Adi's Tech Site

I love playing guitar. I love creating different sounds and sometimes recording tunes. I have been playing for a few years now and I love it.  However, one big problem that I’ve had is that I want to be able to practise on the go. So why is that a problem? Well I have to carry my amp around. Even though it is small it’s still a bit on the heavy side.  That’s been a problem until I came across the iRig Guitar Effects Interface for iPhone, iPod and iPad. It’s made by a company called IK Multimedia.

So what is this iRig guitar interface?  Essentially it allows you to plug your guitar right into the iPhone. It is very small in form factor. You plug the guitar into one end of the interface and plug the other end into your iOS device.  Of course, you also have a place to plug in your headphones. Of course, because it’s a standard headphone jack you could also plug in a pair of speakers if you wanted to.

The first thing  that I noticed when taking it out of the box is the build quality of the iRig guitar interface.  While it may look a little on the cheap side it is really strong. I plugged my guitar cable into it and it held in place really well. I would have liked to have seen something like a

Now there are also a few apps which this interface will work with.  Some of them are the Amplitube series of apps and some of them are free. They also provide a certain amount of FX Pedals and 1 amp model for free with Amplitube. Therefore, you do some a certain amount of choice.  However, you can pay to get more amp models, FX pedals etc right from within the app or go for the full versions of the Amplitube apps to get more.

That being said, if you’re a guitarist who has a lot of physical FX pedals, you should be able to plug your guitar in via the FX pedals. I have tested this and I can confirm that this works.

In fact, I’ve heard some reports saying that you can use the iRig Guitar interface with Garageband on the iPhone and iPad.

So overall, it’s a 4 out of 5 for the iRig guitar interface. It works well with the IK multimedia Amplitube apps, it turns your iPad or iPhone into a decent practise amp with some control over the sound you get and you can use your headphones or speakers with the interface and I would highly recommend it.

When Apple released a new version of the Maps app with the iOS 6 software update, a lot of people bad-mouthed it and talked about how inaccurate it was. To name but a few things, the UK’s very own Stratford-upon-Avon was missing from the map and many bridges were not displayed correctly. In fact, the police in Australia warned people against using it.

However, Google has finally released it’s version of Google Maps for iOS. As soon as I heard about it I went and downloaded it.  The first thing that you you will notice is that it is really snappy.  Even when I did some intense scrolling, I was surprised that it handled the scrolling with no problems at all.

So what’s in Google Maps? Well, you get a lot of the things you would expect to find. You have satellite view, turn-by-turn directions(seen in the native maps app on iOS 5) and street view along with public transfer routes and traffic reports.

Street view has a really good implementation. For example, I went down into London’s very own Parliament Square using street view and I was able to see big ben and also go around the area.  In fact, a tap of a button will give you the ability to view 360-degree panoramas of the area shown on screen.

The voice-guided turn-by-turn works really well.  In fact, it feels like something that really makes sense and feels just natural.

This is all well and good, but how does it do in comparison with Apple’s maps solution? Well, as all the reports have suggested, I can report with authority that Google maps is indeed better. It feels a lot smoother, a lot more user-friendly and the turn-by-turn is better on Google Maps and you have panoramas in street view  on Google Maps which Apple maps does not have just to name a few things. Most important of all, it’s more accurate. Long story short: Google Maps blows Apple maps on iOS 6 right out of the water. That being said, keep in mind that Google’s had a few years to get all the information onto their mapping solution.

Overall I feel that this is possibly the best mapping solution on the iPhone that I’ve used yet. Having had a few days to play with it since it was released, I can say with authority that Google maps is definitely worth it.  Google Maps for iPhone is free to download and it’s available on the iOS App Store right now.

If you’ve been holding fire with upgrading to Windows 8 because of the new start screen, then  here’s something that you might want to check out. This is a Windows app called poki. Essentially, it’s an alternative to the Windows 8 start screen(which I will still call the Metro UI for a long time to come).

To start things off, it has an interesting button that you click to access the menu. This menu has space for all of the apps you have installed. As you can see I have not installed apps!  If you do want more, then there is also an app store and it will also pull in the Windows apps that you have installed(VLC, handbrake, teamviewer etc.). In another interesting move, if you click on the picture then you’ll notice that you have an app store for the Pokki start menu. From there you can download a whole slew of apps. Essentially, this gives you another place to go to get your apps.  At this time there are already quite a few apps in there including your usual suspects such as a facebook client, a twitter client, Angry Birds, Cut the Rope and anInstagram app.

