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Past Episodes

CCATP #454 Lynda Goushá on Apple Announcements

This week our guest is Lynda Goushá and she’s here to talk about the big Apple announcements with me. We’ll talk Apple Watch Series 2, iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, discuss camera specs and revel in “the best iPhone” they’ve ever made. You may have heard her on other fine podcasts, like Let’s Talk Apple with Bart Busschots

You can connect with Lynda on Twitter @llg4cdg


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Jump Start Your Car with the Portable PowerAll Power Bank

Powerall power bank jump starter batteryBack in 2014, I sent a link to my mechanic, Honda Bob, to a product that I thought was a joke. It was a small, portable battery that supposedly you could use to jump start your car. Like I said, I assumed it was a joke, but he immediately bought one to test it out. He reported back with a blog post about how it actually worked!
The device is called the PowerAll Power Bank, and it comes in two sizes, 16,000mAh and 12,000mAh.

After Honda Bob’s vote of approval, I bought one for each of our cars, and for each of our kids cars.

You might be asking yourself why I’m telling you about this again if you’ve already heard about it in 2014.

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NC #591 Theodore Bearington, Typeeto, Wire, DropShadow App, Security Bits

John, AKA NASAnut in the live chatroom sends a spectacular gift to us. We’ll talk about a free Mac utility called Typeeto that lets you use your Mac as a Bluetooth keyboard for your iOS devices and AppleTV. Joe LaGreca gives us a review of the secure messaging service, Wire, with full instructions on how to install and configure it. I’ll tell you how I made fire, otherwise known as how I wrote an actual Mac application using Automator and bash shell scripts (you can download it here but make sure you read the Read Me!) We’re also joined by Bart Busschots for another session of Security Bits.


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Use Your Mac as a Bluetooth Keyboard for iOS and AppleTV with Typeeto

Typeeto logoI’ve got a cool little utility that may or may not solve a problem for you. Typeeto from mac.eltima.com/… lets you use a Mac as a Bluetooth keyboard for your iOS devices, including the AppleTV. Before I walk you through it, let’s set up a couple of problems it might solve.

The AppleTV is the most obvious problem – typing (even with the new remote) is a nightmare. If you have voice recognition in your country for the Apple remote, that actually works surprisingly well, especially for passwords. But most of the time we end up scrolling right/left/up/down and doing a lot of swearing when we try to type on the AppleTV. Using a Bluetooth keyboard with the AppleTV can make you happier, and if you’re watching TV with a laptop right near you, why not use its keyboard instead of that aggravating remote?

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CCATP #453 Programming By Stealth – JavaScript in the Browser

PBS LogoIn this installment of Programming By Stealth with Bart Busschots, we finally break out of the sandbox and learn how to use the console in a web browser to start taking control of web browsers.

Bart’s full tutorial is available at bartbusschots.ie/….


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DropShadow App Made With Automator and ImageMagick

DropShadow shell scriptHave you ever had a favorite piece of software be abandoned by the developer? I’m not even talking about Apple or Google here, but maybe some nifty little utility that does exactly what you want. For years I have been adding a pretty little drop shadow to all images I post on the blog with a utility called Drop Shadow from Del Sol Software. As Tim Verpoorten used to say, “it does one thing and does it well.”

Del Sol’s Drop Shadow app let you change the angle and size and blur of the shadow and even add a little border to the image as well. The border was handy when I had a screenshot with a white background, otherwise it would wash out on the top and left against my white blog post.

A few weeks ago I thought to write to the developer to ask for an enhancement. I wanted a way to save the parameters of my drop shadows. It’s not hard to drag the little sliders, but I have to do it every time I edit an image. To my surprise, Del Sol Software is nowhere to be found. I searched on the web, on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and even LinkedIn, but it has vanished. Oddly you can still buy Drop Shadow from the Mac App Store so someone must be cashing the checks, but there’s no way to get updates ever again.

When software is abandoned, you can take one of two paths. You can keep using it and just hope each time a new OS comes out it will still work. Then when it stops working you can hold off on the update, or try to find hacks to keep it working (I’m looking at you, George.)

I choose a different path. As soon as I know something is abandoned, I find an alternative. I don’t want to be held hostage by an app. It was time to find an alternative for my beloved Drop Shadow.

