Charlie Sorrel - page 37

Kids on YouTube are like rats at a food dispenser. Tap, tap, tap, next video please. But unlike the rats, which get “rewarded” with an electric shock or worse, kids just end up surfing the Up Next links until they end up seeing a rat getting shocked, or worse. A more pompous writer would point out here that it’s a parent’s job to monitor their child’s YouTube activity, but actual parents know this isn’t particularly realistic. So how do you stop your kids watching the wrong thing? Let’s see:

Acorn is one of the two best¹ Mac image editors for normal humans. Retrobatch, from the same developer, is a batch-processor for images, letting you build simple or fancy workflows that can do pretty much anything to your images, automatically. If you regularly resize photos, remove location data, add watermarks, or anything else, this is for you.

Even crazier is Retrobatch’s machine-learning component, which can apply filters and operations based on what it sees in the image. For instance, you could drop a folder of images onto Retrobatch, and it would check them all and only apply filters to pictures of hot dogs. That’s right. It can detect pictures of hot dogs.

Apple’s AirPort routers introduced one game-changing new feature to the world: easy backups. Time Machine is Apple’s automatic backup utility, and it made backups easy enough for non-nerds to use regularly.

The easiest way to use it was to buy a Time Capsule, a wireless AirPort router with a hard drive built in. Before Time Capsule, nobody backed up. After Time Capsule, anyone could keep hourly, daily and weekly backups without even thinking about it. But now that Apple has stopped making Time Capsule, and AirPort routers in general, how do you keep using Time Machine?

This week we look at the amazing new Bias Amp 2 for guitarists, which looks just awful on the big-screen iPad Pro, we see how the Newton email app has banished the “sent” mail folder, we check out the new privacy features in the Overcast podcast app, and find out how to duplicate our entire Instagram history on our own microblog.

Split view on the iPad is amazing. Two apps, side-by-side, open up all kinds of neat shortcuts. You can drag text, links, and pictures from Safari into notes apps, emails, Pages documents and so on. The Mac is less in need of such a mode, because screens are bigger, and you can already place two windows side-by-side, but on a little MacBook, where every 1/64th inch counts, Split View is a great feature. Here’s how to use it.

Koss’s amazing Porta Pro headphones have finally gone “wireless.” These lightweight, great-sounding headphones first launched in 1984, and have been on sale since. And now, they are available with a Bluetooth connection. Behold, the Koss Porta Pro Wireless.

Learning a musical instrument is hard. Really hard. It takes a long time to make anything that sounds like music, and yet still people put in the long hours and the hard work to become great at their chosen instrument.

There’s no way around practicing, but there is. lot you can do to make the practice easier, more effective, and much more fun, and all you need is there on your iPhone or iPad.

Safari’s Favorites bar is the handiest part of the whole app. On Mac and iPad, it sits permanently at the top of the screen, ready for you to tap bookmarks and bookmarklets, either for fast access to a site, or to execute some neat JavaScript trick. But it can get cluttered up there.

By using Emojis instead of text to label your bookmarks, you can fit more of them in, and you can easily identify them by sight.

Sometime, probably quite soon, your Mac will stop running 32-bit apps. All new Macs have 64-bit processors, and Apple wants to phase out older 32-bit apps in order to “enable faster system performance” for your Mac as a whole. What this means is that, in an as-yet-unspecified future version on macOS, 32-bit apps will stop running altogether.

If you’re running macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, then you may already have seen a warning pop up onto the screen when you launch older apps. Today we’ll see how to view a list of all the 32-bit apps on your Mac, so you can either harass the developer to update them, look for a better-supported alternative, or just delete them.

I love the new iOS 11 Dock. Do you love the new iOS 11 Dock? I bet you totally dig it. But maybe we love it a little too much, and end up jamming it so full of apps that every icon becomes too small to tap. If that’s the case, then you might appreciate this tip. Did you know that you can remove the three-app section on the right side of the dock? The one where iOS automatically shows apps it thinks you might want to use right now?

This week you can block all kinds of evil internet content with, make your music sound like it was recorded onto a crappy old cassette tape, translate any web-page right inside mobile Safari, and listen to the songs of bands that are playing live in your town. Yes, its time for your favorite Sunday read, the cult of Mac Apps of the Week roundup.

Gmail’s sweet new interface is rolling out to users. It offers the familiar simple text-based interface from the Gmail you all know and “love,” but it manages to be both less messy, and more useful. If you want to take it for a spin, then switching it on is easy.

Ever since iOS 9, you’ve been able to block ads, trackers, and other content in Mobile Safari. But as websites fought back, and the content-blocker apps added yet more rules in return, the war escalated. Blocker apps started to hit Apple’s hard limit of 50,000 rules.

