I took the opportunity to speak to Nichola Bates (@NicholaBates) one of the founding members of CoderDojo Newry and Andrew Leonard (@ASLCreative) a parent who takes his son and asked what is this is all about?

Listen to the podcast below (17:54) or download the MP3 (16.4MB):

Why am I in this predicament?
When I first booted the iPad I did not restore from my previous version and I initially turned iCoud off. This meant that I had a virgin iPad that I then proceeded to load with apps. Some time later I realised that I had no previous notes! There doesn’t seem to be a way to restore notes from a backup that was made on another iOS device, so that means you need to be a little bit creative in your approach to getting to the data.

If like me you have had several iOS devices the chances are you have loads of data backed up on your computer from those devices, but there is no easy way to read this data. You therefore need to install a couple of apps that make this process easy.

Step 1: Download and install iPhone Backup Extractor and MesaSQLite.

Step 2: Launch iPhone Backup Extractor and click on the “Read Backups” button and proceed to choose which backup you wish to recover.  At this point you you need to select the “Extract” button which will ask you to select a target folder to place the extracted files into.

Click on read backups and choose which backup you wish to recover

Select iOS files and extract

Specify where you want the extracted files to go

Step 3: You now need to launch MesaSQLite which you will use to read the data in your iOS backup. If it doesn’t automatically ask “which database would you like to open?” go to File > Open Database and navigate to the folder you extracted your iOS backup to. As we are going to recover notes, you need to navigate to iOS Files > Library > Notes > and choose notes.sqlite

Step 4: Near the top left, where it says “Table Name”, select “ZNOTEBODY” and below that select “ZCONTENT”. Next select “contains” and finally hit “search”. This will return any notes that have been backed up to your Mac. From here, simply double click on the text and copy and paste into a text editor and save your note.

If you know of an easier way to do this please do share your knowledge in the comments below.

Listen to the show below or download the MP3:

Full show notes are available on EamonnMallie.com

Reader in Safari

Through a web browser

Of course one of the easiest routes to take is to go direct to the website, but I find that a laborious task and who can remember to visit all of your favourite sites anyway?

iReader

If you do go direct use “Reader” on Safari to clear away the clutter, it’s that little button in the address bar.
iReader is available for Chrome.

RSS icon

If you recognise this little icon (to the left) you know that you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the site or section. You can use a variety of tools to read RSS feeds from your web browser to your email client, but my preferred approach is to use google reader to manager my feeds and browse through them on the web.

You may also choose to subscribe to email alerts. Hint: we offer an email subscription to this site, it’s right over there to your right
These services generally send you a daily email with either all the latest stories or an editors selection. You should be able to unsubscribe at any time.

flipboard

Apps

Flipboard, exclusively available to iOS users is one of my favourite apps, but the fact it’s not on android means I can’t always use it. Like it’s name suggests, you simply flip the page to reveal the next story. This app is a good all rounder as it integrates with google reader, twitter and facebook, pulls in other feeds as well, saves articles for later and enables discovery. What more could you want? (An Android app )

Pulse

Pulse, not as pretty as flipboard but equally as useful and available across iOS and Android. If you create an account with Pulse you can sync your sources across devices. Adding content is easy, you can either add packs curated by Pulse or add you own favourite news sources. However, there is no google reader integration.

Google Currents

Google Currents surprised me because I tried not to like it, yet it works really well and is one of Google’s better designed apps. Google Currents is a available on both iOS and Android devices, you can add your google reader feeds, discover new sites as well as subscribe to the more mainstream news.

Feedly is once again available on multiple devices and as a chrome extension, but is my favourite app for wading through my RSS feeds on my phone. It connects to your google reader account and pulls in the stories in a magazine style layout and with a simple swipe to the right you navigate to your next story. I use feedly solely with my google reader account as I feel the other apps are better for discovery.

Feedly

Zite is my least favourite of these picks, but it’s good for discovering articles and sites that you would not normally come across. The main reason I don’t like it is because ‘I’m stuck in my ways’! I have spent years curating my own RSS feeds, I know what I like and that’s what I want to read and Zite doesn’t make it easy to read my feeds. However, I can imagine using Zite as a magazine replacement at the airport or at a cafe. It’s one of those apps where you could spend an hour discovery new content.

Zite

All of these apps allow you to share a story with your social media accounts and save them for later. It’s this saving for later that might be making you curious so how do these apps do that?

Simply, they integrate with two other great apps: Pocket & Readability. By sharing or saving an article to these apps you create a list of articles that you want to read at a later date, maybe offline on either your phone or tablet. You can also install browser extensions or bookmarklets that allow you to save an article for later. So for example if I’m reading a long piece (e.g. a preview to the Masters) and I want to come back to it later, I simply click the button in the browser and it magically gets saved to either my pocket or readability account so I can read it later.

Did I mention all of the apps above are free?

Of course, these apps are mainly for reading the news. Tunein radio is a must download in my opinion for both android and iOS. This app will let you listen to both live radio and podcasts while on the move. The BBCs iPlayer app gives you access to both radio and TV and of course no roundup would be complete without including YouTube – yes even YouTube has news channels!

What are your favourite apps for reading the news?

This article originally appeared on EamonnMallie.com

Print
Let’s have a show of hands on who buys a newspaper? Do you actually go into a store and purchase a newspaper? Be honest. If you raised your hand, you are clearly in the minority.
Matthew Symington in his article states “The only constant in print journalism is decline” and continues to argue that “a newspaper with no money would steadily become a stenographer of the rich and powerful, and if this were to happen to our newspapers we’d be better off without them at all.”

