I just love the internet radio station 181FM 80’s Hairbands. I love all of those glam rock bands like Poison, Motley Crue and Bon Jovi. I find myself listening to it daily, and in a variety of places. It occured to me that not everybody is aware of internet radio, and the plethora of cool music that is available to you, so I thought I would put together a tutorial on how you can listen to any of the thousands of internet radio stations anywhere, 24 hours a day, and we’ll use 80’s Hairbands as an example.
Part 1 – If you want to listen in your car, or through your head phones on the go, your phone is the best bet. Navigate to the App store for your phone (I’m using iPhone for this tutorial, but Tune In has a Free app for Android, Palm, Blackberry and Windows phones as well – see HERE) and search for the FREE Tune In Radio App.
Once you have downloaded and installed the app, open it and press “Browse” down the bottom.
In the search bar that appears at the top, type “80’s Hairband”
181FM 80’s Hairband Station should be the first one, so click it, and it should start playing. With in seconds of pressing it for this tutorial, I was listening to Malmsteen….SWEET HUH!
At this point it is important to make the station a favorite, so each time you want to listen, you dont have to go through the whole searching routine. To make it a Favorite, press the “Heart” in the top right corner, and then press “Add 181fm 80’s Hairbands to Favorites”.
I’ve noticed recently that the home button on my iPhone has become a bit dodgy. It doesn’t always work, especially when I double click it for multitasking/app switching.
I had resided myself to believing that the actual button mechanism had worn and was malfunctioning, when my wife told me how to recalibrate it. I was dubious at first, but this little “fix” has solved my problem, and my home button is back from the dead!
To start the recalibration process, press and hold the lock button on the top of your device, just like you are going to turn it off.
Instead of sliding the red button with white arrow to the right, press and hold down the home button.
After about 5 or 6 six, your phone will go back to your home screen, and that is it! During that 5 seconds, your phone re-calibrated your home button, and with a bit of luck, everything will be like new again!
From time to time an app on your IOS device may crash and become un-responsive. Just like on your computer, sometimes apps need to be closed and shut down, then completely restarted to become active again.
To do this on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, quickly double click the home button.
This will push whatever you are looking at on your device upwards, and the multi tasking menu will appear. This is also how you can open another app and use it without closing the one you already have open. The ones you have used most recently will be in the first group of four icons that appear, and you can scroll/drag left and right through them to find the one you want to close if it isn’t on the first screen. Once you have found the icon for the app you want to close, put your finger on it, and leave your finger on it, and all of the apps will start wiggling and dancing (Like they do when you want to re-arrange them. The difference here is that they will now have a red circle with a white minus sign, as opposed to the black circle with the “X”. The red minus means close, the black X means delete).
Now all you have to do is press the red circle with the minus sign in it to close the app completely. Once it is closed, press the home button once to stop the apps dancing, and you can now restart the app by opening it like you normally would.
Closing out of apps completely that you are not using can also aid in preserving battery life, and help speed things as well, as apps are no longer in an open state using up resources while they lay in waiting!
Heytell is a great little app. For me, it’s like a phone call, a walkie talkie, and a answering machine all rolled into one. But if you have a few contacts, and use the app regularly, it wont be long before your conversation window is full up, and you can search the app until your blue in the face and you won’t find a “delete” or “Clear” option anywhere!
Thankfully, it is REALLY EASY to clear recent conversations!
All you gotta do is swipe your finger left to right on them! Just pick the conversation you want to clear, swipe your finger left to right on it as shown below,
And look what comes up!
A delete button!
All you gotta do now is press delete, and your window will be free and clear, and ready for your next conversation!
Easy when you know how huh! This method also works in other apps to, so don’t be afraid to drag your finger across something, you never know what will pop up!
At least three times a week my phone will ring between 11pm and 4am, repeatedly. When I answer it, there is someone there, who (with a very strong Asian accent) asks for what sounds to me like “Allan”. I have responded pleasantly saying “wrong number’, “not Allan’s phone”, “sorry, you have the wrong number” etc etc etc, to no avail. I hang up and 5 minutes later, the phone rings again…..”Allan…Allan…”……
Your probably saying “Just Turn The Ringer Off”, which is what I do when my wife is at home, but her job requires her to spend on average 1 or 2 weeks a month away from home. When she is away, I really like to leave the phone on so if there is a problem, and she needs me, she can reach me. Not unreasonable.
I set about finding a “Blocking App” in the Apple App Store, and I must say, I was really disappointed not only at the amount of fake apps that are available for purchase, but the fact that Apple has allowed them to be made available for purchase in their store.
After further investigation it seems that Apple doesn’t allow access to the particular part of the iPhones software that would need to be accessed in order to intercept and block an unwanted call…
If you choose to Jailbreak your phone, you have options, but for the 95% of people who use their iPhone as it came, anything you purchase from the App store to block an unwanted number is going to disappoint you!
In short, at this point in time, I can only offer a “Workaround” – A way to deal with the situation. And as my mystery caller shows me no respect, I will now return the favor and publish their number on this site – please call them at 3am!
My mystery caller phones me from two different numbers. They will try two or three times from one number, and then switch lines and try a few more times from another number. To begin handling this problem I created a contact for my unwanted caller with both of the numbers, and called it “Spammer”,
Now that I have created a contact for my phone spammer, I needed a way to silence them! The best I could come up with was a “Non Ring Tone”. A ring tone that doesn’t make any sound. After a bit of searching (and finding fake files, popups, porn links etc) I did find a silent ring tone. To make your life easier, here it is:
Once you have downloaded the zip file, extract it so you have the “SilentRing.m4r” in front of you, then open iTunes and connect your phone. On the top left side of the iTunes window, select “Tones”. Once you have Tones open, drag and drop the SilentRing.m4r file into the open field window.
