Tech

Photo: Kārlis Dambrāns - used under a CC-BY-2.0 license Seriously dude, do we really need the Apple Watch? (substitute with your favorite wearable device) Not really. Actually not at all. Your iPhone (substitute with your favorite mobile platform) will do almost everything the watch does. It’ll show you notifications, it’ll tell the time, let you reply to messages, allow you to make video calls, track some of your health stats, allow you to cross items off your shopping list. And you can use it to watch TV. All you have to do is pull it out of your pocket. Your iPhone will even do a lot of things that your Apple Watch can’t do. But do we really need the iPhone? Not really. Actually not at all. Your Macbook (substitute with your favorite portable computing platform) will do almost eve...

The people who brought you the original Bossjock Studio app have now released bossjock jr, a free and wonderful little podcast recording app. When I say “podcast recording" I actually mean “a frigging full-featured podcast studio with jingles and all in one free app" - it does everything, from recording your voice, allowing you to add in jingles, pause when you need a second to think of what to say next, export to all sorts of formats, include artwork and meta data in your recordings. It’s brilliant! It even comes with an Apple Watch extension. There’s not a single excuse not to start a podcast now. » bossjock jr (iTunes link)

Judging by the amount of effort that you nowadays have to take to keep your Wordpress blog at least partially clean and safe from hacking, it really reminds me of the days of Windows XP (that’s the last time I seriously used Windows) and the numerous measures you had to take to keep it free from malware. Similar to Windows in the 90s, Wordpress is pretty much a mono culture at this point. And monocultures attract vermin. All my Wordpress instances have recently been infected. The goal of the infections was never to bring the sites down though. Destruction doesn’t help those who infect the sites. They want to either boost someone’s Google rank by creating more back links or they simply try to spam others through links or spam mails. In the case of my Wordpress instances, I began notici...

Interessante Beobachung zum Downloadverhalten. Fast niemand abonniert unseren neuen Podcast. Trotzdem stimmen die Hörerzahlen. Von vorne: ich habe kürzlich den neuen Podcast Glutenfrei gestartet, den ich mit meiner Mutter produziere. Für den Feed und die Website benutze ich den Firtz. Um es den Hörern und Hörerinnen leichter zu machen, den Podcast zu abonnieren, ist er zum einen in iTunes gelistet, zum anderen verwende ich den Podlove Subscribe Button, um auf der Website selbst einen möglichst einfachen Abo-Prozess bereitzustellen. Soweit erst mal das meiste richtig gemacht. Um die Abonnenten einfacher von den Websitehörern zu unterscheiden nutze ich folgenden Trick: es gibt nämlich zwei Feeds. Der Firtz macht das in Zusammenspiel mit Auphonic recht einfach. A) der MP3-Feed füttert den Pl...

Wer bei dieser Überschrift einen Rant erwartet, liegt diesmal ausnahmsweise daneben. Wir sind aufs Land gezogen. Naja, sagen wir mal: in ein paar Minuten ist man mit dem Zug am Hauptbahnhof Hannover. Hier ist ja alles “Land" und alles sehr flach. Wir haben ein paar Jahre gesucht, bis wir endlich die Viewfinder Villa gefunden haben. Unsere Kriterien waren neben Platz und Erreichbarkeit natürlich auch finanzieller Natur — und ganz besonders wichtig war immer eine halbwegs schnelle Anbindung ans Internet. Bisher hat uns da htp.net ordentlich versorgt, zuletzt mit zuverlässigen 50/10 MBit/s, die auch zu Stoßzeiten quasi nie eingebrochen sind. Da wo wir nun hingezogen sind, ist htp nun leider nicht mehr verfügbar, also mussten wir wieder zurück zum Monopolisten: unser DSL kommt nun von der Tel...

Sooner or later it’s time to say goodbye to old friends. This is about my good old 2007 Mac Pro. It has served me incredibly well for over seven years. It only needed two upgrades during that time: one to bring the original 4GB RAM up to 8GB and the other one being the replacement of the spinning root disk with an (albeit smaller) SSD. Extending The Life Span When I did them, both of these upgrades have extended the Mac Pro’s life span by at least a couple of years. And what great years those were! I could throw pretty much anything at this 4-core beast. It would chug along rendering video while at the same time downloading files from an FTP server, checking integrity of an external disk, backing up its root drive to Time Machine and recording a podcast. Plus surfing the web would still...

Now that Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite is here and I’ve played with its sharing extensions, I think down the road this might provide a way to hugely simplify one of my always recurring tasks: Take any piece of information (a web page, an order form, a mail attachment), and save it as a PDF to a specific folder on my system. This needs to be a one-click operation. Is there anything like out there? Does any existing app provide such a service? I’m not looking for a process that requires multiple steps and goes through Evernote, Instapaper or similar, I’m looking for one-click simplicity. Any ideas? Update: I’ve been asked “why not just use print/save as pdf" and my answer is that I believe it should be even simpler and straightforward. The above is a keyboard shortcut (⌘-P in most apps) fol...