How to stop the iPhone's screen rotating

Was asked yesterday about how to lock the iPhone's screen from rotating when you view it side on. I thought a few of you out there might find this useful, so here is a step by step guide to follow. It's really simple!

Start by double tapping the home button.

This will pop the screen up and show you your recently used applications. Once this appears, swipe your finger right, and it will show this screen:

This screen has a few options. You can play and pause your music, you can go to the iPod, or you can lock the screen, by clicking on the icon to the left.

Once you've clicked it, the icon will change to a padlock, as shown below:

If you press the home button once more, your screen will now be locked. And a little icon indicating this will appear in the top right hand side of the screen in what is sometimes referred to as the "tray", but next to the battery icon.

That's it - it's that simple. If you decide you'd like to turn rotation back on, you can do so at any time from any screen your on.

If you liked this post, or found it useful, please feel free to share with your friends to pass the info on using the buttons below.

Wrong Date/Time on Mac after shutdown?

Your computer's clock is set to a date before Jan 1, 2008. This may cause some applications to behave erratically.

This happened to me about 15 minutes ago after my laptop ran out of battery last night whilst I was using my computer, and the power cut out.

The error on the screen looked like this:

When I clicked on to my time in the top right hand corner of the screen, I noticed that the clock's time had returned to normal.

However, this can cause problems for you if it's not automatically set back, so here's how you can fix it.

Click the system preferences icon in the dock, as shown below, or click the Apple Icon at the top left hand corner of the screen, and choose system preferences from the drop-down box.

In the system preferences pane, choose Date & Time, then tick the box to automatically update if it isn't already, and that should connect to the Apple servers to update the time.

That said, you can always leave it un-ticked, and set the time manually yourself if you like, and that will resolve the problem.

If you liked this post, or found it useful, please feel free to share with your friends to pass the info on using the sharing buttons below.

A complete idiots guide to twitter

Twitter is another type of social networking you've no doubt heard of, but if you're like many that haven't even looked at it, or ever understood what it's for, you've come to the right place!

In short, twitter is a service that allows you to share what your up to, whats on your mind, what's new, what's going on, what's trending etc. There is a limit to how much you can write with a limitation of 140 characters per tweet.

There are different types of users too. Some are companies, most are individuals, some are blogs, some are news sites, others are spam. You get all sorts on twitter.

Apart from "tweeting" what you're up to, or whatever your tweet is, you can also "follow" people. This principle is similar to the friend feature on facebook, except that most people don't have their profile on private, in fact by default your account is public, which means anyone can follow you and get your updates.

Many people don't even use twitter to post anything, rather they just use it to follow others (myself included) to get their updates and find out whats happening. The way I use twitter is to get news updates from specific companies that I have an interest in. For example, you can follow Microsoft, Google, Apple, your bank, your phone carrier, your friends, your local news publisher, and so on. In this way you essentially get a customised news feed which gives you updates and news on places, companies and people you care about.

Personally, I think this is the best thing about twitter, and this is the primary reason I use it.

Let's get into a few guides on how to use and interact with twitter.

Firstly, you'll have to get an account. When you navigate to twitter.com for the first time, you'll get a login screen, and a prompt to sign up for a new account. It will look similar to this:

In order to sign up, just enter your details in the box that says "New to Twitter?" then click the yellow button below.

The next screen will confirm your details and ask you to create a username. This username will appear all over twitter whenever you make tweets or when people refer to you in a tweet. This can be changed later if you need to. It looks a little like this.

Finally, you click create my account. You will then be presented with a quick set-up which will help you find your friends on twitter, help you locate potential people/companies/etc to follow

Towards the end of the set-up guide, the service will ask you for a short Bio about yourself, with a limitation of 160 characters, and the option to upload a profile picture. None of any of this information is required, however I'd recommend putting at least something in. Even if it is very basic information. Eg. "My hobby is stamps", or something.

This is the final step to the set-up guide of creating a twitter account on the twitter website. The next screen you'll see is the main screen. This will change over time as you start to follow more and more people. But it might look like this when you first start. You may also be asked to confirm your email address with twitter.

On the left hand side of the screen, you can see worldwide trends, which you can customise to be your location, by clicking change.

Above this box is your profile box, where you can create a new tweet, see how many people you follow, how many follow you, and how many tweet's you've made since creating your account.

The last piece of info I'll go into in this guide is the hashtag section. A hashtag is a tag you can add to your tweets when you are tweeting about something that is relevant to an event, time, news or something happening. For example, looking at the list of trending topics posted in the screenshot, Titatic is a topic which is getting a lot of attention on twitter at the moment. If you were to write a tweet about the Titanic movie, you could include a Titanic hashtag in your tweet. An example tweet could be: "Going to see a ship destroyed by an iceberg in 3D. Should be awesome. #Titanic" In this way, you are referring to the titanic, but not actually including it in your sentence. It's a good way to add topics to your tweet, whilst reducing the word count, and keeping up with current trends.

That's it. With all this info at hand you should have a basic idea about twitter, how it works, and how to use it. If you have any questions, please feel free to post in the comments below, and I'll do my best to answer you.

If you liked this post, or found it useful, please feel free to share with your friends to pass the info on using the buttons below.

Google Drive: What is it, and how do I use it?

Google announced recently it's remote storage services called Google Drive. This is similar to the hard drive in your computer, except it's stored on Google's servers remotely, which means for you, you can access your files anywhere you have an internet connection. No more having to carry USB's around for printing documents and sharing files.

The only limitation on the service - which is free to use - is that the storage space is 5GB. If you're only storing documents, then it will more than likely be more than enough, however, if you feel that you need more space, you can upgrade to some paid options of 25GB, 100GB and higher if you need.

Basically, how it works is that the installer, which you can download from the site, creates a folder on your computer which you can then create sub-folders for if you need, or just copy and paste your documents into this folder, and they will automatically be synced to the cloud, or Google's Drive.

Then, when you go to another location, you can just sign in and your files can be seen on the screen, available for download.

Let's get into some screen shots to show what this all means.

Let's quickly go over the boxes.
- Blue: Main menu options, from here you can create, star, share, trash etc. Similar to GMail's main option
- Purple: You can share, organise, delete, and preview documents with this button.
- Orange: Your actual files you have on Google drive. Note that it can read pages, numbers and keynote files created using Mac's iWork suite.
- Green is a link to the file that creates the program on your computer.

Apart from syncing files, you can also create new files, documents, power presentations etc, by clicking the big create button at the top left. You can also upload your files manually too, if you like, by clicking the upload button which is next to the create button.

If you'd like to install the software, Google will set one folder which automatically syncs with the server, so any files in this folder will be on the Google Drive, backed up in the cloud.

I'd recommend saving a project folder as a sub-folder on your drive, so any files you save here are automatically backed up. In this example below, you can see my files are mirrored on my computer as they are created, and automatically sent to the Google Drive application.

That's the basics of Google drive.

If you've got any specific questions, feel free to ask me or make a post in the comments for all to see.


If you liked this post, or found it useful, please feel free to share with your friends to pass the info on using the buttons below.