I love these cheap little odds and ends that transform how you use a piece of tech.
The problem? I’ve never been very happy with the way my car’s satnav mounts. Inevitably it ends up on my windscreen leaving a tell-tale circle on the window for thieves to see and generally making the screen dirty.
Enter the very simple and very cheap non-stick car mount mat. I’m sure you’ve seen them advertised and I have looked at them and scoffed about how unsuitable they must be, especially given the textured dashes in most vehicles or the configuration of air vents resulting in a lack of flat surfaces. With the recent purchase of a TomTom Start 25M, I tagged on one of these fairly generic mats. (I did find a Car Sat Nav TomTom GPS version of the mat – perhaps there are some specific properties unique to TomTom?)
Very simply, the mat is completely fit for purpose. Even with my textured Audi dash and central vents, which the corner of the mat has to wrap around, it remains firmly on the dash. I say “firmly” – the centre piece that the GPS unit mounts on seems to lift from the dash surface slightly. As a result you can detect slight vibration in the attached device. That said, with some very tight and fast cornering and even an emergency stop, the mat and sat nav stayed resolutely in place.
My TomTom Start 25M weighs in at 216 grams. If I’m honest I think that’s about the maximum weight I’d want to mount on the mat but that’s enough for most modern sat nav devices. I am very happy with the upright mounting of the sat nav and the fact I no longer have a sign on my windscreen announcing ‘there is a sat nav in this car somewhere; break in and steal me’.
I highly recommend you give one of these a try. Cheap as chips and simply brilliant!
When I was first handed the Ghost Drift HD back in November it would be fair to say it had a lot to live up to – and not in comparison to the action cameras you might expect. The market leading Go-Pro I have always found to be all show and in fact not very much GO. My cheap and cheerful Kodak ZX range cameras are the real challengers, with their almost unparalleled lens quality, integral waterproof housing and cheap, easily changeable batteries. The Kodak ZX is a real hidden gem. So when I picked up the very sexy looking Drift HD with sky-high expectationsh, I was a bit disappointed with the results.
If you read my original review you will no doubt detect the ‘luke warm’ reception I gave it. Just keep in mind that I really did review it like the proverbial Dummy. I unpacked it, stuck in a memory card, mounted it on my bonnet and took it out.
Well what a difference a few months makes!!
Just before revisiting the Drift HD, let me qualify my review by saying I dislike the GoPro Hero 3 (direct competitor to the Drift HD). To start with, the internet is littered with stories of faulty units. My main beef though is that, since the manufacturer knows it’s considered to be the market leader, it cashes in on the hype with silly prices and expensive optional extras. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned if you need a separate waterproof case to make your action camera fit for purpose it’s just not an action camera!
Back to the Drift Ghost HD. The big selling point for me was the remote control unit and that’s proved to be a fantastic feature – not only because I can switch my cameras on and off from the comfort of the driver’s seat but because the colour coded LED indicators on the remote flash very clearly to tell me the cameras’ current modes. Don’t get me wrong, I keep it simple when I’m filming my green lane adventures but just occasionally I like to select the burst picture mode and take some still images – and the transition is effortless.
In my first review of this camera, I wasn’t a huge fan. So what’s changed to make me such a convert?
It’s amazing what a bit of experimentation can do. First off: mounting the camera. The 1/4″ standard camera thread is on the side of the camera. Brilliant I guess for a helmet cam. Not so much for a vehicle mounted camera. Nonetheless, get the right mounting solution and that little wrinkle is soon smoothed out.
Next, low light filming. The camera comes with default exposure setting of +0. Initially that gave me disappointing results. It only took tweaking that setting up to +1.0 and oh my word, the camera is transformed! I never thought I’d say this, but the images from this camera in all conditions are now superior to my beloved Kodak lensed ZX range of cameras. They are at least comparable to the very latest GoPro but without the silly price tag and it doesn’t need an extra case. Have I mentioned yet that the GoPro needs a waterproof case…?
It really is just the complete package for an action camera and as with all my kit this has been tested in wind, snow, constant driving rain and even the occasional dunking during a river crossing. I’ve also gained a few handy hints from this experience of using the camera in the field. These should really help you get the best from your Ghost Drift HD.
There is an app for the Drift Ghost HD. It’s quite a fun thing to play with and allows you to see what your camera sees, on your smart phone’s screen. Good fun to play with although I usually just use it to make sure my cameras are positioned correctly.
Spare batteries. Now although I found these batteries lasted approximately 5 hours of intermittent use via the remote control, I sometimes go on whole weekend trips; I wanted the flexibility of swapping out batteries. Spare batteries for the Ghost HD are very very cheap – about £11 for 2. That’s a lot cheaper than any of the other action camera contenders, for sure. The only thing I would say is that it’s a little bit fiddly to swap a battery. It gets easier with practice but not something you can do with cold gloved hands!
