Zenmate — a free browser extension which can mask your location and encrypt your traffic. Say, for instance, you lived in the US but you were addicted to UK tv shows. You could, in theory, install Zenmate, tell it you’re in London, and watch the BBC’s iPlayer until your eyeballs bled. If you got tired of non-commercial British TV, you could also watch the ITV player and 4 on Demand and enjoy the not-quite-American commercials and freaky reality shows. And Downton Abbey, which has definitely jumped the shark but has such lovely costumes…

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Star Trek sound effects: http://www.trekcore.com/audio/. A dizzying assortment just waiting to be made into ringtones and alarm sounds.

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Fans of The Great British Bake Off — do you know about Stuck-In-A-Book’s hilarious snarky-but-affectionate episode recaps? Here’s a link to his recap for the finale of Series 5. http://stuck-in-a-book.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/great-british-bake-off-series-five-final.html Dig around and read all the others. They’re priceless. I got to the point where I look forward to reading his recaps almost as much as watching the show.

(And congratulations to our Nancy! Well done, you!)

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If, like me, you get your TV shows from various sources (including but not limited to Netflix and HBOGO), you might sometimes find it hard to remember which episodes you’ve seen, which shows are about to start, what airs on Thursday, etc. It’s a lot more complicated than back when we had three networks and all shows started in the exact same week of Fall. Have I got an online tool for you!!!

TV Calendar: http://www.pogdesign.co.uk/cat/

Make an account. Click “Settings” and adjust the timezone (important). Click the “Shows A-Z” button. Add your favorite shows, or shows that you haven’t seen yet but want to be reminded about. Scroll to the bottom for shows that aren’t currently airing (very handy for if you’re doing a re-watch of some old show and want to keep track of where you are). Now the front page will show your personal TV Calendar! Tick the box after you watch an episode and it’ll go dim. Green is the first ep of a new season, red is the last.

Never again will we forget which Only Connects and Colbert Reports we’ve seen! And we’ve been doing a re-watch of Boardwalk Empire from the beginning (well, re-watch for me, first time for Henry), so I’m ticking off the episodes as we go. Every show’s page has a complete list of episodes and, as you tick them off, it will even tell you how many hours of your life you’ve wasted watching that particular show. Sigh.

(Only Connect wasn’t in the list when I made my account, but I requested it via the twitter account and the guy added it! :)

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I’ve been reading a German translation of Marian Keyes’s “Last Chance Saloon” (in German it’s “Pusteblume” (Dandelion) for some reason) on my Paperwhite Kindle. I installed a German-English dictionary a long time ago, but I just realized that if I press an unknown word my Kindle will look it up for me! Astonishingly helpful. After I’ve looked up a word, I highlight it — so I can glance back through later and see if I remember the new words. Some words are too slangy for the dictionary, so if I’m really mystified I highlight the whole sentence and hit “translate” — and google (I assume) figures it out for me — if not WELL, at least to the point where I know what on earth is going on. Remarkable.

Here’s the link:
http://www.cultofmac.com/187553/change-from-icloud-as-default-save-location-in-text-edit-mountain-lion-os-x-tips/

In case the link breaks and you’re going to commit suicide if Mountain Lion wants to save to iCloud ONE MORE TIME, here are the instructions:

Launch Terminal and type or paste the following command in (My blog is showing it on two lines. You might want to paste it into a text document first and get rid of the carriage return if there is one):

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

Quit whatever app is pissing you off, run it again, and try saving something. Voila.

You’re welcome.

Here’s the link I always use:
http://www.ehow.com/how_2160460_custom-iphone-ringtones-free.html

Here’s a quick version to remind myself:

iTunes preferences -> CD import settings -> AAC
Convert mp3 snippet to AAC
drag AAC version to desktop (or somewhere), throw away mp3 version, throw away AAC copy still in iTunes (if there is one)
rename from .m4a to .m4r
double-click

The alarm I just made is the “Somebody loves the MONARCH! Monarch speaking… WHAT?!??!” soundbite from The Venture Brothers. Cracks me up every time I hear it. Grab it if you want it. It’s only 7 seconds long. http://ge.tt/3yvpkMq

This wastes a ton of space and allows me to see far less text per screen. Also it’s ugly. I don’t need to see margins on a fake “page” when 99.99% of my documents will never be printed! And if I do want to see a page layout like this, I can just choose “view” -> “fixed-width page”.

