Send Holiday Cards Right from Your iOS Device

Working at the Service Check-in Counter, I often have customers asking me how to get out of Zoom and/or Voiceover on their iOS devices. While most people have Zoom and Voiceover disabled, it still shows up now and again.

If you have used Zoom, the image to the right may seem familiar. If this happens, you can try to enter your passcode and navigate to Settings to turn off Zoom but this can be difficult. An easier way out is a simple 3 finger tap twice which will Zoom you back out.

If you have seen the image above, then you also must have experienced Voiceover. Instead of using your finger to select individual apps, the screen is sectioned into rectangles, and you select that shape as whole. It is very hard to navigate, and the whole time a voice is instructing your movement. Voiceover is helpful for the visually impaired, but can be a hinderance if turned on. You must navigate back to Settings > Accessibility and turn Voiceover off if you do not wish to use it. If you have the shortcut enabled, you can try triple clicking the home button. This will turn off Voiceover. I would recommend turning off both Zoom and Voiceover, unless of course you need them and are familiar with their commands.

Apple has officially announced a special event that will be held next Tuesday, October 22. Rumors have been circulating that this event will…

When I saw that we had started to carry the Fody Tempus Pro Bluetooth weather station, I was immediately interested. At my apartment, I had a really old, pretty cheap, wireless thermometer I was using to help me figure out how to dress myself for the conditions outside. You know, t-shirt, sweater, jacket, full Antarctica-grade parka…it is Vermont after all. The problem I always had with it was that the remote sensor couldn’t get wet, and there just weren’t many places I could put it. Last year I got a slightly better thermometer base station that used a wired thermocouple that could easily be passed out a closed window. The thermocouple is sealed and can get as wet as you want. That worked a lot better, but the base station features weren’t as good. I didn’t like the way it recorded min/max temperature.

So when I saw the Tempus Pro, I thought it might be able to solve all of my problems. In addition to indoor/outdoor temperature and indoor humidity, it also records outdoor humidity, rainfall, barometric pressure, windspeed and wind direction. Instead of all that data going to a limited base station, it goes to my iPad, where I can quickly see trends, share it with friends on Twitter or Facebook or just email myself the raw data.

I had a few concerns such as whether or not the radiation shield on the outdoor temperature sensor would work. You have to install the Tempus Pro in an open location so that wind and rain can be recorded, but this most likely means it’ll be in the sun too, which would completely mess up the temperature reading. The radiation shield actually does an amazing job at preventing that. I haven’t seen any excessively high temperatures recorded even when the station was baking in the sun.

Setup was very easy for a device that’s actually doing a lot of complicated things. The outdoor station transmits its data to the indoor base station that is plugged into the wall for power. This transmission is probably very basic radio since the range is quite a bit more than is possible with Bluetooth and the outdoor station only uses three included AA batteries. The indoor station uses low-energy Bluetooth to relay indoor and outdoor sensor data with your iOS or Android device.

Once everything is paired and running (which is easy to do if you follow the order indicated by the instructions), you will see real-time data being displayed on your iOS or Android device via the Fody app. It also builds graphs of historical data so you can watch trends. One of the things I liked most about the app was the alerts feature. I can set high/low alert thresholds for any of the sensors. I set up an alert for when the outdoor temperature falls below freezing. A few times this past week, I was sitting on my couch and heard my iPad chime. It was an alert letting me know it had fallen below freezing outside. Very cool! You could also set other useful alerts for things like excessive rain, or high winds.

Overall I think the Tempus Pro is a pretty neat device and the simple use and setup belies the actual complexity of having your own personal weather station. If you’ve ever been curious about setting up a personal weather station at home, or just want something a bit more than temperature readings like I did, you won’t be disappointed with the Fody Tempus Pro.