Another feature that this thing has is the ability to boot your computer straight to the desktop. In my tests, I can confirm that this has not worked. However, I can confirm that the people behind Pokki are working on that.  You can also set things up so that your windows key brings up the Pokki launcher and you can still access the Metro UI at the click of a button.  In addition to that you can access your music, pictures and other files

In the time that I’ve had to play around with this utility, I have to say that it is quite a nifty little app. I like the fact that my favourite apps will appear in the main portion of the launcher. I also like how the apps installed from the Pokki app store are shown alongside your apps on the taskbar within the desktop. Given that this is a beta, it is a good app and a recommended alternative to the Metro UI.

Apple released OSX Mountain Lion for their macs and I am now ready to give you my thoughts.

Of course, iCloud is a big part of this upgrade. When you log in with you’re Apple ID,  all of your contacts, calendars, notes and any other information you have stored in iCloud will be downloaded to your computer. However, you have to go to System preferences and say what you want to be pulled down.

Before I go any further with this, you still have a terminal. That means all you enthusiasts that know a couple of UNIX commands can go in and still use nano, vim, emacs and all that fun stuff.

First of all, I want to talk about Flickr integration.  Essentially, this allows you to upload your photos to Flickr. If you have a Yahoo account then you already have a Flickr account. If you don’t have one, you can use your Facebook or Google account in order to create your  Flickr account. The reason why I upload less photos to flickr, is because there was no easy way to upload to Flickr. However, as shown in the photo here, you can just sign in once with your Flickr credentials from System Preferences and you are good to go.  I have to say that this is the best integration of Flickr that I have seen in a desktop operating system yet. You can expect to see more photos on Flickr from me then.

Now here is another feature in Mountain Lion that I really love called Reminders. If you have an iPad or iPhone, then this one will be second nature to you. We can all be forgetful at times, but this application allows you to create a to-do list and make sure that you get things done.   In my testing of this feature, it has given me a clear view of the things that I needed to get done.  Best of all, these reminders will be sent to your iPhone or iPad via iCloud.

The next thing that I want to talk about is twitter integration.  like with iOS, Twitter is very deeply integrated into Mountain Lion.  For example, if you are using Safari, then you will be able to share a link to a particular web page. You can also share a picture from your computer to Twitter with one click and put a small comment with it. These are just a few things that you can share with twitter.  All you have to do is sign in to your twitter account from System Preferences and you will be able to post things to twitter. If you’ve signed in to twitter once, then you will not be prompted for it every time you want to post something.  I have tested this with a link within safari and it works great.  You will also

Now here is one which I think will divide some of you and it is dictation.  From most  applications you can start speaking what you want and then it will figure out what you said and turn that into text.  However, you will need an internet connection in order for this to work.  In my tests this has worked really well in most cases. It’s not perfect, but it does work well.

You also have a good notes application which provides a ‘quick and dirty’ way of taking notes on certain things.

Just on a quick side note, if you want to make sure that your applications are compatible with this operating system upgrade, then you might want to check out roaring apps.

These are just a few of the things available in Mountain Lion.  All-in-all, I think that this is a good upgrade.  I think that this is a clear sign that Apple wants to try and bring iOS and OSX as close to each other as possible.  For me, I think that bringing over notes, reminders, notification center and twitter integration from iOS to the Mac was a great decision. Overall, I would give Mountain Lion a 4 out of 5. For me, the one thing that it falls short in is that you can only download it from the App Store, but that’s how things are going. Mountain Lion is only available as a download from the Mac App Store for £13.99($19.99 or €15.99).  Best of all, you can use it on all of the macs that you own(effectively an unlimited license).

For those of you not in the know, Virgin Media have finally started rolling out Wi-Fi in the London Underground tube network here in London, UK.  It’s already in over 40 stations in the network and it should be in 120 stations by the end of 2012. It’s free to all tube users until the end of the Olympics. Of course, I’ve had a chance to use it and I have to say that it is pretty darn quick.