I found a fix on this page of people complaining about this dreadful new “feature”:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?tid=0cf3f67e3bde8a86&hl=en

1. Go to settings (upper right hand corner)
2. Select Editing
3. Uncheck: Create new text documents using the latest version of the document editor

Now, reload googledocs, or close all its tabs and start over. New documents should be the old-style full-width layout, so just copy the text out of one of your fixed-width docs, make a new doc, and paste it in. Voila!

If google eventually decides to force everyone to always use fixed-width layouts, I guess I’ll have to find a new online text-editor.

Developer website: http://www.snappytouch.com/flowergarden

I’ve had my iPhone for about 6 weeks now, and I’m finally getting around to reviewing some software. There are a number of great apps that I use every day so it was a bit hard to choose which to review first, but Flower Garden is so pretty and fun that it wins the coveted first-iPhone-app-review-on-kayray’s-blog award!!

Flower Garden is a garden simulation app. It’s not the kind of thing you’ll play for an hour at a time, but you’ll find yourself checking your garden several times a day, especially when you unlock some of the more difficult-to-grow seeds. The graphics are very pretty and the outdoor sound effects, birdsong and a gentle breeze, are soothing. I feel happy every time I look at my Flower Garden.

My main Flower Garden page:

When you play for the first time you have twelve empty flowerpots and a small selection of seed packets. Tap a seed packet, tap the “plant” icon, and you’ll have a pot of seeds ready to care for. Water them as often as necessary to keep the slider in the green zone and your seeds will grow into lovely flowers. If you accidentally over-water and the slider goes into the yellow zone, the app plays a sad sound and your flowers droop a bit. Let them get too dry and the slider drops down into the red zone, the flowers droop even more, and the dirt looks dry. There will also be an alert icon on your main garden page to let you know you’d better water them. But don’t worry — your flowers won’t die! Just take better care of them and they’ll regain their health.

My seed packets, with some still remaining to unlock:

A packet of Sunflower seeds:

A pot of Tulips:

When you’ve got full-grown flowers you can cut them, assemble a pretty bouquet, and email it to someone special. Cut flowers go straight to the bouquet page. From there, you can remove any flowers that don’t suit the bouquet, rearrange them by shaking your phone, rotate horizontally with a finger-swipe, and even rotate them vertically with a two-finger swipe. You can zoom in and out and move the bouquet up and down. Choose from a small number of different-colored backgrounds; the developer says a color-picker is coming soon, which I’m happy about, since I need a mild yellow background my tulip bouquets. Tap the tag, which is draggable, and enter the recipient’s email address (or choose from your Contacts list) and a brief message. The email interface is perfect — you stay within the app instead of getting kicked out into your email program, and you’ll enter your own return address so your recipient knows it’s not spam. An emailed bouquet looks like this:

Over time you will unlock more and more seed packets. Eventually you will see a little padlock at the bottom of the seed packet page, which lets you enter an unlock code for super-special flowers. Try entering “snappytouch” or “theappera” or “theportablegamer” or “touchofgaming” or “iphonegamesnetwork” or “fingergaming” or “appcraver”, and let me know if you figure out any others. :) May 2011: Note: you no longer need to enter unlock codes. All of these flowers are in the Bonus Seed Pack.

Many thanks to Noel of SnappyTouch for this charming iPhone pastime, and thanks to Chris Hughes for recommending it to me!

Flower Garden on Facebook (check here for more unlock codes)

(By the way — any review you see here will most likely be positive. I’d rather write nice things about fun and useful iPhone apps than gripe about the bad ones.)

Want to listen to KPBS? Got a Mac? First, install VLC. It’s free, and very useful for watching or listening to all sorts of media. Run it, then choose File -> Open File and paste that special KBPS link into the box. Hit the Ok button, wait a moment while it buffers, and enjoy! I’ve got Morning Edition on right now, and last night I listened to BBC news, and then at 7 there was the Writers’ Almanac (it was Jane Austen’s birthday!) and then they switched to classical music, as usual, and there was lots of Beethoven ’cause it was (probably) his birthday too.

Hooray for KPBS!