I run a Pure Sine inverter in my Land Rover so I can power larger devices. I’ve also picked up a great Patona external battery charger for these replacement batteries making the whole process of keeping my cameras running a lot easier and smoother.
Now as for memory cards, as you can imagine, shooting the amount of footage I do, I use about one 16GB card each day in each camera so it can be an expensive thing to kit myself out with enough of them. Well that’s where your friendly neighbourhood Geek comes in because he did a review of SD cards recently and it turns out that one of the cheapest SD cards is the best anyway, so the Samsung SD card is an easy and cost effective choice.
[easyreview title=”Dummy rating” icon=”dummy” cat1title=”Ease of use” cat1detail=”To get the best you need to spend 10 minutes with the manual.” cat1rating=”4″ cat2title=”Features” cat2detail=”What else could you possibly need.” cat2rating=”5″ cat3title=”Value for money” cat3detail=”It’s still a bit on the pricey side for me but a lot better value than the market leader.” cat3rating=”4″ cat4title=”Build quality” cat4detail=”Tough rubberised coating and waterproof seals. Solid” cat4rating=”5″ summary=”This is where the smart money is. A genuine GoPro killer”]
So you have my advice and you have my opinion now I’ve had the benefit of having used this camera in all conditions. It only remains fr me to show you the latest film I made with this set-up, which should be featured in Land Rover Monthly’s May Edition.
As you may know, here at Geek & Dummy, we’re building up a free library of sound effects, which you’re welcome to use in your own projects. For the best results you really need to use decent quality recording equipment – a microphone attached to your computer will just pick up lots of unwanted noise. We’ve achieved really great results with the Tascam DR-05, which for the price (about £80) packs an amazing sound quality into an easily pocketable format. It helps to pair this with a decent SD card – see our recent MicroSD card head-to-head to see what’s the best value for money in that department.
When recording, make sure your audio sample contains about 2 seconds of ambient noise. This enables us to profile the ambient noise before we remove it from the sample.
Run Audacity. If you don’t have this incredible (but dull-looking!) free software, pick it up here.
Open the sample (File –> Open).
Using the selection tool, select your couple of seconds of ambient noise – this “silence” should look virtually flat in the display.
On the menu, choose Effect –> Noise Removal.
Click “Get Noise Profile”.
Press Ctrl-A to select the whole sample.
On the menu, choose Effect –> Noise Removal again.
This time, click OK. The default settings are probably okay, though you can play with them to achieve different results.
Listen to the sound sample. Sometimes noise removal can result in artificial sounding samples. If that’s the case, you can take a noise profile from a different quiet section of the sample and try again, or try with different parameters.
You can now remove silent sections of the audio as required. You can either select the sections and press the delete key, or use the Truncate Silence feature in Audacity (Effect –> Truncate Silence) to do it automatically. Use the zoom tool for precision removal of short sections of silence.
We “normalize” the sample to take it to the maximum volume possible without causing distortion. Before normalizing, you may want to find and delete any unwanted loud sections from the sample, in order to improve the effect of normalization.
To normalize the sample, ensure it is all either selected or deselected. Then choose Effect –> Normalize. Again there are some configurable settings here.
Listen to the sample again to make sure you’re happy with the results. All changes can be undone with Ctrl-Z.
Seldom does a product reach out and and grab me with the intensity of “Have me, have me”, like this product did. In fact I can honestly say that only the iPhone, (the original first release), gave me anything like a similar sensation. I recall like it was yesterday, in December 2007, just a few weeks after the iPhone was launched, when I first held it, and realised in only a few minutes that, no matter what – I had to own one, and fast!
Now, I’m aware of bluetooth speakers – I have been for some time. I’ve conducted some modest research into them in the past; my conclusion was always they were too damn (expensive), or just rubbish. Suitable for a camping trip perhaps, but certainly not for full time home entertainment.
Well, a colleague brought one of these into work recently. I kid you not, within seconds of it springing into life, the same iPhone sensation gripped me and I ordered one for myself the very same day.
Bose, I think most will agree is a quality manufacturer of speakers. They have been one of the market leaders for as long as I can remember, and I can remember the days when “technically advanced” was when your cassette player could skip to the next track! One of the better things ever to come out of America, since Coca Cola, Bose is right up there on my scale of best perceived quality manufacturers, on a par with European examples such as Audi, Omega and HP Sauce.
