I was on the Pocket Show this week, enhancements to the layout of the Live show at podfeet.com/live. I did the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge – donate at alsa.org. Would you trust your healthcare login to Facebook? followmyhealth.com thinks you will. Steve and I search for Bluetooth headphones for exercise and choosy the Jabra Sport+ Wireless Headphones over the much more highly reviewed Jaybird Blubuds X Sport. Terry Austin, aka @ielectrons tells us why he thinks we should check out the new podcasting app Overcast .from Marco Arment. Michael Price in our Google Plus community posted a tutorial (using Clarify 2) showing how to get OSX to let you use an external DVD drive – check it out at grumpydocs.clarify-it.com/d/fyga7n. This week we’re joined by Todd Whitehead of Alpha Geek Radio, over at alphageekradio.com. I asked him to come on the show to talk about the past, present and future of how we consume audio and video content on the Internet.
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Hi this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Mac Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh bias. Today is Sunday August 24, 2014 and this is show number 485. This week I had the great pleasure of being on the Pocket Show again with host Paul Wheatley, along with my good buddy Chris Ashley and my new friend James Hart. The four of us have an instant camaraderie that is super fun to listen to. It’s amazing how you can have this much fun when you’ve never even met each other before. Anyway, I put a link in the show notes to the oddly named episode, “Dropbox – Loosing you friends since 2007”.
If you listen to that show, you’ll hear that I made a very odd purchase. You might want to pull the car or your bike over if you’re moving before I tell you what it is. I bought a Windows phone. Yup, I bought the Nokia (Microsoft) 635 running Windows 8.1. I’m not going to talk about it a lot just yet because I want to have a good play with it first but I have to say, I don’t hate this phone. Now the SMR Podcast guys got into a lively discussion about whether that statement (which I also made on the Pocket Show) was a compliment or not. Rod didn’t think it was, but Chris was right that it was a huge compliment. Perhaps it’s because Rod didn’t hear my intonation. I used the tone Robb Dunnewood uses when he says, “I’m not gonna lie, I don’t hate that joint.” It’s not bad at all! Anyway, I’m going to leave you with that as a tease, should be ready to talk about it in depth next week.
I should mention though that Chris Ashley calls his little Windows phone loving friends, his Minions. Last week, I guess because I’ve been showing some love to the Windows Phone community, Minion Joel Rushworth joined in the live show chat room. While he was over at podfeet.com/live he made a suggestion for improvement to the page, and I figured out how to incorporate his idea. In the old page, you had the live video near the top and had to scroll down to see the live chat if you weren’t using a 3rd party chat client. He asked if it would be possible for me to have them side by side, so with a bit of html table work, and with some help from Bart to clean up some code that was messed up in the embedded chat block that made it disappear if it was stuck in a table, we now have a much more nicely formatted live show page. If you have a narrow screen the chat may spill over on the right sidebar but I don’t have anything very interesting over there any more anyway. Thanks Minion Jeff!
Before we dig into the show, I wanted to let you know that I did the ice bucket challenge to benefit ALS research, or as it’s known in some countries, Motor Neuron Disease. I posted the video Steve created (a three camera shoot of course) on Podfeet.com earlier this week, so you might want to go give it a look. In any case, if you have some spare money you could put towards the irradication of this dreadful disease, consider donating at alsa.org.
Oh, and one more thing. This week Steve and I are going to Sequoia with Devon and Maryanne from New Zealand (and of course someone is watching our house), so if you have a review you’ve been meaning to record, this would be a GREAT week to record it for me! There’s a tab on podfeet.com called “Record a Review” with some good guidelines on how to make an effective recording. Ok, NOW let’s start the show.
Blog Posts
Would You Trust Your Healthcare Login to Facebook?
Search for Bluetooth Sport Headphones or No to Jaybird, Yes to Jabra
Overcast for Enhanced Podcast Listening by Terry Austin
Clarify 2
I’m really enjoying the feedback I’m getting on the newly released Clarify 2. Over on our Google Plus community at podfeet.com/googleplus, Michael Price posted a great tutorial he created for himself and decided to share with all of us. His post over there said,
Hey +Allison Sheridan – Finally got around to using Clarify2 to make a “memory jogger” procedure for when I do a nuke & pave to Yosemite. What a nice update & worth that LONG wait.
He wanted to document those things that he does to every Mac so he has the instructions handy when the time comes. The problem this particular tutorial solves is how to convince your Mac to still play DVDs from an external DVD drive when you’ve removed in internal optical drive. I had this exact problem just the other day. I was at my daughter Lindsay’s house, and we were trying to play home movies from the movie drive I’d created for her of DVD disk images but OSX kept yelling at us that we don’t HAVE a DVD drive so how could I possibly want to play a DVD.
