theplan

18th January 2010, AWM, Preistly Wharf, Birmingham UK

Initial meeting with the AWM Environmental Clusters team. We are now working with them to develop some social media solutions to communication needs, and have a student from the MA Social Media placed with the team.

20th November 2009, Faraday Wharf, Birmingham UK

Bit of a cheat this one, as it doesn’t have my name on it, but it was a big day, so I wanted to add it in. This was my visitor pass from my meeting at Digital Birmingham where I was fully briefed on the Digital Champion project. Good times.

Grounds - the news club for Birmingham

Some of the recent posts here have been auto-posts from a blog I’m working on called “Grounds”. Grounds is the first completed project from the “Digital Champion” project I’m working on at BCU.

Grounds is a “news club” - we’re trying to build involvement through participation rather than readers. It’s a quirky idea, but it might just work. And we do have badges.

Some of the posts don’t really make sense in the context of this “life stream” blog as they are written as proper bits of news (I’ve deleted the offending pieces) but some of them are interesting enough to stay as little blog posts. Anyway, as I’m constantly making running repairs to this “lifestream” website, I’ve changed my set up so these posts won’t come hear anymore unless I really want them to.

How to read an eBook - they’re the future you know

First, get logged in through the paywall - I used an Athens password, so find a student to help you.

This is what you get. It looks like the book should load in the big empty space, but it doesn’t.

Click on some of the links down the side… oh they download PDFs. Not one per chapter. One per heading. Some of the sections are merely a page long… so that’s 1 PDF per page people.

They all have handy file names so that you can check what you’re reading, look:

If you can work out which page is which, and you have Acrobat Pro, you can combine these into one readable document. Ok, so it’s taken me 10 minutes now to stitch together the acknowledgements. Let’s try Chapter 1…

Here are the headings - click on any heading and the reader fires you over a PDF document.

Here’s the stitch:

Download now or preview on posterous

brogan-trust-ch1.pdf (132 KB)

Ah, as we can see here, clicking on a heading just loads page 1 of that heading. Not useful. This isn’t really happening for me; let’s try the handy “download multiple pages” option instead:

Oh, we’re only allowed 10 pages at a time. Well no worries, I’ll grab a section at a time using this feature. Only the interface doesn’t tell me the page numbers for all of the sections. Right. This is getting tricky now, but I know what to do: just download 1-10, 11-20, etc. and stitch them.

Or not:

Ah, it seems that accessing my book is inappropriate. I might just give up and order another one from Amazon.

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Feb 19

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Feb 01

Recording calls on iPhone

I’ve been asking around for a while for a way to record voice calls on my iPhone. I don’t have much call to do this, but there have been a few times when it would be handy it seems obvious that the phone should do this (it makes calls, it has a voice recorder), but it doesn’t. My BCU colleague Paul Bradshaw has also been asking the same thing; he teaches journalism, so his needs for this are greater than mine. The apps that would do this do not work in the UK for reasons that don’t make a whole lot of sense.

Urbanfly on Twitter spotted this little hack to record an iPhone call:

How to record calls on iPhone: 1. Be in call with person
2. Hit the button to add a call (the +)
3. Type in your phone number
4. It will go strait to voicemail
5. Once you here the beep, it will start recording
6. When you hang up the call, you will get a voicemail of your recording

(source: macrumours forum)

Which is OK, but you can’t download a voicemail to a computer for archiving. So here’s another little hack to manually dub your voicemail to your computer.

Android users can do all this much more easily - they should feel free to flame us Apple fan boys in the comments below - but should remember our phones are ++shiny. And if anyone else has answers, let me know.