So when I first heard the Soundlink Mini in the flesh, not only was I blown away by the performance of such a compact unit, but I immediately also thought that it would fit the needs of my ever-demanding, cable-hating wife. The variety of places we could utilise this neat little device were numerous; we could take it outside in the summer, replacing the iPad Air that we use to play music when dining outside. Perhaps it could come with us on weekends away, to hotels, cottages, foreign holidays even? With a little thought, its use could be expanded with ease. Use it in the kitchen, broadcasting iPad Air audio from a YouTube cooking tutorial, listen to the football commentary whilst tinkering in the garage, piping Radio 5 Live from your iPhone 5s and so on. Take it into the bathroom, the workplace, your mate’s house – the options are almost endless.
Made largely from aluminium, the speaker is robust and weighs around 1.5 lbs, giving an immediate impression of good build quality. It has rubberised top-mounted controls and is a cinch to use. It can pair with multiple devices, (remembering the last 6). Connection of your device, phone, iPad, Mac, or PC is even easier than connecting to your car’s hands-free, without the need to enter any passcode.
From such a compact unit, my impression would be that it wouldn’t cope with any modest volume demands, but how wrong I was. Whilst I agree it may fall short of providing music enough to satisfy a full-on house party, it’ll certainly provide enough output to meet everyday needs in our house, and if I had neighbours, enough to get them banging on the wall I’m sure! One observation, of a slightly negative nature, is that you can’t adjust the tone the speaker offers the listener. I have a number of theories as to why this may be, but ultimately the lack of such a feature is not a problem as the output offered is rich and deep enough to do justice to rock music, and the treble range is just as sweet for raw acoustic performances – I simply love it.
An optional extra is a Bose carry case made especially for this unit, but at around £40 I don’t think it represents value for money. Bose also offer a variety of coloured soft shell cases, which you may find funky, but don’t really appeal to me.
If you want to read about the detail of the unit to learn about battery life and range, you can do so on Bose’s own website. I don’t get too hung up about stuff like that. I’m never far from a power socket, and I don’t live in a house with rooms anywhere big enough to test the range of the connectivity. Why would I want to control music upstairs when the unit is playing downstairs?!
If you’ve got £170 or thereabouts burning a hole in your pocket and need a wireless Bluetooth speaker which is well-built and offers top drawer performance, then stop reading this now, and get clicking! I’m married to a woman who views audio visual products / any technology really, about as high up her priority list as I do face cream and Yoga, so you may understand why we have clashed for years over these priorities. To be fair, cost isn’t the usual bone of contention – normally it’s whether it can be seen with the human eye or not. My wife doesn’t really care what it sounds like, how technically advanced it might be, where it came from or anything like that: if it’s visible, then “You think you’re putting THAT, there?!” is a standard response. Cables are sinews of the devil!
For those of you living with such a woman, who lives the minimalist dream and likes her choones, imagine the points you’ll score when you bin the cumbersome, slightly dated, yet perfectly functional and technically superior hi-fi unit and replace it with this?! If the £170 ticket price is making your eyes water too much though, take a look at Geek’s review of the Soundlink SW100.
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[easyreview title=”Boris rating” icon=”collab” cat1title=”Ease of use” cat1detail=”So easy, even Dummy could use it. Effortless syncing with multiple devices.” cat1rating=”5″ cat2title=”Features” cat2detail=”Pretty basic really, but it does what it does, very well. I didn’t harbour any unrealistic expectations of it.” cat2rating=”3″ cat3title=”Value for money” cat3detail=”With a high ticket price, it’s only expensive if it fails to perform, and it certainly doesn’t.” cat3rating=”4″ cat4title=”Build Quality” cat4detail=”Premium build & premium performance, it’s a 5 from me.” cat4rating=”5″ summary=”With such simplistic function and premium performance and build, this is a top notch device. Well done Bose. “]
Anyone who’s pulled a computer apart will know how much dust, crud and miniature wildlife can take up residence within your machine’s delicate circuitry. This build-up is bad for your computer. In particular, it makes fans and heat sinks less efficient and causes everything to warm up.
At best, this is a nuisance. Many power-regulating computers will simply slow down to allow the system to cool off. At worst, though, the excess heat in a power supply for example can set your computer – and your house or office – on fire. Clearly this is not A Good Thing.
Periodically then, it’s a good idea to take an “air duster” to your computer’s innards. Air dusters usually consist of cans of compressed air, with a straw-like nozzle to direct the air flow. They’re designed to create enough pressure to remove dirt but not so much as to cause damage.
Where I work, we used to get through a ton of these cans of air. The problem was, just when you really needed the air duster, you’d look on the shelf and there’d just be an empty can. Harrumph. How inconsiderate.
Giotto’s Rocket-air Super Blower AA 1900So looking around for a better solution to the problem, I came across this fellow, the “Rocket-air Super Blower” by the Chinese/Taiwanese Company, Giotto’s Industrial Inc. (Beware of the annoying noisy Flash animation that plays whenever you visit the site.)
