Lumia is dead. Where to from here?

I tend to be a rather loyal consumer when it comes to brands.
I've always liked Nokia, and I have stuck it out with Cell C ever since I left MTN over 10 years ago, but there comes a point at which it just becomes illogical to flog a very nearly dead horse.

I am of course referring to the steady decline in popularity and market share of Microsoft's Lumia range (formerly Nokia), and how the decidedly lacking app ecosystem of Windows Phone has contributed to this factor.

When I received my first Lumia, the 920, I was unfazed by the critics and naysayers, all of whom were very quick to point out the lack of apps available on the Windows Phone platform.
At that point, apps weren't quite as big a deal as they are now, at least not to me.
I could do everything that I needed to, and for the most part I had all the apps that I required, with a decent piece of hardware to run it all on.
Also back then, Windows Phone was still gaining some traction, and developers were starting to work on more and more apps for the platform as a result.
Not so anymore it seems - all you see these days are Android and Apple logos all over the place.

This becomes especially troublesome when you work in the technology field daily - all the more reason to have all of the latest and greatest apps and tools at your fingertips.
Lately it just seems that the apps that I need the most, simply don't exist on the Windows Phone platform - very disappointing since the Lumia hardware has always been up for the challenge.

I then had an opportunity recently to play with the spaceship that is the Samsung Galaxy S7 - my mind was shredded when I started to grasp the sheer extent of the number and variety of apps that are available for Android.
This is of course common knowledge to Android users I would imagine, but for a Lumia user experiencing it for the first time, it's quite overwhelming.
The S7 also just does everything right - "it just works", as Apple once mistakenly claimed about every single one of their Macs... except this time, the S7 does just work, and damn well too.

Given my history with phones then, I would say that my next step would logically be to Android - possibly the Samsung S7, or whatever flagship is around when my upgrade is due early next year.
If you're an Apple user reading this, I can only begin to imagine what must be going through your head right now:

 - "...what about the exploding Samsung battery???";
 -"iPhones are the best!";
 -"the new iPhone 7 has the best hardware in the world!" (probably all made by Samsung anyway ;))
 -"iPhones are the best!";

Truth is, you either like a platform or you don't.
Of late, I've just warmed up to Android, and I like how Samsung releases smartphones that get people talking - not just about how they look or because they're "cool", but about the incredible technology and functionality that they pack into each new device that they release.

So let's have it - Samsung lovers, Apple lovers, Android lovers and haters, Nokia loyalists, Windows Phone lovers, Blackberry purists, bring it on.
What should I go for?

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Is your default printer changing randomly in Windows 10? Here's how to fix it...

Windows 10, by and large, has been a decent addition to the Microsoft OS family.
Apart from isolated glitches and snags which I have encountered, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoy the experience, and it makes things a lot easier when Microsoft release patches and updates that actually fix bugs (Apple could learn a lot here...).

Recently though, Microsoft released an update which has likely caused a bit of confusion.
In cases where a machine has multiple printers installed, Windows now changes default printers whenever it feels the need, or so it seems anyway...

In truth, Windows isn't playing silly buggers with you, but is in fact just sending print jobs to the last used printer, as opposed to the "default" printer.
While this may make sense in some scenarios, there is thankfully a setting to manage this:

Click on the Start Menu (bottom left of the screen), then click on Settings:

On the next screen, click on Devices:

Now scroll down through the printer settings, and find "Let Windows manage my default printer".

Switch this off:

Lastly, double check your printers in the Control Panel, to ensure that the correct default printer is now selected, and you should be good to go.

Happy printing!

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Get your 50GB of FREE cloud storage...

There are dozens of cloud storage providers out there today who all provide free and paid storage options to new customers.
Putting a copy of your data on the cloud is a great way to guard against potential device failure or loss, however the amount of data that we generate nowadays is rather a lot...

The traditional 2GB free data offering from Dropbox just doesn't cut it anymore - Microsoft moved the goalposts somewhat with their 15GB free offering, but even that will still be used up pretty quickly once you start syncing photos, videos and music to the service.

Enter Mega - launched in 2013, it was founded by the same chap (Kim Dotcom) who founded the now defunct Megaupload in 2005.

Mega essentially operates in the same way as Dropbox - you install a sync client on your PC, and this keeps a dedicated folder on your PC in sync with the Mega servers, to the tune of 50GB of free data.
Now 50GB is a lot of data in an any language, and it pretty much beats any other free offering out there.
I have been trying out the Mega service myself, and it has been fairly painless so far, with a nice web interface to boot.

Give it a shot if you need free cloud storage (and who doesn't?):

https://mega.co.nz/

Comments welcome - free services like this will hopefully keep the big guys competitive and on their toes, provided that they keep their systems more secure than Apple, that is... ;)
Oh and one last bit of advice - keep your most personal intimate pics off the Cloud, lest they should fall into the wrong hands!