In my tests, I’ve been using it and the speeds are just ridiculous. I’ve been able to get 20Mbps(megabits per second) download speed and approximately 20Mbps upload speed.  At the most, I’ve seen someone getting speeds of 30Mbps download and upload speeds.  Now that is just ridiculous. Now of course, I could just be faking it, but I always try to be honest with my reporting. So, here are a few screenshots from my phone of a few speed tests that I have done. When I downloaded a song from iTunes, it downloaded in just 2 seconds. I downloaded an app from Apple’s app store, it got downloaded in less than 10 seconds. These kind of speeds are a lot faster than what a lot of us could afford to have in our homes.

Truth be told, when it comes to keeping my Mac clean, I am not all that great.  I do have folders for everything on my desktop, documents, downloads and other folders, but I still need to improve.

This is where I came across a sweet mac app known as Clean my Mac.

Before we get into this review, I have to say a big thank you to the folks over at MacPaw for sending a copy of Clean my Mac to review.

So what does this software do?

As the name implies, Clean my Mac allows you to get rid of unwanted data that is just unneccessarily taking up space on your Mac. You can get rid of a lot of stuff on there.

The first thing that I noticed that installation process was quite easy.  I just mounted the DMG image file, and copied the Clean my Mac program into my applications folder.  The installation itself only took about 10 to 15 seconds. That being said, I was running this on a mid 2010 iMac on an intel, so the install might take longer depending on how powerful your mac is.

After the install was complete, I launched the app and I was greeted with the regular CleanMyMac user interface. I went in and I did not know what to expect.

The first thing that I did was to place a tick next to the things that I wanted the app to scan for.

Next, I had to click on the “Scan” button at the bottom left-hand corner of the window.  You will be able to see this better when you click on the above screenshot.

Once I did this, it scanned through to see if it could find any junk which I needed to get rid of.  As shown in the picture on the left.

At this point, you would then be able to go through each section using the sidebar and then see an itemised list of all the things that you need to clean. As you can see here, I was able to see that I had a lot of stuff that needed to be cleaned.  From here, I would be able to click the clean button and then the app would set about getting rid of all the stuff that I’ve asked it to.

So after a small wait, CleanMyMac had done it’s work.  From here, I would be able to see just how much space the app has been able to free up so far.  As you can see in the screenshot, I have cleaned up 1.66GB of data. You can also share this information on Facebook or Twitter.

I’ve had a week or two and I have to say that this is yet another brilliant application.  It was very easy for me to pick up and use.  If there was one thing that I would change, I would suggest that the preferences screen should open up in a separate window.  Overall, CleanMyMac gets a 4 out of 5 from me.

CleanMyMac is available as a free trial from MacPaw.com. You can bu for £24.95 from the MacPaw store. If you have a Windows PC, then you might want to check out CleanMyPC.

Let’s face it, some of us will have a lot of business cards given to us from time to time. All of these cards have contact information on them(e.g. Name, email, phone number and so on). With that being said, wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to put every bit of the information onto our phones using a semi-automated system?

Well, this is where I came across an app called WorldCard Mobile. Massive thanks to Brian Williams for sending me a copy of this app for this review.

The way it works, is that you have to take a photo of your business card.  It is advised that you take the photo in an environment with a good amount of lighting and have a steady hand when taking the photo. Additionally, you have to make sure that you have to avoid reflections and shadows as they will decrease the accuracy of the conversion.

Once you have taken the photo, you can then have a chance to review the photo and then take it again.

If you are happy with your photo, you can then tap the “recognise” button at the top of the page. At this point, it will use optical character recognition(OCR) to recognise as much of the text as possible.  From there, you will be able to see how the contact information on the card came through. WorldCard Mobile will also search for the contact on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter as well as save it directly into your contacts.

I have been using this app at home and I tried this one out with a few of my business card which I have collected.  90% of the time, I was able to capture every detail on the card with no problem with adequate lighting. Under low lighting, the application would capture the contact information, but with less accuracy. Simply put, I think that it does the job well so as long as you are using WorldCard Mobile in a well lit room.

I’ve had a chance to also play with a similar app called CardMunch from LinkedIn and it works in a similar way. WorldCard Mobile beats CardMunch because you have to wait until someone actually transcribes the card. That being said, CardMunch will also pull down this data from LinkedIn. WorldCard Mobile is also able to do this by taking you to the browser using safari on the iPhone.

All-in-all, WorldCard Mobile gets a 3.75 out of 5 from me.

WorldCard Mobile is available for iPhone(£4.99) and Android(£3.72)

Disclosure: The unit used was sent to me by Drobo. I am not being paid by drobo. These are my own thoughts and my experiences with using a Drobo which are completely unbiased.