Michael wrote up his procedure which included lovely screenshots using ovals and rounded rectangles to draw our attention to the relevant information. He also used the blur tool to perfectly blur out information that was irrelevant to us or sensitive to him. He made good use of italics, numbered and bulleted lists to make his written instructions clear as well. When his masterpiece was complete, he simply pushed the Clarify upload button, created a free account on their servers and pushed publish.
I’m going to create a link to Michael’s tutorial on the podfeet tutorials page so you can see it too, or of course there’s a link in the shown toes to grumpydocs.clarify-it.com/d/fyga7n. He was pretty proud of this because he had to use some of his Terminal knowledge – shall we say he tamed it?
If you’d like to join the ranks of people who create tutorials for their own memory or for the benefit of others, head on over to clarify-it.com and download the free trial. Don’t wait too long to buy though, the 25% off coupon code just for NosillaCastaways, XXXXXX, expires on September 1st!
Chit Chat Across the Pond – Time: 21:42
This week we’re joined by Todd Whitehead of Alpha Geek Radio, over at alphageekradio.com. I asked him to come on the show to talk about the past, present and future of how we consume audio and video content on the Internet. We talked about the old days where you had to go to a website every day to see if there was new content and how RSS attachments changed our world to create podcasting to deliver our content to our iTunes doorstep. We spent a lot of time talking about new services, Alpha Geek Radio in particular that allow you to basically get what feels like a radio station of tech/geek shows that plays all day long. We also talked about services like TuneIn Radio tunein.com that let you listen to Internet radio on just about any device including Windows Phone.
That’s going to wind this up for this week, many thanks to our sponsor for helping to pay the bills, Blue Mango Learning at bluemangolearning.com makers of Clarify. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter and app.net @podfeet. Check out the NosillaCast Google Plus Community too – lots of fun over there! If you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.
Pretty cool that your new Nokia 635 works without SIM activation. Will a no-contract android phone also function as a Skype phone without activating it?
Drew – It should be possible. Doesn’t mean it is on a particular phone. Would surely be easier on a GSM phone purchased unlocked than on CDMA (Verizon, Sprint, VirginMobile).
The Moto E & G phones are relatively inexpensive. Amazon, and others, sell even cheaper phones. BLU is a “decent” brand that’s inexpensive on Amazon. Beware that many “cheap” phones have very small internal memory, like 4GB, so if you want to use it like an iPod Touch, you’ll either have to buy a phone with more memory — or the ability to use an SD memory card.
You could buy a GSM phone and “activate” it with a one month SIM from T-Mobile for about $30 for that month. I have several old phones around that work just fine over WiFi with no cell data. It is worth noting they remain able to “CALL 911” even without a SIM or a cell plan.
To use your phone as a “Skype” phone, you’ll have to download Skype (or a similar VOIP application) and it will only work when your device is connected to WiFi.
Note there’s another “cheap” opportunity. Any number of good but inexpensive Android tablets (Kindles, Nexus 7, and others even cheaper, read reviews) will do what you want. Just not fit (easily) in your pocket.
Don’t forget the newest iPod Touch. Perhaps “not cheap” at about $200, but a lot better deal than the first gen one I bought when the first came out.
This video shows the “trick” to getting past the log on Screen on one kind of Android/Verizon phone. You’d want to be sure you can find the “trick” on whatever phone you might want to try.
Hi George,
Thanks for the info. Too bad there it isn’t possible to know for sure if a particular no-contract android phone would work without activation. I might just try a Nokia Windows phone.
I want to use the device as a Skype handset–by holding it to my head as a phone, so an iPod Touch wouldn’t work for me.
Cheers!
Drew – I was reluctant to say something was certainly possible I had not tried. So let the Yahoo Answer below be your guide.
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130821072240AAizZ4f
Buy the carrier unlocked GSM phone of your choice and it should work. If all you want is to make Skype calls, doesn’t Skype come pre-installed from Win Fon? If phones are about same price, go Win
Amazon has great return policies. If there is meaningful savings, the BLU Androids get acceptable reviews. And some are very cheap. Just be sure you’re buying from Amazon, not a third party seller which might not be so return friendly if your fon doesn’t Skype as expected.
Without knowing specifically about how the Facebook Login works, I obviously can’t comment with 100% certainty; however, in all likelihood Facebook is only being used as an identity verifier, using OAUTH technology. Basically the app/site is asking Facebook “hey, verify this person’s identity”; Facebook uses its own login technology to verify you (i..e you give it your Facebook login/password), then the only thing Facebook sends back to the calling app is “Hey, this person is who they claim to be. Here is an encrypted access token that you can use from now on.” The app/site then associates said token with your medical records. That’s the extent to which data transfer between Facebook and the app/site takes part in. You don’t actually “connect” the app to Facebook (i.e. Facebook can’t reach in and grab your medical records) It’s basically used as a convenience, i.e. rather than creating Yet Another Login/Password to SomeMedicalSite.com.
Donald – I think you’re right – Bart wrote something similar over on G+ here: https://plus.google.com/108325897935311073914/posts/NFvE8p8Zwxr