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What to do if your Apple has run out of USB ports...

All too often nowadays, I come across Apple owners who are at their wits end because they have run out of USB ports.
Well the obvious solution would be to go out and buy a USB hub to upgrade the amount of USB ports, right?

Well thankfully, there is now a far simpler, and indeed cheaper solution which I will outline for you using the images below:

Before: Limited by only 2 USB ports

After: A 3rd USB port has now easily been added to this Apple

Taking a closer look, post-upgrade...

You can take this even further than just one extra USB port of course - in theory you are limited only by the amount of free space available on the Apple itself!
Take note - some discolouration of the new USB port is normal, a few minutes after the upgrade has been completed.

Now don't all thank me at once for saving you a few hundred bucks on a USB hub... :)

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What will the next "WOW" feature be in smartphones...?

Of late I have noticed that most of the big players in the smartphone game are releasing new phones with obvious improvements over older models, but lacking any real sanity-smashing game-changing new features.

Some may beg to differ, but I am talking about influential features like these:

• NFC - upon launch it was a biggie, but now this is pretty much a standard;
• Wireless charging - what no cables? How can this be? Very useful indeed;
• Hand gestures / facial recognition type technology that are now present in a lot of high-end smartphones;
• Fingerprint readers - building a seriously solid layer of security into devices that are often full of sensitive info;

So my question is, what's next?

Samsung are generally pretty good at the "wow" stuff, with insanely powerful beast phones powered by V8 motors, and capable of some pretty amazing things... :)

I am also bombarded daily by tech mail ranting on about iPhone 6 this and iPhone 6 that, "new" features (which are nearly all present on competitor devices), how the iPhone 6 will take down all competitors etc... beyond boring really.

In truth, what game-changing and crazy new features has the iPhone 6 got?

Well, there is Apple Pay, which is an attempt at replacing the traditional credit card in order to pay for goods. 

Others have tried (with some success), but I'm not sure how widely adopted it will be, especially after Apple's recent spectacular fail at the hands of hackers, which resulted in the leaking of hundreds celebrity photos - go iCloud, you impenetrable fortress you!

Right, so we know that Apple cannot be trusted to safeguard data. Good luck Apple Pay!

On an unconfirmed note, I have heard rumours of a feature that may find its way onto the next Nokia Lumia flagship, and this one really would be a game-changer if it turned out to be true...:
Solar charging.

We are all at the mercy of cellphone battery capacity nowadays, so if the battery dies, who cares what else your phone can do anyway?

But a device that you can just pop in the sun to revive? Now that's something that I would pay good money for.

Think it's true?

What feature do you think could be added to new smartphones to make your life simpler, or otherwise change the game completely?

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The day that Evernote died...

Evernote, for me at least, is the king of all note-taking apps.

Evernote (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Let's go through some essential features that set it apart from the crowd:

• Cross platform: This is a biggie - Evernote runs on any device that you may be using, be it Apple, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, PC, Mac... the list goes on.
  You can also access it directly from any web browser of course.
  There is serious power in compatibility.
  
  
• Pricing: The free version offers a lot of functionality, so much so that I only found a need to upgrade from the free plan this month, for reasons that will be covered in this blog post...
  
  
• Evernote offers features that I haven't even started to use yet - scanning through the menu on my PC, I don't even know what some of the features do, but I am guessing that once I start using them, I will find it hard to imagine life without them!
  
  
• Convenience: Instead of trying to remember each and every thing that I did in my day, which customers I visited, time spent on-site, tasks completed etc., I make a point of updating Evernote on my Lumia 920 several times per day, and the data is automatically synced back to the cloud, and then onto each of my other devices when they in turn sync later on.
  Couldn't be any simpler really.

Cloud-based note software is therefore an amazing way in which to keep your life, your devices and indeed your mind in sync, no matter where you are or what device you happen to be using.

It is the perfect, simple, centralized solution... or is it?

For over a year now, I have been using Evernote (free), to make my life simpler by remembering important stuff for me - and it has worked sterlingly well.

Then last week, something decidedly odd and alarming happened which caught me completely off guard, and which turned an otherwise fantastic Monday into one with a distinctly blue hue.

While opening a critical note (I say "critical", since it pertained to information stored for the month that directly affected the bottom line of my business), I discovered that the entire note appeared blank.

The note title was intact, as was a preview of the first 3 lines of the note, but that was it.

No stress, I thought, still reasonably calm at this stage, as I switched over to my phone to access the note there.

Same thing on the phone. Zip, nada, nothing in the note.

Stress level successfully upgraded.

Last ditch to recover data? You guessed it - turn to the oracle of all things - Google.

Oddly, while this particular event appeared to be rather common in search results, no real explanation, solution or fix accompanied any of the articles that I was desperately trawling through.

