A collection of how-to articles focusing around OS X, Windows, Gaming, Wordpress and Programming in VBA, VBScript, VB.Net, PHP, Poweshell and Automator
This weeks focus of the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month is the importance of Cyber Safety in your own home. It’s a good idea to instil Cyber Safety in your everyday life. As part of the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month StaySafeOnline have published a handy infographic Cyber Safety Starts at Home
Below are some suggestions around things you can do to ensure you’re Cyber Safe at Home (more…)
It’s important two protect your online service accounts, perhaps even more so than your own home. Your online accounts can be accessed and potentially ‘attacked’ by millions of people from all around the world, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Unlike your home, they don’t even need to leave the comfort of their ?basement? before ‘having a go’ at breaking into your account.
First things first; you should always use a strong password when setting up accounts online, and never reuse passwords on more than one website. I personally recommend (and use daily) LastPass which can be easily integrated into your daily workflow, using either it’s desktop/mobile app or its web browser plugins. (more…)
Rey Ian Cabanganan shared a handy Siri Shortcut over of the Siri Shortcuts Facebook group which does a good job of optimizing your phone for “fast charging”. Now, obviously, none of the charging technologies is changed using this shortcut. It simply switches off all of the battery intensive functionality on your device. What’s more, to save you the effort of having to switch all the services back on, it will prompt you in 30-minute intervals, so once your battery has reached the required percentage it will switch them all back on again.
Ian appreciates his device knowing who is boss and has added voice acknowledgement of his status. I’ve removed those sections, the rest I’ve left in place.
On my MacBook I use the GPG Suite in order to keep my sensitive data secure, including data which I upload to the cloud. Encrypting files is something I do frequently, so I put together a small automator folder action to automatically encrypt files dropped into a specific folder.
For this to work, you’ll need the GPG Suite installed, with a private key setup. You’ll also need to adjust the ‘–recipient’ option in the bash code listed below.
Once the file has been encrypted it deletes the unencrypted copy, so be sure to keep your key safe.
For sometime now I have been a big fan of the Apple Workflow app, which Apple acquired 2 years ago. So needless to say, I was very excited when I learnt about their intention to bundle the Shortcuts app with iOS 12 back in July. As a veteran applications developer, I like automating things where possible and the Siri Shortcuts app enables just that. With the benefits of it being ‘cross-device’ and also actionable via voice from the HomePod.
The app is amazingly powerful, with third parties updating their apps all the time to support the new hooks.
The social media platforms are awash with Shortcut examples, the best of which I’ve found so far are attached to a conversation on Redit by user Varoeldurr;
It’s not as large as it used to be mainly because I had to delete a lot of them to reduce clutter.
Some of them are self-explanatory, but a few are personalized so they might not make sense to you. I’ll try to explain. It’ll take forever to share each one so let me know if you find one interesting and I’ll share later tonight before I sleep.
From left to right
Music:
Say you shuffle your music, you land on a song you love and you want to play the whole album. This will do it. LINK
Sometimes I listen to an album of an artist I just discovered, so I like it and I want to know where to go next. This will take you to an aggregator that ranks the artist’s top albums. LINK
Tweet a song you’re listening to with an album artwork and a YouTube link of your choice (it’ll take you to YT app and you copy a link then it’ll take you back). LINK