The Rocket-air has a thick flexible rubber body and a solid plastic nozzle. Squeeze firmly and you get a blast of air not dissimilar to that from a can of compressed air. It’s not hard work to operate and of course the best part is that you have an unlimited supply of air at your disposal (at least until some thieving, envious toe-rag runs off with it).
It’s theoretically available in a few different colours. I’ve only seen it in the UK in the red/black regalia, not that it matters: I didn’t buy it for its looks. Mind you, as looks go, it’s a fairly funky tool and was surprisingly quite a conversation piece when it first arrived.
Speaking of design, you have to love the attention to detail here. Giotto’s makes camera equipment, so the Rocket-air’s primary function is to blow dust from delicate camera lenses (the fact that we can bend it to other uses is a big bonus). On the opposite side to the nozzle, there’s a fast air inlet valve. This means that when you release the blower, rather than sucking dust back in through its nozzle, it pulls in (hopefully) clean air from the other side.
Oh, and the “rocket fins” on the base of the blower enable it to stand up stably. Not massively important, just a nice bit of design. On two of these fins there are holes punched so that you can thread a lanyard through. Great for hanging it from your neck should you be so inclined. People will give you funny looks though.
So it’s well made, durable, moderately attractive, great at its job – there’s got to be a catch, right? The price. Amazon has it on sale for £8.99 at the moment. I don’t know about you, but my first thought was, “That’s a bit expensive for a glorified executive stress toy.” But then if you think about it, you can’t really buy a can of compressed air for less than £3 or £4. So the Rocket-air pays for itself pretty quickly – I would expect it to last as long as a hundred cans of compressed air. When you put it that way, it’s a bit of a bargain.
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[easyreview title=”Geek rating” icon=”geek” cat1title=”Ease of use” cat1detail=”Short of poking it in your own eye, I’m not sure you can get this wrong.” cat1rating=”5″ cat2title=”Features” cat2detail=”Does everything you expect of it. I suspect it could be made slightly more powerful, but otherwise, there’s little to criticise.” cat2rating=”4.5″ cat3title=”Value for money” cat3detail=”When you compare it with the alternatives, it’s pretty near the cheapest solution to our dusty problems.” cat3rating=”4.5″ cat4title=”Build Quality” cat4detail=”Great attention to detail. Some slightly annoying slivers of rubber haven’t quite been removed after it came out of its mould. But otherwise, really well made. Feels like it will last forever – or at least until I retire (which is much the same thing).” cat4rating=”4.5″ summary=”Great solution to the problem of safely cleaning dust and dirt out of computers and fans. As a bonus, you can use it on your camera too. Can’t really recommend it any more highly.”]
Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!There’s a lot of information and misinformation concerning SD technology, on the Internet. I’ve read a few conflicting theories about how many different companies actually manufacture SD cards and how many re-badge other companies’ kit. For your average consumer (and by this, I mean Dummy) though, this is all a bit of a red herring. Dummy wants to know (a) which card is fastest and (b) which card is best value for money. End of.
In order to separate the wheat from the chaff, we’ve picked 16GB Class 10 MicroSD cards (with full size adapters) from the top five brands out there: SanDisk, Transcend, Kingston, Toshiba and Samsung. We’re not too concerned with who made ’em; we just want to see which is the best package overall. To that end, we’ve benchmarked the cards in two different environments: firstly using a MicroSD card USB reader on a Windows PC and secondly on an Android mobile device. This gives us a really good idea of how these five cards perform in real-world scenarios.
MicroSD cards – the contenders
If you can’t be bothered with all the stats and just want the summary (and we can’t blame you!), click here.
Test rig
eSecure All-in-1 USB card reader connected to HP ProbookOur Windows 7-based test rig consisted of an eSecure All-in-1 card reader connected to an excellent HP ProBook 6560b. The 6560b isn’t available any more by the way, but the 6570b is a worthy successor. Our test software was the venerable and well-respected CrystalDiskMark.
Our mobile device test rig consisted of the brilliant Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (replaced by the even more incredible Note 3). Using this phone we ran the handy app A1 SD Bench. It’s less comprehensive than CrystalDiskMark, but gives you a good feel for how the card performs in one of its most likely use cases – plugged into a smartphone or tablet.
The Tests
For our tests, we ran five passes of the benchmarks on each card. When a test run contained anomalous results (which could be down to processor blips or other irrelevant causes), we discarded the test and ran again. We then averaged the scores from the five clean passes. We think this gives us a pretty bulletproof set of scores.
We ran three distinct batteries of tests:
5 passes of CrystalDiskMark with the file size set to 1000MB
5 passes of CrystalDiskMark with the file size set to 50MB
5 passes of A1 SD Bench
The results are summarised in this image (click to enlarge):
This is worthy of some explanation! The bottom row of the table shows the “standard deviation”. You don’t need to understand statistics to get the point: if there’s not a lot of difference between the cards, you’ll see a small figure on this row. So for example in the sequential read tests, there’s very little difference between the cards (standard deviations of 0.12 and 0.18). In the case of a 50MB file written randomly in 512k chunks, there’s a huge variation – 5.97. If you look more closely at the column, you’ll see that the Samsung card clocked in at 15.2MB/s in this test, which is very good, while the Toshiba managed a paltry 1.3MB/s.