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NC #590 AmazonBasics Tripod, Liberate Your Activity Data, Bandwidth Tests, Emojify your Contacts, Metal vs Glass Prints

Update your iOS devices to 9.3.5 without delay to protect yourself from a really nasty exploit in the wild. Steven Goetz does a guest review of the AmazonBasics 62” Aluminum Ball Head Tripod. I’ll walk you through how to liberate your Activity data so that you can see it in other apps like Activity++ and Pedometer++ from plusplusapps.com. Steve and I performed an exhaustive network test comparing the Apple Airport Extreme against the Netgear Nighthawk X8 (spoiler alert, it is definitely worth the price differential!) Lindsay gives us a fun tip to make our Contacts more interesting. Fantastic metal prints from Adoramapix.com.


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Metal vs. Glass Prints

PoppiesBefore I met Mark Pouley, I was content with taking photos, editing them on the computer and displaying them online. But Mark started encouraging me to get some of them printed in large format. He’s trying to drag me into his madness (his house is FULL of large prints of his photos). It did sound like fun.

A few years ago I successfully captured the beauty of some California Poppies during a trip to Santa Barbara County. If you haven’t seen these, they’re gorgeous bright orange flowers that adorn our local area in the spring each year. Mark kept nagging me to get it printed.

This particular photo stands out because of the exquisite light coming through the blooms. I was proud of this photo because I actually crawled under these little blossoms just to catch that light. In thinking about how to print a photo where light is so important, I decided to try printing on glass. Read More

Liven Up Your Contacts Just for Fun

Contacts with emojiWe’ve been doing some good work here on the NosillaCast, learning about vulnerabilities and the importance of doing updates, exercising to get those little rings to go round and round, diagramming workflows, and testing bandwidth to compare routers. I thought it would be good to take a break from all this seriousness for somethings silly. My daughter Lindsay came up with a little tip for us and I asked her what problem it solved. She said simply, “It’s fun.”

When you go into your contacts on iOS (and there’s probably an analog to this on Android and Windows Phone), there’s a Favorites list. On her phone, there’s an emoji next to each person. For example, her husband Nolan has a heart next to his name. My name has a computer next to it, and her brother Kyle has the poop emoji.

I asked her how she did this and she explained that you simply open each contact and edit the last name field, and add the emoji using the keyboard. How easy is that? I went through on my phone and gave Steve the smiley face with sunglasses, Lindsay has an angel, and Kyle has a smirking face. Oh – and my favorite pizza parlor, Georgio’s, has a pizza emoji!.

It’s fun to look at and there’s some other side effects. When Lindsay calls me using Siri, Siri says, “Calling Allison Computer”! I bet it’s even more fun when she calls her brother! When you get emails from the people you’ve given emoji’s it shows up in there too!

Take a break from all this seriousness and have some fun with your contacts!

Real World Bandwidth Test: Netgear Nighthawk X8 vs Airport Extreme

Airport extreme vs netgear nighthawk x8Back in April I told you about the new router I bought, the Nighthawk X8 from Netgear. I bought this router for two reasons. I already had an Airport Extreme 802.11ac router with beam forming antennas, but after talking to Bart about how insecure the Internet of Things devices are, I wanted to run two parallel networks. The second reason is because it sounded really cool.

Just a few weeks ago, Denise Crown did a review of the same router for us. She’s a serious network nerd (Masters degree in Telecom) so I really liked hearing her perspective on it.

One thing neither of us did was any kind of network speed tests to see whether a) we needed this router and b) whether the new router improved speeds or reduced dead spots in our homes. We had both been influenced by Dave Hamilton of the Mac Geek Gab where he talks a lot about routers. I reached out to Dave and asked him what he uses to check network speeds. I knew that while running speedtest.net was a relatively good way to test your Internet speeds, it wasn’t a good way to test the speed of your internal network. Since the speed test was going through Internet and back, it had far too many variables involved.

Before we dig into the tests, let’s review the devices. The Airport Extreme is the current model, which has internal beam-forming antennas. It’s only a dual-band router, with one radio for 2.4 GHz and another for 5 GHz. The Nighthawk X8 is a tri-band router with two 5 GHz radios and one for 2.4 GHz. By having two 5 GHz radios the Nighthawk can send and receive at the same time. It also sports four internal antennas and four active external antennas. That all sounds swell, but at 1.7x as much money for the Nighthawk X8 over the Airport Extreme, let’s see how they perform relative to each other in real world testing. Read More