Attempting to start rebuilding the note from memory only made things worse - the more that I could remember from the scattered bits and pieces haphazardly floating around my brain, the more I realised that the task facing me was near insurmountable - I had stored a lot of data in that note...

It would be safe to say that I was going through unusually high stress levels at that point.

In desperation I continued what now seemed a pointless effort to find any scraps of info online, that may turn the situation around.

Finally, one faint glimmer of hope caught my eye from the far recesses of the web - a feature included in the Evernote Premium (paid) which allows you to roll back to a previous version of any note.

Ah, but I was on the Free plan, so what use would this be to me?
Thankfully, quite a bit, since Evernote actually implements this feature on all new accounts, Free or Premium. 

This means that by upgrading from a free plan to a Premium plan, you can access historical data about your notes, even from the period before you became a Premium user - a massive lifesaver if you are someone like me, who was about to lose most of my remaining sanity due to data loss.

In short, I was able to upgrade to a monthly Premium plan (R 49 per month), and access a version of my lost note that had been saved that same morning, approximately 99% intact.

Stress levels normalised. Meltdown averted.

So what's the point of this post really?

Well, I am an avid cloud service advocate - whenever clients ask me about data storage needs for the future, cloud is always in there somewhere when I respond.

I think that the lesson in all this, is that while the cloud is as reliable, secure and stable as it can possibly be, shit does happen.

Just as external hard drives can be dropped or fail at random, cloud services and syncs can fall over with unpredictable results, and when dealing with your data, unpredictability is a scary thing.

Whichever way you go, be it local storage or the cloud, take precautions and put extra measures in place, within reason obviously.

Duplicate backup drives, store a local copy of your cloud data or make use of multiple cloud storage services.

Whatever you do, have something to fall back on, because when it all goes belly up, data is impossible to replace.

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Get a Bluetooth hands-free kit dammit...

Driving and talking on a cellphone.

Not a great combo at the best of times - your mind is actively engaged in the content of the conversation, while still having to do all of the things that it needs to do in order to keep your car on the tar and off of the pavement, or worse...

I got my Bluetooth hands-free kit a few years ago when I got fined for chatting on my phone while driving.

Thankfully I got off lightly - a R 500 fine was all it took to convince me to go Bluetooth.

What got me thinking about this, is how often I see people driving with headphones on.

Sometimes its the in-ear ones, which are better than nothing I suppose - at least you can theoretically talk "hands-free", but you still have cables dangling down which really isn't ideal.

Worse though, is when I see drivers wearing the proper huge headphones - those crazy ones that are essentially miniature boom-boxes that fit over your head, which completely cover your ears and provide incredible sound insulation (for your listening pleasure, of course).

Circumaural headphones have large pads that surround the outer ear. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Apart from making the driver look odd, the problem here is the fact that these headphones are so well insulated in the name of sound quality, that they essentially put the driver into his or her own little audio bubble.

This means that if a theoretical 10 ton truck were bearing down on said driver, and its brakes were to fail, then said driver would likely not hear the truck blasting its horn for the driver to get the hell out of the way.

In fact, all that the driver would hear are the bangin' beats in his head, and the subsequent crunching of metal (and I don't mean heavy metal)... Ouch.

While pumping loud music from a car sound system also probably cuts into a driver's awareness of their surroundings, at least their ears are not closed off from the rest of the world completely.

Bluetooth kits can be expensive though, which brings me to my final rant for today:

IF YOU DRIVE A LUXURY VEHICLE, THEN WHY THE HELL AREN'T YOU USING YOUR BUILT-IN BLUETOOTH KIT???

This is another matter altogether, but one which I see almost daily in traffic.

Luxury vehicles today are almost certainly factory fitted with Bluetooth, yet it astounds me how many executive looking types dice around in their snazzy vehicles, blissfully unaware of how idiotic they look holding their phone to their face like a walkie-talkie...

What is it - laziness? Don't know how to pair a Bluetooth device?

Google it guys, we live in the age of information!

In the name of safety people, if you must talk while driving, then use Bluetooth.

Sure, scientists in 25 years may discover how many crazy ailments are caused by wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, but at least you will be that much safer now while driving :)

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Where did Apple get their logo from...?

I wonder if Steve Jobs and his Apple Inc. co-founders popped into The Apple Bite Roadhouse in Edenvale early in the 1970's for a quick bite, and saw the sign below as inspiration for the logo of their future technology behemoth...?
(What they might have been doing in Edenvale of all places, I cannot speculate over...:))

I mean how many establishments use a semi-munched apple as their logo?

After all, Apple Inc. was founded in 1976, yet the Apple Bite Roadhouse was founded in 1970... and so the plot thickens!

