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theplan


research, comment, ephemera by Jon Hickman

Filed under: iphone

RSS without the faff (Safari on a mac and iPhone)

Amongst other things, RSS is a great way to follow websites without remembering to go back and check them all the time. For example say you want to know when I've written something. Rather than coming to my website, you can use RSS to make it come to you, every time I update it.

There are loads of ways of receiving RSS updates for websites. Let's not bother about the geeky stuff about what it is how, it works, and what special software you can use if you're  an RSS ninja - here's a simple way to make it work for you if you use a mac and if you use Safari.

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If you're Reading this I've downgraded my phone to iOS3

iOS4 was fun wasn't it? I could zoom when taking photographs, and tell people what I was reading instead of what I was Reading. But when you're phone crashes out from Safari every time you load it, and when there's a 30 second delay between key strokes on your keyboard, it's time to either get an iPhone 4, or downgrade the OS. I'm too tight for the former, so the latter it is.

I'll kind of miss the combined mailbox, and I'm a touch worried that some of my apps may have done a weird iOS4 only upgrade. Fingers crossed it's all good.

I've only waited so long because I'm busy / lazy, but it seemed a perfect "bank holiday while the baby is napping" kind of job. Here's the how to - since it was written RecBoot downloads two different programmes, hit the readme file and it says "RecBoot Exit Recovery is used to exit recovery only" so I used that instead.

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.
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