The bar chart overlays are fairly easy to follow, we hope. For each column, the card that has the biggest bar achieved the best speeds. This is most noticeable on columns with the largest deviation (512K random writes).
The price column is colour-coded going from red to green; expensive to cheap. “Expensive” is a relative term – there’s only £3.50 difference between the most expensive and least expensive cards here. Mind you, that means that the pricy SanDisk is over 40% more expensive than the modest Toshiba.
SanDisk MicroSD card – overpriced and over hereLet’s look at the SanDisk card for a moment. It’s considerably more expensive than the cheaper cards on test, so what do you get for your money? Well it actually performs worst on one of the tests (1000MB sequential write). If you’re working with video, that is going to be noticeable. The story’s better with random writes, but that seems to us to be a fairly “edge” scenario. It also does worst when being written to in an Android environment. All in all, not good. It certainly hasn’t justified its high price ticket. We were expecting a lot better from such a well known and respected manufacturer.
With generally narrow deviations, it’s hard to pick out an outstanding card, but if you can managed to stare at the figures a bit without your eyes glazing over, we do think a hero emerges.
Look at that Samsung card. Best at the 1000M sequential read. Best at the 1000MB sequential write. Second best at the 1000MB/512K random write and leading the pack for the 50MB/512K random write. In almost every test, it achieves consistently good results. It’s top dog when it comes to writing data and no slouch at reading it. All this and it’s the second cheapest.
Conclusion
Samsung MicroSD card – the winnerIf you’d like to mine the data we collected, you can download it here as a zipped Excel spreadsheet – this contains the raw data from all our tests – no less than 450 data points! Whatever you do, we think you’ll agree with us that in this class, the best value MicroSD card by far is the Samsung 16GB Class 10 MicroSD. There isn’t even a runner up in this contest; the remaining contenders are either too slow or too expensive.
Wow, so this is a popular search on Google! And sadly, most of the results you find are riddled with either viruses, bad advice or broken English.
As you almost certainly know if you’ve found this page, WhatsApp is a massively popular (over 7 million downloads on Android alone) app for instant messaging. Its distinguishing feature is that it relies on a user’s mobile phone number, rather than any dedicated username/password combination. The idea is that you use it as a drop-in replacement for SMS and MMS messaging. You can also use it instead of your favourite instant messaging client, on the basis that almost everyone has a mobile phone number these days.
Linking the product to a mobile phone number is also one of this product’s weaknesses – you may want to use WhatsApp from your desktop PC or laptop, but WhatsApp doesn’t provide PC (or Mac) software. The good news is that it can be done! The bad news is this process depends on you having a Google account – sorry, Apple/iOS users. The REALLY bad news is that you can’t link a single mobile phone number on two different devices. Because WhatsApp associates to a mobile phone number, this means that you can’t synchronise your chats across more than one device. If you try to link two different devices to the same mobile number, one of the devices will disconnect and you’ll be greeted with the following message:
I don’t want to reverify!
So this piece of information can’t be stressed enough: you can’t run WhatsApp in two places simultaneously using the same mobile phone number. If you want the convenience of being able to input messages via your computer, you need to look at some form of remote control program for your mobile device (VNC, for example). That’s beyond the scope of this How-to.
The remainder of this guide assumes you’re going to be associating your mobile phone number to WhatsApp and using it only on your PC. If that’s what you want to do – good news! It’s entirely possible.
BlueStacks Android Emulator
The easiest way to get started is to install the BlueStacks Android emulator. BlueStacks is in beta at the moment and free to use. We imagine this will change at some point in the future. There will still be other possibilities, but one of the beauties of BlueStacks is its simplicity.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that whenever you’re going to emulate one operating system on another, you’re well advised to ensure your computer is up to the job. I’m using an Acer Veriton M6610G which is more than up to the job. (It has since been replaced with the M6630G series – very competent and expandable PCs.)
Visit the BlueStacks web site and download and install the emulator. We’re doing this on a Windows PC, but I suspect it would also work on a Mac. (Any Mac users out there that have an Android phone? I suppose it could happen…)
During the installation, you’ll be presented with a set of three options – App store access, App Notifications, and Spotlight. I’d suggest you only select the first of these. The installation can take a fair few minutes.
If you’re prompted to update your graphics drivers, you’ll need to allow this, for BlueStacks to run. As always, make sure System Restore is working, in case something goes wrong when installing the drivers.
