This makes me happy! During Sunday night's LIVE iTunes training one of the participants had what can only be described as an Aha! Moment, where she learned something that made her investment in time worth every minute.
Over the last 3 1/2 years I've answered hundreds of technical questions from Instructors. I've learned that if one Instructor has a question there are probably a bunch of you with the same frustration who would enjoy learning the answer.
The question was; “how do I restore the correct order of a playlist in iTunes if I have clicked on one of the column headers?”
I made this short video to show how to solve this 🙂
The next training date is January 8th where we will be learning Spotify Premimum for iPhones and Android devices. You can join the notification email list here.
Last spring I was getting a flood of emails from hacked email accounts 🙁
Because we are regularly emailing close to 10,000 Instructors, my email address is in all those contact lists. When an account is compromised, the first thing the hackers do is send an email to everyone on your list. That email typically includes a nasty link that, when your mom/dad/babysitter or club department head clicks, could infect their computer with a virus or worse… like taking complete control of your computer.
It even happened to me – an old yahoo.com email I haven't used in years started sending out spam emails. Embarrassing to say the least.
I wrote two posts here & here about the importance of using a good/strong password to prevent this from happening to you. Here were my suggestions.
… take your existing password (if it has 8 or more letters) and add one capital letter and two special characters.
So “password” would be greatly improved by changing it to “@Password!”
Another option would be to combine three easy to remember words, separated by special characters. The three girls in my life are Amy, Abby and Carly so a reasonably secure password could be Amy&Abby&Carly. You can use your first name, your dog’s name and your city or any other three words and special character combination.
One more suggestion — You may have heard you should have a different password for every website — unrealistic. But I personally use a few different passwords, depending on the type of website where I have a user name.
One simple password for sites that don’t matter (No email or financial data) Here’s where you can use “password”
One password for important sites (No financial data)
A complex password for each website that has financial, medical or credit data. Create a prefix password and add the name of the institution at the end like; @Password!=visa or @Password!=bank or @Password!=401k
To be clear, my example of @Password!=visa would in actuality be: @Password!=FirstBankVisa but please don't use “password” instead use an easily remembered root word. Password is the number one, err – password and it's the very first word the hackers try.
But how do you know what you've created is really a good/strong password? This online password strength checking tool can tell you the relative security of any password you dream up. Suggest testing a slightly different version of your password – change one digit-just in case this site is an elaborate scam to actually steal passwords. It did come to me from a trusted source… but you never know.
So “password” (without the quote marks) returns:
Please don't use this password.
Which is pretty much like posting your password online, but @Password!
Much better
Is a big improvement, while @Password!=FirstBankVisa should be pretty secure.
Now you're talking 🙂
So until we all have the new iPhone 5S with fingerprint recognition, please protect yourself and change your passwords.
I'm a big Shazamer (not sure if that's a real word) cause I'm constantly Shazaming music I hear throughout my day. Watching TV, in the car, during other Instructor's class – pretty much anywhere. I've even looked into finding a way to create a “hot button” on my iPhone so I could quicken the process of having Shazam start listening with just a single action. I don't use Siri and would love to be able to just press and hold the “Home” button and have it launch Shazam.
But all of this Shazaming created some frustration for me. Once Shazam has identified a track, I still needed to type the name / artist into Spotify search to listen to it or add it to my Future to use playlist.
So I consulted the all-knowing Google and found that Shazam Encore, the premium version of Shazam, offers the option to open a track in Spotify!
Encore has the option to purchase the App for a year ($4.99) or lifetime ($6.99) – I opted for one year plan but that link takes you to the lifetime page – scroll down for options.
Once you have updated to Encore here's how to get a tagged track into Spotify:
Start by creating a special playlist in Spotify for your Shazamed tracks so you have a place for them.
Shazam a song.
Scroll down to see the Spotify option and select it.
Spotify will open in search, so it may gave you multiple choices – Shazam isn't telling Spotify the exact song, just the track name.
To the right of the track name is a circle with ***
Select it and then Add to Playlist > choose your playlist 🙂
There are other advantages to Encore:
No more advertising
It appears to run quicker / answers come much faster – I'm willing to bet Shazam purposely delays it's response so the advertisements are displayed longer.
Can the sounds of breathing identify the metabolic changes during exercise that are described as VT1 aerobic threshold & VT2 anaerobic threshold?
There's promising research conducted by Breath Research and Dr. Carl Foster at UW Lacrosse. Here's your chance to support this cutting edge technology that could potentially replace conventional metabolic testing, for the purposes of determining Heart Rate training zones.
In an earlier post I asked the question; “Could Breath Acoustics be our answer?” I also promised you an interview with Nirinjan Yee, the CEO and Founder of BreathResearch. Nirinjan's early work in Breath Acoustics (literally recording and analyzing the sounds of breathing) has lead to her Indiegogo crowd-sourcing campaign. Its purpose is to raise the funds needed to fully develop and build the headset microphone worn during exercise.
It's important that Nirinjan reaches her goal of $30,000 by September 29th – not the end date listed of October 29 – because there's a second contest she could win. Phillips Electronics is hosting the “Innovation Fellows” competition and are calling for innovators to submit their #BIGIDEA to address the current innovation gap in the areas of living well, being healthy and enjoying life. With its constant commitment to people-focused innovation, Philips aims to make a difference in people’s everyday lives, and is offering $100,000 of its own money, plus mentoring from Philips leaders, to help the best ideas come to market faster.
This help from Phillips will be huge. So while you are listening to my Interview with Nirinjan, please go to the project page and help her meet her funding goal 🙂
We are getting closer to solving the multitude of problems we've been hit with, sort of:
ICI/PRO -The login widget was causing the login trouble. Please use the temporary link to the right.
Pedal-On – I'm fighting a battle with two separate web hosting & domain registration companies over what should have been a simple request >company “A” made a change that needed company “B's” cooperation… except “B” either (depending on who I talk with) can/won't or can't make the necessary change. I'm currently working with a “can” person. Stay tuned.
Podcast feed in iTunes is still broken and I'm waiting for a response from Apple.
It must be drive John crazy week. Technical difficulties everywhere I turn and don't get me started on the continuation of the cold crappy weather we are privileged to suffer through. Yesterday's group ride was 3 hours of steady rain @ 55 degrees.
iTunes isn't receiving our free podcast feed and yesterday one of my hosting companies needed to make just a teeny, tiny, little adjustment… which turned out to be huge and has pedal-on.com unavalible for the next (hopefully only) 24 hours or so.
While I try to bring everything back to some level of normalcy, please enjoy one of my favorite early episodes of the Podcast.
