Old laptops can suck after years of heavy use, but Whitson goes over a few ways you can revive yours and keep it useful for years to come.
The New Way to Migrate Your Google Accounts and Data
Migrating data from one Google account to another, or even just downloading that data for backup purposes, used to be a huge pain in the butt. Now it isn’t.
Is eInk really better for my eyes than my iPad?
Staring at a screen for a long time is bad for your eyes, so is an iPad really worse than an eInk display? Whitson decided to find out the answer.
The Communal Tablet Problem
Tablets were designed as individual consumption devices, but we tend to share them a lot. This is a problem, because they can contain a lot of private data we may not want our friends to see. Thorin elaborates on this problem and offers a few solutions.
How Thorin Hated Grocery Shopping and How He Fixed It
Grocery shopping is not the sort of thing everyone enjoys. Thorin would go so far to say that he hates it. Hoping to make the process less painful, he devised a way to fix the problem with a combination of delivered products and simplified recipes/shopping lists.
Questions and Answers
Each week we answer five questions from readers and listeners. Here’s what we tackled this week.
What is your microphone setup on the podcast?
Well, you might not want to know when listening to this week’s episode as I forgot to record myself and I’m kind of hard to hear, but our setup is actually pretty good when I’m not screwing things up. It’s also cheap. Thanks to a reader recommendation, I picked up a Presonus AudioBox 44 VSL as our audio interface. It sounds really great, has four inputs, and is only $300 (that’s fairly cheap for this kind of box). For the podcast we use two Samson C01 condenser mics, which are about the cheapest good condensers you can get and do well for just standard speech. For the third mic, we’re currently using a Shure SM58 I had lying around but will probably get another C01 one of these days for consistency’s sake. So long as the room’s quiet and there are no technical difficulties, it works very well. For remote guests, we just record from Skype and our guests have different microphones so it varies. We’re not perfect yet, and we don’t have anyone manning the computer while recording, but one of these days we’ll get it right!
Is there a user and data migration tool for Windows?
Yep, it’s called Windows Easy Transfer.
I like Google Drive and SkyDrive better than Dropbox. Why do you guys say it’s the best?
It has more features, like automatic photo download, great third-party app integration, tons of tools that support it, lots of ways to make it work better for you (such as limiting upload speeds and transferring data via the local network when possible), and more. It’s just ahead of the competition because it has been around longer. That’s another reason we’re so fond of it, too—we’ve been using it for a long time and love it. If you like the new stuff and it works great for you, you’re probably not missing out on anything in Dropbox that would make you want to switch. Stick with what works best. That said, if it’s because the other options are cheaper, you can get a ton of space for free via Dropbox’s referral system. Sure, SkyDrive gives you a ton of free space right away, but if you like Dropbox’s feature set you technically can earn a lot of free space from them. Even though I pay for the service, I still have 16GB I’ve earned through referrals. If I didn’t sync absolutely everything, that would be a lot of room to play.
If you want to know more about our thoughts on cloud syncing services, check out this comparison of file syncing services, this look at Google Drive versus Dropbox, and this pricing comparison of all the services.
Downloads of the Week
Each week we talk about our favorite downloads. Here are our picks for this week.
Windows 8 (Windows, Obviously)
Microsoft released the Windows 8 RTM to developers and TechNet subscribers today, but if you want to sneak a peek at what’s coming in the final version of Windows 8, you can download a trial of the Enterprise version right now.
SendRail (OS X)
SendRail is possible the simplest file sharing app we’ve come across, and we’ve seen our fair share of ways to send files online. It connects to your Facebook and Gmail accounts so that you can click a file on your Mac, press a command key, type a name, and know that your file will get to your friend as quickly as possible.
XBMC Nightly Builds (Android)
XBMC was announced for Android back in July, with the caveat that the software would not be available in the Google Play store until it was stable across a wide range of devices. However, if you don’t mind doing a little tinkering with your Android device, nightly builds are now available in the XDA Developers forums.
Download XBMC for Android Nightly Builds
CallBar (iOS)
Regardless of what you’re doing on your iPhone, if you get a phone call you have to stop. The call screen takes over the entire device, whatever you’re doing be damned. CallBar fixes this problem by replacing the screen with an unobtrusive notification bar.
Dictation (Chrome)
Google Chrome has a built-in speech recognition system, but you can only use it in certain places. Dictation is a webapp that uses Chrome’s speech recognition engine, but allows you to dictate much larger chunks of text right inside a simple webapp.
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