Dr. Horrible: 5143-7259-7185 (Yes, I know it says he’s female. We did that to make it look like he’s wearing a lab coat)
Captain Hammer: 1634-5717-6203

We’re working on Penny but she’s not quite right yet.

How often do you use your capslock button intentionally? If you’re like me, you hit it by accident now and then, look up to find you’ve typed a WHOLE SENTENCE IN SHOUTY CAPS, swear a little, delete, and re-type. I recently read a tip somewhere telling how to turn off the the darn caps lock button on your mac! Here’s a little tutorial for you:

1. Open System Preferences. The easiest thing to do is click the little apple up in the top left-hand corner of the screen:

2. Once you’re in System Preferences, click “Keyboard and Mouse”:

3. On the “Keyboard” tab, click the “Modifier Keys” button:

4. Now set Caps Lock Key to “No Action” in the drop-down box, and hit “OK”:

Now sing and dance, ’cause you’ll never type an accidental string of shouty caps again!

Second Useful Thing:

Did you notice all those nifty little screenshots up above? I made those with a wonderful new little program called Skitch for OS X. It’s a free beta right now. It’s hard to describe how useful it is, but I’ll give it a shot.

So, you run the program and you get a little empty window, surrounded by a frame with a few familiar tools on it — pencil, eraser, color choices, text, paint bucket, etc.

There’s a “Snap” button on the frame. Click it, and you get crosshairs, and the Skitch window disappears so you can take a screenshot of whatever window is now on top. You can click to take a picture of the whole window, or click and drag the crosshairs for a selection. There’s a timer option too. Once you’ve taken your screenshot, Skitch pops back up with your shot in its frame. Now you can manipulate the little image however you want — draw on it, drag the lower right corner of the window to enlarge or reduce the whole image, drag inside the window to crop, add text, select and drag elements you’ve added, whatever. When you’re done fiddling, hit the “webpost” button at the bottom of the frame and Skitch uploads your little image to your own “Skitch” page. Every image has this little box on the right side of its page:

The “copy” buttons copy whichever url you choose to your clipboard, and then you can go paste it in to your email or your blog post or your forum post or whatever. The default privacy setting is “secret” but you can change that.

So this one little app lets you easily take screenshots, edit them, upload them, and share them. I need to take a lot of screenshots to explain things to LibriVox volunteers, and boy oh boy does Skitch make it easier! It’s got lots more fun and/or useful features — for instance, you can take a snap via photobooth (or a webcam?) and give yourself a fancy hat and a moustache and a bow tie and some party balloons:

Go install Skitch! What are you waiting for?

So they say he saved her life
They say she works with the homeless
and doesn’t eat meat
We have a problem with her
(This is his hair!)

Yesterday Bob and Chloe came over in the evening and we had the best time talking and hanging out! We played with the new Check Mii Out channel on the Wii — voted on some contests and made a Surfer Dude to enter in the Surfer Dude contest. And we watched a few episodes of Spaced, and all of Dr. Horrible (which I enjoyed even more the second time through).

Today I poked around around at the new Nintendo Channel, watched a ton of game previews and downloaded a couple of demos for the DS. Crosswords DS was fun — but even “hard” wasn’t very hard, kinda like a NYT Monday puzzle, and there were a lot of stupid clues. Not sure if the full game has a more challenging level. The interface rocks, though. I’m pretty excited about WiiWare, but I want to read a few more reviews before I decide on a game to buy :) Magnetica looks fun (I love Zuma) and the Dr. Mario Online one looks great too, and maybe My Life as a King, LostWinds, Toki Tori, and of course Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People (which is supposed to be released in this month). Any opinions, fellow Wii-owners?

Edit: I just did a little research and found that there are two different Crosswords games for DS – “Crosswords DS“, the one I tried today, and also “The New York Times Crosswords”. Yep. That’s the one I want to try next!!

So anyway, since all my microblogs are down:

So tired.

Off to drop Henry at Kung Fu. Was planning to shop tonight but will put it off till tomorrow or Saturday.

Watched two episodes of Nova on hulu.com with Henry today — one about reconstructing an ancient Chinese bridge and one about trying to erect an Easter Island statue to see how it was done. (oooh more than 140 characters there!)

Anyway. Come back, microblogs!