Set up BlueStacks
When you first load BlueStacks, you’ll be taken though a setup wizard. Click “Continue”:
You need to connect BlueStacks to a Google Account for two reasons: first, to download the app from the Google Play Store. Secondly, so you have access to your address book. It’s best to link BlueStacks to an existing Google account, so you have the benefit of your Google address book. Choose “Existing”:
Enter your Google credentials and click “Sign in”:
If, like me, you use Google’s two-factor authentication, you’ll now be taken through a web-based login process (still within the BlueStacks emulator). Click “Next”:
Re-enter your credentials and click “Sign in”:
Again, this is only if you’ve enabled two-factor authentication (which you should, by the way). A code will be sent to your mobile phone number. Enter it here and click “Verify”:
The “Back up and restore” section – what you choose here is up to you. Click “Next”:
You’ll be taken back to the BlueStacks wizard. Click “Continue”:
Re-enter your Google account details (yawn):
Do you want your password to be remembered? Your choice:
Again, leap through the two-step verification hoop if it applies to you:
The Google Play store will now be available. Click “Let’s go!”:
Finally, accept the Terms of Service. I suggest leaving the “opt-in” unchecked:
Installing WhatsApp
Immediately after setting up BlueStacks, you’ll be taken to the Play Store:
From there, search for WhatsApp:
Click “Install”:
Accept the permissions:
WhatsApp will now install:
Once installed, click “Open”:
Agree to the WhatsApp terms:
Enter the mobile number that you’re going to link to this installation of WhatsApp (remember, one mobile phone number per device) and click “OK”:
Double-check and click “OK”:
WhatsApp tries to send and detect an SMS. The SMS message will go to your phone of course, not BlueStacks, so this detection will fail (you’ll need to wait for this):
Instead, click “Call me” and be ready to enter the verification code:
An automated message will tell you the code you need to enter into WhatsApp on BlueStacks:
Verify your profile:
WhatsApp will spend some time initialising:
Once it’s done, the “Continue” button appears. Click it:
That’s it; you’re in. From now on, you can run WhatsApp from the Home screen:
You should see your list of contacts from your Google address book:
If you have any chat history from using WhatsApp on a different device, this will not be pulled across to BlueStacks – history is not saved on WhatsApps’ servers.
So there we are; it has its limitations, but if you’re happy to use WhatsApp on your computer instead of your phone or tablet, this is probably the easiest way to do it. Having said that, I will personally carry on using WhatsApp on my Galaxy Note phoneor tablet, both of which I’m more likely to have with me than my computer!
As you know, Dummy and I are constantly on the lookout for good-value, great gadgets. Are you stuck for gift ideas for the tech-lover in your life? Look no further. Dummy has already offered you his “top five” list; here’s mine.
I’ve yet to review this device, but I bought one earlier this year, when Roku discounted them from £50 to £35. They’re not quite that cheap now (up to £45), but they’re still great value, very competent devices.
Roku’s set-top boxes appeal to me, because rather than buying one of those super-expensive “smart TVs” (like Dummy did), instead for a relatively trivial sum, you can upgrade virtually any television with this small, unimposing gizmo. There are a few different media streamers in the series, but this bottom-of-the-range LT was more than sufficient for my needs – to stream media (from a wireless network connection) to a 32 inch television. The LT offers 720p HD video and has a super-low power consumption profile.
The idea is that you add various different “channels” from Roku’s huge library, which includes iPlayer, Demand 5, 4oD, Plex, Netflix and a host of others. The LT’s big brother, the 3, has more tricks up its sleeve, like a wired ethernet port, USB in, headphone socket on the remote (genius!) and games. I needed none of those though and have been absolutely delighted with the LT.
If Roku doesn’t quite float your boat, you might want to consider an Apple TV. More expensive, feature-for-feature, but simple to use and well-appreciated by all its owners.
This is a close call. There are more and more tablets on the market these days and the quality is increasing as manufacturers weed out early production problems. You won’t get anything that I’d call “great value” from Apple or Microsoft, so that leaves us with the Android platform. And wow, there’s an awful lot of choice now.
I’m torn on this one. Amazon is pushing out better and better Kindles at keener and keener prices. The Kindle Fire HD is a serious contender for this top 5 list – £120 now; that’s a bargain. But ultimately, the fact that the Nexus 7 doesn’t need to be hacked (“rooted”) to get the best from it means that this tablet is the better choice in my opinion. You can pick one up for under £200 and I don’t think anyone could be disappointed to find one of these in his or her stocking.
I’ve had more than six months with this speaker that I reviewed back in May this year. I just can’t fault it. Great at what it does and a real steal at £20.