I have to give a big thanks to our friends at Drobo for sending a Drobo to me and making this review possible. In addition to this, they are allowing me to give away a Drobo to one of you.

Here at Adi’s Tech Site and on my podcast network, I constantly keep on reminding people to backup their data.  I know this, because I recently had an external hard drive fail on me, but I had a backup of some my data.

The Drobo 4-bay is a Storage box with a difference.

I also have to thank our good friends over at CUBS the Computer Warehouse for sending us some hard drives for this drobo. In particular, I am using four hard drives. In fact, Drobo said on their website that customers have found that it is best to use a seagate or Western Digital hard drive.

The Drobo 4-bay has a port for power, a USB 2.0 port, a FireWire 800 port and a FireWire 400 port. It will support up to 16TB of hard drive space. Best of all, setting up the drobo is super easy. Simply pop the software CD that comes with your Drobo into your computer, install the software and follow the instructions.

So this raises the question, what makes the Drobo different from similar solutions?  It uses its own patented technology known as BeyondRAID. With similar solutions, you can only use hard drives that are the same size. That being said, it is a good practise to use the same model and brand of hard drive as well.

With Drobo, you can use hard drives of different sizes and brands and you can swap and upgrade hard drives in your Drobo box whilst it is powered on(AKA hotswapping).  In addition to this, it automatically backs up your data by copying and spreading your data between your hard drives. Should one of the hard drives inside your Drobo die on you, Drobo will allow you to take the failed hard drive out, put in a new one and your data will still be safe.  The Drobo also has lights which tell you when a hard drive needs changing or if a hard drive is about to die. In addition to that, it has a fan to keep your hard drives cool.

I’ve had a few weeks with this Drobo. I’ve had it set up as a Time Machine backup box for my Mac. To use time machine with the Drobo, I recommend that you download an application called Time Tamer. So far, I will say that it is definitely one of the most innovative solutions that I have ever used.  To test the expandability of it, I started out originally with two Seagate 1TB hard Drives and put them in.  The Drobo registered the hard drives as expected. The next day, I got hold of two 750GB hard drives and put them in and it picked them up straight away whilst I had the power on.

Now, I was not so sure, if I would be able to use my Drobo with Time Machine on my mac whilst using the remainder of the space as a standard storage device, so I decided to throw a video that I had previously uploaded to youtube and it still worked.

All-in-all, I think that the Drobo is a great device with a simple design and possibly the best storage solution on the market that I have seen yet.

So thanks to the good people at Drobo, I also have a Drobo to give away to one of you lucky people as part of an simply click here and you will find all of the information that you need.  The competition ends in just 9 days time so get those entries in as quick as you can! Please be sure to share this with your friends.

Let’s face it, there are a lot of websites out there that need you to have a password in order to use them such as facebook, gmail, twitter and many others. It can be hard to manage all of those passwords or even remember them all.  This is where a great little service called LastPass comes into action.

So what is LastPass?  In a nutshell, lastpass is a password management for your internet passwords.  It is secure because it stores all of your passwords on your computer. They are all encrypted in salted hashes using 256-bit AES encryption. In addition to this, it also syncs your passwords between your computers. Since they are encrypted, the passwords will be seen as a bunch of gibberish when they go through the internet to your other computers or mobile devices.

So how does it work? First of all, you have to go to the lastpass website(by clicking here) and make your free LastPass account.  When you create your LastPass account, you will be asked to create a master password(the only password you will have to remember for a while, so make sure that it is a good one.  Now that you have created your account, you need to download and install LastPass. It should automatically detect which web browsers you have installed on your computer.

When you have installed LastPass, you will be asked to login with your lastpass credentials.  If you have any passwords that you have saved in your web browser(or web browsers) before installing lastpass, then it will pick these up and import them into your LastPass vault.  From here, if you visit another website and enter a password, lastpass will ask you if you want to save it to your LastPass vault.  If you visit a site that LastPass has log in details for, you can ask it to log into the website for you. I personally, have it prompt for my LastPass master password every time I log into any site.  Best of all, when making a user name for a site, you can have LastPass generate a random password for you, and save it into your vault.

lastpass is compatible with the following devices:

• Windows PCs
• Macs
• Linux PCs
• Blackberry devices
• Google Android devices
• iOS devices