Oh and they make damn fine pizza as well (the Apple Bite Roadhouse that is, not Apple Inc.) :)

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Thinking of upgrading your Apple Mac to Mavericks? Better read this first...

It's crazy to think how huge corporations nowadays can affect our lives and change our behaviour, simply by changing the way their products work.
In so doing, they force their customers to break old habits and adopt new ways of doing things.

Apple has recently done exactly this, by means of the much touted "Mavericks" update to OS X - version 10.9.
In case you missed it, gone are the days of the big cats.
No longer will we have such bravado codenames as "Mountain Lion" and "Tiger", by which to refer to the various OS X versions.
Mavericks is in fact a popular surfing location in Northern California, and future updates to OS X will carry the names of locations in California that have inspired the company.

Onto the point of this post.
One of the most controversial changes in Mavericks (in my opinion anyway), is the obliteration of Sync Services.
In layman's terms, this means that you can now no longer sync your iPhone / iPad calendars, tasks and contacts to your Mac, via iTunes using USB or WIFI.
Think about that for a sec - pre-Mavericks, iTunes had a tab called "Info" when you plugged in your iDevice. That tab is now gone.
Now if you are someone who uses Microsoft Outlook within the Mac environment, and you like to keep your contacts and calendars in sync between Outlook and your iDevices, well you're clean outta luck.

Outlook used to be able to sync to iCal and Address Book using Sync Services. With Sync Services now gone, so is that sync relationship - Outlook is now dead in the water and totally isolated from your iDevices.

In terms of a fix, patch, update or resolution, nothing is forthcoming at this stage from Apple or Microsoft.
Apple forums all over the web are abuzz as Mac users continue to hit this seemingly backward move for OSX.
In terms of workarounds, they range from tedious to extreme...:

Tedious:

Point iCal (now Calendar), your iPhone and iPad to your iCloud account so that they all sync there.
With all your iDevices now talking, manual labour is required in order to keep Outlook in sync.
For EVERY new appointment created or accepted in Outlook, you have to drag that appointment from the Outlook calendar, down onto the Calendar icon in the Dock.
Calendar will then popup, asking you to confirm which category you would like to add the appointment to, and you're done.
Tedious as hell, but it's all we have right now.

Extreme:

Backup your Mac and downgrade back to Mountain Lion (10.8).
Extreme, yet it appears that some people are prepared to go this route in order to retain USB syncing of their devices with Outlook.

It all comes back to what I said at the beginning of this post - changing the way we behave as consumers.
Apple clearly want their customer base to become more reliant on iCloud, and what better way to achieve this, than to kill USB syncing in OS X. Nasty.
I am also not quite sure what message they are sending to Microsoft here - Apple seems eager to lay blame at Microsoft's door for not seeing the update coming and making Outlook more compatible, yet the counter argument is valid as well - with so many Apple customers depending on a sync partnership between Outlook and OS X, why the hell not just leave Sync Services alone?

Will Apple fix it? I doubt it.
Will Microsoft update Outlook 2011 to remedy it? Probably not - Office 2014 is likely around the corner anyway...

What will you do now that your iWorld is out of sync?

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Relive Warcraft on the Nokia Lumia 920... or something similar anyway :)

The Nokia Lumia 920 continues to impress me on a daily basis, as I find out more about what the phone can do each day.

That's the thing about Nokia, and maybe it's to their detriment somewhat - they release awesome yet understated devices that are capable of amazing things, but they don't proclaim their devices to be "the best in the world" or make use of other similar marketing tactics a la Apple.
Good example - the Lumia 920 screen has a higher pixel density than the iPhone 5 screen, and looks easily as good (if not better), yet Apple will quickly tout their screen as being "the most advanced screen in the world", or something along those lines.

In the meantime, Nokia will carry on doing what it does so amazingly well - build brilliant devices, but minus the over-the-top in-your-face arrogant marketing.

Bit of a deviation there from the topic at hand, and indeed the title of this post, which is the awesome game "Royal Revolt!", available for free at the Windows Mobile Store.
Royal Revolt! revives fond memories of days (and nights) spent waging medieval war upon Orcs, slaying peons, mining gold, harvesting lumber, building foundries and barracks, casting Bloodlust spells... well you get where this is going (at least if you ever played Warcraft, that is).

While the gameplay is somewhat different to Warcraft (you are the Hero, around whom soldiers, archers, mages etc. fight), a lot of the game bears a striking resemblance to the original Blizzard masterpiece.
The game is a "reverse tower defense" game, meaning that you control an army who is launching an attack on an enemy castle, meeting enemy soldiers, archers and towers along the way.

The graphics are also a treat, and the hardware of the Lumia 920 ensures fluidity all the way.
Check out these screenshots to see what I mean:

The game is available for several platforms, namely Windows Phone 8, iPhone, iPad, Android and more - check out the website to download - www.royalrevolt.com.

Get it while its free!

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