Probably the most popular and comprehensive blocker is 1Blocker, which just got superseded by 1Blocker X. The new app splits off itself into seven “extensions,” each of which have 50,000 rules, bringing the total to 350,000 rules.

This doesn’t just allow 1Blocker X to boast in the app store. It also allows whole new categories of content blocking. The new setup works slightly differently, so let’s see how to get things started.

On your Mac, screenshots are pretty automatic. You hit the shortcut of your choice, and the resulting picture is saved to your desktop as a PNG image file. But what if you want a JPG? We’ve already covered that. How about saving the image to somewhere other than your desktop. Like iCloud maybe? Today we’ll see how to change the Mac’s default screenshot location to an iCloud folder.

Today we’re going to learn how to record a movie that’s playing on your Apple TV direct to your Mac, with no wires required, no weird hacks, and not even any third-party software. The tools are all built into every Mac that ships. To record a movie off the “screen” of your Apple TV, you’re going to use Apple’s QuickTime app, and one of its lesser-known but super-powerful features.

There’s little that’s more hipster than an audio cassette. Its sound is far from perfect, it’s impractical, and — most important of all — it is easy to see that you’re using one. But that doesn’t mean that tapes were all bad. Lo-fi cassette decks actually add some rather pleasant audio artifacts to audio.

So what? Well, now you don’t need to lug around a Walkman and a bag of tapes to enjoy the retro sound of audio cassettes, because there’s a) an iOS audio plugin and b) a website that will tape-ify any track you like.

App subscriptions are great, mostly. Trial subscriptions let you try out all the app’s features for free, and if you like the app enough to keep using it, the developer gets an ongoing income that lets them keep improving the app. It’s a win-win.

But what if you signed up for a trial subscription, and you don’t like the app? Or maybe you subscribed to a monthly magazine, and those unread copies just keep piling up? Canceling a subscription is easy, whether it’s a fresh trial, or a years-long subscription you just don’t want any more. Here’s how.

One of the handiest features on iOS 11’s Files app is the Recents view. This view — available in the Files app itself, and in any other app that uses the Files picker to locate documents — shows all the files you have created or opened in the last few days.

Did you ever wish you could do the same on your Mac? Well, you can. Today we’re going to see how to add a folder to your Dock that shows recent iCloud Drive files.

Your entire DNS browsing history can be recorded by your ISP, and will soon be sold to anyone who wants it.

DNS is what sends you to the correct site when you browse the internet, but it is also non-encrypted, and reveals your entire browsing history. Your browser’s private mode does nothing, and the little green lock icon that denotes a secure connection doesn’t help either.

DNS is also slow. So, in order to fix both of these problems, you need to change your DNS provider to one that is both private, and fast. That’s Cloudflare’s new 1.1.1.1 service.

This week has been big on big updates. Drafts, the best text-capture app for iOS, got a brand-new version. Cultured Code’s Things also received a big update (but still doesn’t allow drag-and-drop to task lists). And Dropbox finally did add drag-and-drop, just seven months after iOS 11 added the feature.

Well done!

The iPad and iPhone can be great learning tools for kids, just the same as they are for adults (only with more clowns and talking animals). But even if you don’t want to fully lock-down your iPad to restrict what your kids can do, you might want to stop then from downloading adult-oriented apps. That includes violent games, scary books, and dirty movies.

Drafts 5 has launched, the sequel to Drafts 4, and you may be a little confused as too what it actually new. Should you upgrade, for example? After all, it’s just the same old note-creating app with a lick of paint, right? Well, the definitive answer to that is “Hmmm, kinda…” While Drafts 5 doesn’t get many big new features, it has been completely redesigned. It looks better, works better, and the settings are way less confusing.

Oh, and you can finally use it as your only notes app, without feeling like you’re doing something dirty.

Do you ever find yourself staring at a web page, unable to understand a word? All the letters look familiar, only they’re arranged into some weird order? That’s called “foreign,” and it’s how people from outside America talk to each other. Some of them don’t even write their websites in English.

Fortunately, a good old American company has done something about this terrible habit. Microsoft Translator can fix up a web page and turn all that foreign gibberish into a language we can all feel comfortable with. You may already use Google’s translate bookmarklet for this, but Microsoft’s version is so much better it’s in a different league.

One lesser known ability of the Photos app on your iPhone is that is can use third-party filter packs. If you install a photo-editing app that supports them, then you can apply that apps filters without ever leaving the Photos app. This makes it super quick to add sophisticated effects to your pictures, and you can revert to the original photo at any time in the future.

Today we’ll see how to use these filter packs, and look at a couple of great apps that have them.

Vulse is a neat app for musicians. More specifically, it’s for guitarists. The app has been around for a while, but got a big old update this week that makes it worth a new look. The idea of the app is that you stick your iPhone onto your guitar, just below where you strum the strings, and then use a combination of wild flailing and screen-stroking to apply crazy effects on the fly.