I am a huge fan of wireless technology. I have been slowly updating my home office to be as wireless as I can with speakers from Sonos and all of my computer accessories from my keyboard to printer are wireless as well. One area that I had not ventured into yet has been wireless headphones. I am often working at home, and because my office space is part of my main living space, I often have to have headphones while working. It was only recently that I started to use wireless headphones and frankly I can’t believe I hadn’t started to use this technology sooner! Urbanears has a bluetooth option in their popular Plattan line up, the Plattan ADV. I was able to easily link the headphones to my computer and no longer felt tethered to my desk when working. With the bluetooth headphones I could easily leave my desk for a glass of water or to let dogs out without missing a beat. The battery easily lasts all day and unlike some other bluetooth headphones, you can easily plug them into your computer or device directly with a cable should you forget to charge them. I also linked up these headphones to one of my iPads. These headphones allow you to have them linked with up to 8 devices, so you can easily use them from one device to the next without having to pair and unpair constantly.

Over the ear headphones are great for around the home and office, but not the most practical when you’re exercising. As mentioned a few weeks ago I have begun trying to get out and move more in recent weeks, and carrying my iPhone in my hand or pocket when out for a run was becoming a bit of an annoyance. The Ourdoor Tech Orcas are the perfect solution. With the bluetooth on my Apple Watch I easily paired these headphones with my watch, synced a playlist to my watch and left my phone behind! The headphones are lightweight and comfortable. I am not a fan of in ear headphones and I was skeptical that these headphones would work well for me, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well they stayed in my ears and with the quality of the sound. Many in ear headphones begin to wiggle out of your ears or provide sub par sound quality, but these headphones have truly made me change the way I think of in-ear headphones. As an added bonus they also feature a built in microphone. This feature isn’t something that I can say I have taken advantage of, but it’s certainly nice to know I could take a call if I needed to.

Apple had some notable news this week (but no, the iPad 3 isn’t out yet): Apple Releases Mountain Lion Developer Preview Apple announced…

When a customer buys a new Mac, there’s often a question of what to do about the old data. All that old data is all that stuff that made your old machine yours: it’s the settings, the pictures, saved web page bookmarks, documents, spreadsheets…all that stuff.

Frequently a Mac-to-Mac data transfer can be done without any special equipment or advanced knowledge. The easiest way is to use Apple’s Migration Assistant which is a program built into OS X, and is on every new Mac. When setting up a new Mac (or any Mac that’s been reset to factory settings, generally from the disk being wiped and the OS being reinstalled) it’ll prompt you to make a decision.

The top option is to transfer data from a start up disk or Time Machine backup. If you’re already doing a Time Machine backup to an external HDD this is the best option, just make sure your backup is completely up to date. If it’s behind, any changes you’ve made won’t show up on your new machine when the transfer completes. Once you’ve identified the drive you want the data to come from it goes through and calculates the sizes of everything on that older drive. You’ve got a little control of what comes over, like whether or not you want the entire Applications folder, but nothing more specific than that. It’ll also tell you how much available space will be left over, or if there’s more data on the source drive than the destination.

I recommend using a Time Machine backup drive (any external HDD that has a Time Machine backup on it) because it’ll be useful for backups on the new machine. It’ll even see that it’s a new machine that has all the same data and ask if you want to keep using the same Time Machine backup; this is call inheriting.

Alternatively, you can put the source machine into Target Disk Mode by pressing the T key when the machine is booting and having it connected to the destination machine through Thunderbolt or FireWire. Target disk mode only works through Thunderbolt and FireWire, don’t bother trying anything else. I’ve wasted enough time for us all: it’s not supported. If you’re transferring data from a machine with FireWire but no Thunderbolt to a new Mac that only has Thunderbolt you can get a Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter, but that’ll run you $30 and you might not have another use for it after the data migration. You could also use a Thunderbolt cable, but that’ll also run you at least $30, and again, you might not have another use for it, that’s why I recommend an external HDD. If you’re not doing a backup, it’s worth the peace of mind, and simplifies data transfers.