smurphy – Page 26 – Tech, writing, and tech writing

The Octo-drier

Anyone an Octonauts fan? It’s a cute, mildly educational cartoon by Brown Bag shown on CBeebies. The Octonauts live in an Octopod and sound an octo-alert whenever there’s a situation requiring their attention. We’re big fans. So, when I picked up this bit of gadgety goodness in Ikea a couple of weeks ago, naturally it got renamed the octo-drier (Ollie the octo-drier, to be more precise).

If you’d like to adopt your own octodrier, they’re in Ikea Dublin for €4.99, and of a nice sturdy construction. The legs fold upwards to turn it into a vaguely cylindrical shape for storage. I’m very fond of ours already.

Rolling Back a Bad iThing App Update

Yesterday I updated an app on my iPhone and found one of the changes annoying enough that it prompted me to figure out how to roll back an app update for the first time in my long history of iThings and apps (Facebook, I hope you feel proud). If you find yourself in a similar position, the procedures below should help.

Note: I use iTunes on Windows – Google suggests that Time Machine can help resolve the same problem on a Mac, but I’ve not tested.

If you updated your app on your iThing

Delete the unwanted version of the app from your iThing.
Note: If there’s data associated with the app, you’ll lose anything you’ve added since your last sync with iTunes.
Sync with iTunes.
The last version of the app downloaded/sync-ed with iTunes is reinstalled on your iThing. Hooray!

If you updated your app in iTunes on Windows

Delete the unwanted version of the app from your iThing.
Note: If there’s data associated with the app, you’ll lose anything you’ve added since your last sync with iTunes.
Delete the unwanted version of the app in iTunes in the Apps section of your Library.
Go to your Recycle Bin in Windows.
iTunes moved the old app here when it downloaded the new version.
Locate the .ipa file for the app you want to roll back, right-click the file and select Restore.
Go to <Drive Letter>:\Users\<User Name>\Music\iTunes\Mobile Applications, locate the restored .ipa file, and drag it into iTunes.
Sync iTunes with your device, and voila, the older version of the app is back.

My Top Ten Apps for New iThing Owners

A friend recently got an iPhone and was asking me what apps I’d recommend. Caught on the hop, I was hard pushed to say which of the hundreds of apps I’ve installed on mine might be of interest to her. I’m an app junkie and install vast quantities of the things on a weekly basis – many of which, it must be said, aren’t up to much.

Anyway – I decided to spend a little time carefully analysing my catalog to come up with a top 10 of apps I’d recommend to friends starting off with their first iThing, and here it is:

Skype – If your iPhone includes a data plan, you could save some money by making your calls over Skype instead of from the mobile. You can also IM on iPod Touches that don’t have mics.
Eirtext – Again, if you have a data plan but have to pay for texts, save a few bob using this app instead. (ETA: This app appears to have disappeared since this article was written.)
TV Guide – One of my genuinely favourite apps – I’d pay for this if it wasn’t free, but it is. Follow the link for more gushiness.
Remote – Assuming you have a computer with iTunes that you’re syncing your iThing with, this app acts as a remote control for your iTunes media. Save your iThing disk space for fave tunes only, and play the rest from your computer/laptop when you’re home. (We have speakers set up on Airport Extremes at 3 points around the house, so can choose where the sounds will appear and make them follow us around. Way cheaper this way than some of the home entertainment systems available.)
Shazam – If you’re listening to the radio and thinking “I love this song – must find out who it’s by and pick up the album”, Shazam can listen to a few seconds of it, identify it, and give you a link to buy it in the iTunes store. The free version has a limit on the number of uses per month.
Facebook – Is anyone not on Facebook these days? As you’d expect, this is an iThing interface to your Facebook account. You don’t get all the bells and whistles of the normal version (for example, you’re not warned of upcoming birthdays unless you check the event calendar, so you’ll most likely get in trouble for missing one – sorry agan Nick!), but it’s a grand app, and a must have for FB addicts, like me.
Echofon for Twitter – Not so many people on Twitter, but if you are, this is my favourite of the various apps I’ve tried. You can register multiple accounts, and do all the usual stuff with each of them.
Kindle – No need to buy an actual Kindle to read Kindle content – provided you’re out of the glare of the sun, you can do it on your iThing. And if you’re reading across multiple devices (Kindle, laptop, iThing), they’ll sync to the last page you were on across all of them, unless you’ve told it not to. Nifty. I like to have a couple of classics with me in case I get trapped somewhere with nothing to do.
RTÉ News Now – Lets you keep up with the top stories in News, Sport, Business and Entertainment, or watch a live stream of RTE News Now.
Angry Birds Free – The free sampler for Angry Birds. Eventually, you’re going to want to just kick back and play a game on your iThing, and it might as well be this – all the cool kids are playing it. Catapult birds at pigs in bizarre constructions and see how many you can kill. Simple yet deviously tricky all at once. Go on – you know you want to.