Once the silent ring tone has copied into iTunes, you can now drag it from the iTunes window to your connected iPhone. When you drag the “SilentRing” file over your iPhone in the device menu, I have noticed that all categories seem to highlight/illuminate (in my case a blue color). It doesn’t seem to matter where you drop the ring tone file, it is automatically copied to the right place on your phone.
After dropping the ring tone file, you will need to click the “Sync” button in the bottom right corner of the window to make your changes stick. You may also have to click “Apply” if a pop up window appears.
Once you have successfully copied your new ringtone to your iPhone you can then choose to apply it to your unwanted caller only, that way when they ring at 2am, you don’t hear it, but if your loved one calls with an emergency, your phone will ring normally. To do this, select your unwanted caller/spammer from your contacts, open their information window, and in the top left corner select edit.
A new window will open with more details. As you will see, the ringtone will be set to your phone’s default ringtone.
This is where you can assign different ringtones to different callers. Now that you have a “Silent” ring tone on your phone, it is just a matter of changing this from “Default” to “SilentRing”.
Once you have made your changes (I changed the text message tone to silent as well), click “Done” in the top right hand corner, and your all set. Next time they call, you wont hear a thing! Your phone may still vibrate though, so it might pay you to disable that feature as well if your a light sleeper.
Almost all of us were, and are still using Windows based computers, even though we have locked ourselves firmly into the Apple world by buying iPhones and iPads. I am sure you have noticed (Like I Have) there are definitely some issues that arise by being “Multi Platform”. Slowly but surely, the software writers of the world are delivering apps that allow your iPhone and Windows 7 Laptop to co-exist a little more seamlessly.
For over a decade now, all of the home video I have, all of my DVD backups, TV programs I have recorded, in other words, my entire video collection is in AVI format. My movies are in DIVX format (I bought Dr DIVX years ago to rip my DVD’s and have stuck with it), and everything else is in XVID. That’s just the way it has ALWAYS been! And I sure as heck aren’t going to convert them all to Quicktime, I’ll be dead before it finishes re-encoding.
Enter Buzz Player, or in my case, Buzz Player HD for iPad. Buzz Player is an app for your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad (Even iPhone 3GS) that will allow you to create folders, copy movie files to your device, and play them seamlessly without the need for jail breaking your device! And my favorite part, it will even stream from your network shares!
To get started watching AVI files on your iPad/iPod Touch/iPhone, download the correct version of Buzz Player for your device from the iTunes app store, and in my opinion, the nominal fee of $2.99 for this app is ridiculously low for the functionality it provides.
Once it is installed and open, you can start creating and organizing folders for your local media (media that is physically on your device), or if your like me, your gonna want to start watching stuff from Desktop and your Media Server. To watch stuff from other devices (In my case, my Western Digital WDTV Live Hub) click the icon that says “SMB/FTP”. This will query your home network and display a list of all devices that are set up to serve media on your home network. It also tells you the protocol they are using to serve.
I noticed that some devices appear more than once, and I expect that is because they broadcast different services that they are able to provide. I selected my WDTV’s Samba feed, and was asked to input credentials.
As my network shares are not password protected within my own home network, I used “Guest” as my username, and left the password blank, and was able to connect easily. I tried to click “Connect As Guest” but that didnt work. I guess my WDTV needed to have at least the username of Guest. If your shares are password protected, this is the place to enter them to gain access. Don’t worry, Buzz Player can remember your devices and logins if you want it to, so you only have to do it once. Just remember to add it to your source list before you disconnect.
Once you have connected, you can see a list of all of the available drives/folders/files being shared.
Now, Its just a matter of selecting the file you want to watch from the appropriate directory, and selecting it. What comes next is pretty cool! Buzz Player asks you if you want to copy the file to your device, or if you want to watch it from a stream! YEAH BABY!
In my case, Im happy to watch the stream, so when you click play, it spends a few seconds buffering the file, and then starts to play your video!
As you can see from the above screen cap, I’m streaming Family Guy “Death Has A Shadow.AVI” over Samba, and watching it flawlessly on my iPad!
Buzz Player supports: .mpv, .mov, .mp4, .m4v, .3gp .avi, .divx, .dat, .vcd, .wmv, .bin, .iso, .vob, .mkv, .rmvb, .ogg, .flv, .swf, .rm, .ts, .nsv, .ram, .vfw, .mpg, .mpeg, .m1v, .m2v, .dv3, .gp, .mqv, .ogm, .ogv, .asf, .dvr-ms, .m2t, .m2ts, .rec, .bik, .dv as well as many audio codecs.
**HINT** – If your playback is choppy and/or breaks during playback, CHECK YOUR NETWORK!!!!!! I’ve seen a lot of people slagging this app because they cant stream a 2GB 720HD video over their 802.11g networks! VIDEO FILES ARE HUGE! Your network might not be capable of streaming it in real time, so COPY it to your device, and then watch it uninterrupted.
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I just love the internet radio station 181FM 80’s Hairbands. I love all of those glam rock bands like Poison, Motley Crue and Bon Jovi. I find myself listening to it daily, and in a variety of places. It occured to me that not everybody is aware of internet radio, and the plethora of cool music that is available to you, so I thought I would put together a tutorial on how you can listen to any of the thousands of internet radio stations anywhere, 24 hours a day, and we’ll use 80’s Hairbands as an example.
Once you have downloaded and installed the app, open it and press “Browse” down the bottom.