In an extremely saturated market, it’s really hard for one phone to stand out from amongst the crowd. If we’re going to continue the theme of great value for money though, I think you can’t go wrong with the Ascend Y300 from rising star Huawei. Under a hundred quid. It’ll do the job. And if you’re buying for someone who’s a little accident prone, better this than a four hundred quid Galaxy S4 (which is a really great phone by the way, but expensive).
Here at Geek & Dummy we have reviewed varied products this year and if you’ve been following our blog, you’ll have noticed that Geek and I have differing tastes and requirements from our tech. Here are my top 5 products of the year, largely based around their impact on me. As you know, I’m a bit of a… well a dummy, so to appear on my list a gadget needs to be one of those tech products that basically works out of the box.
I’ve been using NAS type devices for many years now but this truly IS the daddy. NAS or Network Attached Storage is a system of 1 or more hard drives, a network connection and an operating system. It connects to your network, allowing other devices on the network to access and share files from a central location. Traditionally, quite a dumb device, these have now evolved considerably. The Synology comes with a veritable “app store” of free products to help you backup, stream media and download torrents. All this and RAID too, to ensure your valuable data is as safe as it can be.
The stand-out feature for me is DNLA. Put simply, with my Samsung Smart 3D TV on my home network, if I drop a a picture, some music or a film on the Synology box, my Samsung TV immediately sees it and I can access and watch it. Pure genius. The only thing to remember is that the purchase price doesn’t include the hard drives you will need. When I bought my Synology NAS it worked out a lot cheaper to go and source (high quality) hard drives rather than take a pre-configured bundle. I opted for these WD 3TB SATA III Caviar hard drives: fast and quiet and at the right price!
I’m an amateur film maker and this year I discovered PowerDirector 10. Having played with iMovie and Windows Movie Maker I was looking for some software to take me to the next level but with that all-important Dummy proviso: it must work out of the box without requiring a degree to understand it.
I have to say it’s revolutionised my film editing. With some interesting sound editing capabilities built in, this year PowerDirector has helped both my Geek & Dummy and my 4×4 film viewing figures to soar. I particularly like the way it lets you create and edit mini slide shows within your film. The image enhancement options have rescued some dark and otherwise unusable footage on more than one occasion. This is my fav film from this year created with this software. The only downside is it is a resource hungry animal and you’ll need something pretty powerful to run it properly. I’d recommend something like the Lenovo Ideacentre K450, with stacks of RAM, storage and video oomph.
For the second year running these amazing little cameras have proved to be my mainstay action camera. I stumbled on them absolutely by chance and have since bought 7. They are relatively cheap and I have been buying both the ZX5 and the ZX3 (the latter second hand on eBay). They are essentially the same camera but the older ZX3 has a removable battery and to be honest, I quite prefer the older one because of that. Other than the battery they take exactly the same images and that Kodak lens is amazing. It completely puts to shame the very expensive and industry standard GoPro in the image and even sound department.
Where the GoPro and indeed most action cameras require a secondary housing to make them waterproof and shockproof, the Playsport range in standard guise does all that as standard. Believe me I have tested them to near destruction on many occasions during the year. I took one on holiday with me this year and it made a fantastic underwater film without the need to add a cumbersome case.
This is the second of three cameras to make my short list this year and another that has helped me improve both my stills photography and my video photography. Originally when I bought the Lumix Bridge camera the theory was I needed to progress beyond a standard happy snapper but not go so far that I’d need to spend an hour reading a manual every time I wanted to take a picture. This camera has a top quality lens and a very simple dial that allows you to alter settings quickly to match the type of photography you’re taking.
Whilst I didn’t consider this aspect when I bought it, to my amazement the video functions of the camera are also fantastic. Often you find that the video features are a bit of an afterthought on stills cameras and are low quality. Not so with the Panasonic and whilst it can be difficult to hold steady, the clarity of the video images is the best of any camera I own, probably thanks to the quality of its lens. Read my full review here.
So to my last but definitely not least tech buy of the year. When I originally reviewed this action camera I was in two minds about it. In fact when I re-read my review I’ve been down right uncharitable. Looking at the facts, its expensive compared to the Kodak range and straight out of the box the image quality, mounting set-up and operation are all a bit of a pain. Keeping to my Dummy ethos, it felt like a bit of a hassle to be honest.
Having now lived with it for a month or two, boy is this a piece of kit. It seems that the issues I had filming in low light are resolved by a slight tweak to the aperture settings. Bluetooth connectivity to my mobile phone turns out to be a great, though rarely used feature – I can view what the camera sees, on my phone. The remote control is a revelation for action camera photography; by making it so much easier to switch on and off this vastly reduces the amount of boring footage I have to edit out. You’ll need to buy a decent class 10 microSD card to get the best from it, but they have come right down in price now.