These aren’t necessarily my top favourite apps of all time. The list is intended for people getting started with an iThing for the first time, and they’re probably already smarting from having parted with serious money for the pleasure, so all the apps on this list are available for free (though several have paid upgrade versions). They give a general feel for what you can do with your iThing.

If you have a favourite free app you’d consider a must have for new iThing-ers, and I’ve missed it from this list, please mention it in the comments below.

General recommendation from an app addict: If you see an app you think you might like, and it’s free, download it quickly! I have several apps I couldn’t mention here because they’ve since vanished from the iTunes store, which is a crying shame because several of them are much better than still-available paid apps that do “the same thing”.

TV Guide App

This is a review of one of my absolute favourite iThing apps – the tvguide.co.uk TV Guide. It’s free, it’s customizable, it has bells and whistles aplenty, and it has saved me a fortune in weekend newspapers that I only bought for the TV listings. There’s a website too, for those without iThings, which looks fine in IE and Chrome, but is a bit messed up in Firefox.

There are different versions for iPhone and iPad and both make the most of the screen space available.

The iPhone version shows the times and titles for the current and next 2 programs on each channel. Click a channel to get full program summaries.

The iPad version has a more magazine-y feel to it with scrollable listings at the bottom of the screen, and a picture and program summary at the top of the screen for whichever program you’ve selected in the listings.

Both versions allow you to customize your channel list to show only the channels you have (or only the ones you’re interested in), and they include Irish channels plus regional and HD variations for the UK channels. Since we’re on a free-to-air setup and don’t get a number of the standard UPC/Sky/Whoever channels, this is great for us – no skipping through reams of irrelevant info.

Once you’ve selected which channels you want listings for, you can then order them to suit – I’ve put our favourite channels at the top so they appear on app launch.

If you are a Sky subscriber, you can set up login credentials, which I believe will allow you to remotely set up recording.

Some of the bells and whistles:

When you select a program in the future, you can ask for an alert to remind you before it starts (how many minutes before the program starts the alert pops up is customizable in the settings), or if you have a Sky account set up, you can set it to be recorded.
You can add programs to your iThing calendar, post about a program to Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn, or email info about a program to someone.
You can check when else the same program is on again – brilliant if you’ve missed the start of a show or have just discovered a new series you want to OD on for a bit.
You can also rate programs (the app shows an average viewer rating for each listing), and add them to your favourites (in which case listings for those particular programs appear at the top of the main listings page ahead of all else).
You can search the current day’s listings, or listings for the coming 7 days, for any program title – great for when things get rescheduled due to sports and the like, or you’ve missed if the 2-parter you’re watching is over 2 nights or 2 weeks.

In short – it’s wonderful, it’s free, go get it!

Know your AERs from your Elbow

I was in my local Bank of Ireland during the week when I spotted a fantastic looking offer: a savings account offering 9% interest! Wow! Sounds great! So I made enquires at the customer service desk.

Turned out, the 9% interest is earned over a two year term, not per annum. I would earn 3% interest in year one, at the end of which I would have an option to withdraw some/all of my money, and what was left on deposit would roll over to a 6% rate in year two. OK – so was it still a good deal?

Currently, the best lump sum deposit rate available is ~3.1% AER, and the best 1 year fixed term deposit rate is 3.7% AER.

AER stands for Annual Equivalent Rate and is a way of quoting interest rates for accounts of different terms, or that pay interest at different intervals (monthly, quarterly, annually etc.), to make them directly comparable.

So back to BoI’s 3% + 6%. Assuming I could commit to leaving my full lump sum on deposit with BoI for 2 years, what would the AER be?

Well, at the end of year one, I’d have 103% of my original investment; and at the end of year two I’d have 106% of the account value at the end of year one. So my total at the end of two years would be 109.2% of the invested sum – making the interest slightly more than the 9% on the poster.

If I take the square root of that total, I get just shy of 104.5%, so an AER of ~4.5% annually.

√(1.03×1.06)=1.04489

That’s still better than the current rates available, so I’m back to thinking it sounds like a good deal.

What it comes down to next is whether I believe I can afford to leave my money on deposit for 2 years untouched. If not, then I’ll be missing out on 0.7% elsewhere in year one.

But if I go with the (relatively) instant gratification of 3.7% now, what kind of rate will I be looking for in one year’s time to match what I would’ve made on the BoI deal?

1.092/1.037=1.053

That means I’ll want to find an account offering 5.3% in one year’s time to earn the same interest as if I’d taken up BoI’s current offer. That’s an increase of 1.6% on the best 1 year fixed term deposit currently available – quite a jump. But then, the ECB has started raising interest rates… Hmmm…

So, there we go, on Grand National day, I’m left with a gamble – but at least I’ll be guaranteed some return whichever way I bet on this one. Maybe I’ll toss a coin…