport on the quiet, as it’s rather geeky.

January 22, 2012
by Neil T
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Chilly

Brrr!

So yesterday was a bit cold, with a very strong wind blowing down the Calder Valley. Christine and I went up to Hebden Bridge for a bit of shopping, and to see Hugo at the Hebden Bridge Picture House. The Picture House is one of two small independent cinemas in the area – the other being the Rex Cinema at Elland, which is geographically closer but a bit of an arse to get to by public transport. It’s a nice cinema, showing one film a day on weekday evenings and matinées at weekends, and usually the films are those that have been in mainstream cinemas some time previously, with very generous legroom. It’s also competitively priced with cheap refreshments, and serves an area otherwise not well served by cinemas – the nearest multiplexes at present are Bradford, Huddersfield or Burnley, which are some trek away. Unfortunately the cinema isn’t in great nick – there’s quite a bit of work to be done to the building and as it’s owned by the local council a recent council tax rise has been levied to pay for improvements. Its future is also potentially threatened by the opening of a multiplex cinema in Halifax in a few months time, which is a shame as it has a lot of character.

Hugo, incidentally, is a very good film if you haven’t already seen it.

Thankfully today’s been a little warmer and less windy.

January 21, 2012
by Neil T
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January 19, 2012
by Neil T
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Avoiding RSS Bankruptcy

Tynemouth

Feed readers, like Google Reader, are great for keeping up with frequently-updated web sites. But you also need to keep on top of them – otherwise you end up with a dauntingly-huge number of unread items. Other than being incredibly busy at work, part of the reason why there hasn’t been much posted here this week is because I’ve been trying to plough through my feeds.

Thankfully Lifehacker has some tips for making your feeds more manageable. In particular, it tells you how to use Google Reader’s Trends feature to weed out feeds that you aren’t reading, or that are busier than your others. I’ve unsubscribed from a few as a result, since I wasn’t reading them very often.

I have some further tips – one is to use a service like Read It Later. Treat your feed reader like a newspaper – read any short items and skim-read anything longer. If any longer articles are interesting, send them to Read It Later, so that you can read them properly later on. The other is to use an app like Byline, which lets you skim-read headlines and then mark any items that don’t interest you as read, leaving those that you may actually want to read. To do this, open a feed or folder and click edit in the top-right, then untick any items that don’t interest you.

There’s also a couple of points that I touched on the last time I hit ‘feed overload’, back in August 2008.

At the end of the day, if reading feeds becomes a chore, then you’re probably trying to read too much.

January 14, 2012
by Neil T
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