Ok; all of this comes with a £250 price tag (Geek & Dummy do have a 10% discount voucher for the first lucky reader requesting it) but for the time it saves me and the quality of the images I’m now getting, it’s worth every penny. In fact do you know what, I’m getting another one for Christmas!
DUMMY: I’d been excited about doing this review for quite some time but describing delivery of this item from China as “slow” and “a bit dodgy” is an understatement. Now it has at last arrived though, I can say it massively exceeded my expectations.
GEEK: It was one of those occasions where the seller pretends to have “UK stock”, but quotes a 30 day delivery time… And then the package turns up with a customs declaration, describing the item as a “gift”. Not to mention the hassle associated with returns, should the unit prove to be faulty. So it pretty much goes without saying that we would only advocate buying from abroad for low-cost, low-urgency items like this. All that said, Dummy is right: great piece of kit, for buttons.
DUMMY: Let’s wind this back a stage. Virtually every modern vehicle – even my Land Rover Defender – comes equipped with an OBD-II (On-Board Diagnostics) port. Similarly these vehicles are fitted with an ECU (Electronic Control Unit) and this little computer will be monitoring hundreds, if not thousands of events that are going on in your vehicle every millisecond. The OBD port is like a network cable into that information and the OBD Bluetooth Diagnostic Scanner is the device that can take that information and send it to a program where it can be processed.
GEEK: He almost sounds like he knows what he’s talking about doesn’t he?
DUMMY: [ignores Geek] Sounding complicated? It really isn’t. You find an app that works with the scanner, you plug the scanner in, you start your engine and hey presto, an immediate window to the soul of your car.
GEEK: There are a few apps out there that will translate this information into a variety of user-friendly dials and displays. At the moment, for Bluetooth adapters like the one we’re reviewing, you’re basically restricted to Android or PC devices. Apple is extremely fussy about what it will allow to connect via Bluetooth. Yet another reason to see the light and throw your iDevices in the bin.
DUMMY: You just can’t pass up an opportunity can you?!
If I’m honest, my boy racer days are behind me. Although I was mildly interested in seeing live BHP calculations and how many G’s I was pulling, the main attraction of this device to me are the diagnostics. Select the right app and it is simplicity itself to interrogate the ECU to find out how your car is feeling. Not just viewing and interpreting fault codes, but also resetting those codes as required. Yes that’s right, that job for which your dealer or local garage charges you £40 a pop, you can now do for yourself and all your friends and family for £6 – for life.
GEEK: Ha – middle-aged much?! We’ve looked at some interesting devices this year, expensive and cheap. Of them all, without doubt this has to be the simplest and most cost effective purchase of the year.
DUMMY: Ha – skinflint much? It’s a real shame that this is no use for Apple devices, in its cheaper Bluetooth form. Looks like this Apple fanboy is going to have to hand the best bit of equipment we have bought this year straight to Geek.
GEEK: Rest assured, if we can work out an easy way of making it work with iOS, we’ll be all over that. Watch this space! In the meantime, the Android apps we used in our tests were aLapRecorder HD (which unfortunately appears to have been abandoned by its developer), Carista OBD2 (free) and Torque Pro (not free, but excellent).
DUMMY: Anyway, enough chat. Here is a little road test we did together of this brilliant little device. I apologise in advance for Geek’s driving!!
[easyreview title=”Consensus” icon=”collab” cat1title=”Ease of use” cat1detail=”Couldn’t be any easier, no really.” cat1rating=”4.5″ cat2title=”Features” cat2detail=”Its feature is communciating via Bluetooth which is does faultlessly. The clever stuff happens in the software it connects to.” cat2rating=”4″ cat3title=”Value for money” cat3detail=”Can’t be beaten. Full stop.” cat3rating=”5″ cat4title=”Build Quality” cat4detail=”Feels substantial. We certainly don’t pick it up and think it’s cheap.” cat4rating=”4.5″ summary=”We can’t tell you how delighted we are with this purchase – and the price delights most of all!”]
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Enter the very simple and very cheap non-stick car mount mat. I’m sure you’ve seen them advertised and I have looked at them and scoffed about how unsuitable they must be, especially given the textured dashes in most vehicles or the configuration of air vents resulting in a lack of flat surfaces. With the recent purchase of a TomTom Start 25M, I tagged on one of these fairly generic mats. (I did find a Car Sat Nav TomTom GPS version of the mat – perhaps there are some specific properties unique to TomTom?)
My TomTom Start 25M weighs in at 216 grams. If I’m honest I think that’s about the maximum weight I’d want to mount on the mat but that’s enough for most modern sat nav devices. I am very happy with the upright mounting of the sat nav and the fact I no longer have a sign on my windscreen announcing ‘there is a sat nav in this car somewhere; break in and steal me’.
UPDATE 2: WhatsApp has finally bowed to pressure and created a 
is the device that can take that information and send it to a program where it can be processed.