Newspapers could vanish over night and I wouldn’t notice. If you consider the monthly ABCs, my friends probably wouldn’t notice either. The fact is, most people don’t buy newspapers.
In a market that is facing declining distribution numbers and declining advertising revenues newspapers have flocked to the internet to provide their content for free to anyone with access to a web browser. Madness. In an instant, newspapers have devalued their product in the hope that they will compete with alternative ‘news’ websites such as blogs and industry specific forums. Today it is difficult to measure the real value to our society of print news.

The rise of the paywall

Rising up to challenge this free nature of news are papers such as the Irish News who do not provide free online access to their content. To read the Irish News, you either buy the paper or subscribe to their online edition. That is what you call a business model and demonstrates a company that is sticking to its strategy of providing premium news.

What is premium news? In this case premium (a newspaper website that establishes a paywall) does not mean or imply better, it simply means you pay to access content.
Is the news that is reported in the Irish News better than the news reported in the Belfast Telegraph? That will be a matter of opinion, but the fact remains that I can pretty much read everything that is produced in the Irish News, somewhere else. I’ll probably have to go to several different sources and wait a period of time, but that content will eventually appear. The question then becomes, am I willing to pay for convenience?
Exclusive opinion pieces are another carrot often dangled before our eyes. Again it depends on how much you value those opinions. I would argue that professional analysis is worth paying for, but I can easily create a counter argument: that opinion can be found, analysed and debated, on countless forums and blogs the world over. This crowd sourced approach will inevitably provide a more interesting read.

The internet provides a massive opportunity for us as users. In this world we have access to pretty much anything we want at a time and place that is convenient to us. The user then becomes the editor. I choose what I want to read. I choose when I want to read the story. I choose how I want to read the story.

TV and Radio

Where does television and radio fit into this equation?
I point the finger straight at these guys for slowly but surely killing the newspaper. We don’t “pay” for news on either the TV or radio and this created the notion that news is free. Arguably these platforms are more convenient than print and offer better content in the form of programming. So why aren’t the newspapers creating online news channels? Why aren’t they trying to compete?

I’ll be perfectly honest, I don’t remember the last time I watched the 6 o’clock news or any other news bulletin that wasn’t on Sky Sports News. Multi channel TV, digital radio and the internet have created so much choice for me as an individual that mainstream news has no place in my daily routine. This wasn’t always the case. I was raised on the news. First my Dad made us watch the national news, then it was the local news and then it was more local / national news. You see we (and I mean I) didn’t have Sky or the internet back then. The year was 1995!

Radio almost seems forgotten about these days, yet it’s reach (46.7 million adults each week) is staggering. I rarely listen to live radio, instead I prefer to get my radio via podcasts. This allows me to listen to my favourite shows when and where I want. The advancement of smartphones has made the process much more straightforward, but you can buy radios with onboard recording facilities and an EPG e.g. the Pure Bug (my bedside radio). Listening to online radio also opens the doors to niche broadcasting and eliminates the risk associated with traditional stations i.e. I hear what interests me. It is this phenomenon that can be attributed to the decline in local radio news.

So how do I consume news?
The inspiration for this article is thanks to a conversation I had with a chap about how you can use RSS feeds to gather all of your news into one app on your iPad. “You’ve no need to visit their website” I said, only to be greeted with a blank response. It became abundantly clear in that one conversation that many people could be more efficient at consuming news.

In my life news is broken down into genres, mainly tech, science, sport & business. I use these interests to drive my consumption. Inevitably this means that I consume news from multiple sources. Back in the dark ages (I refer to this time as pre-iPad) I used Google Reader to subscribe to various RSS feeds and so Google Reader became my news aggregator. I could log in and read my news when I wanted to. Even though this is really straightforward I understand that few people actually know or understand RSS. Move forward to today and clever app developers have understood that normal people don’t quite get RSS and this has resulted in an explosion of news curation apps for mobile devices.
I primarily read news on the iPad with the Flipboard app. I’ll be addressing how you can consume news on the iPad and other mobile devices in a separate article, but here is a brief overview.
Within flipboard I can add my google reader subscriptions, I can search by topic, I can refine by platform, in other words, if the content is online I’m pretty much guaranteed access to it from within flipboard.
With flipboard I have my twitter feed, my RSS feeds and any other content that might interest me all conveniently packaged together in one app, which makes it incredibly easy to consume the news.

News is not dead
It is easy to say that news is in decline, but the opposite is actually true. While one form of news distribution is facing a challenge other platforms are booming and we must remember that there is one constant in all of this: there are people who will always want to tell the story and there will always be people willing to listen. News is not dead, it has just evolved.

Listen to the show below

Read the show notes on EamonnMallie.com

Listen to the show below:

Read the show notes on EamonnMallie.com

One of only eight UK universities selected to become a Centre of Excellence, Queen’s will benefit the UK by:

• Enhancing the UK’s cyber knowledge base through original research
• Providing top quality graduates in the field of cyber security
• Supporting GCHQ’s cyber defence mission
• Driving up the level of innovation

Queen’s, as part of the award, will receive £50,000 to further develop its work in this area and along with the other seven Centres of Excellence will help make the UK government, business and consumers more resilient to cyber attack by extending knowledge and enhancing skills in cyber security.

Continue reading the article

Listen to the show below:

Read the show notes on EamonnMallie.com

Listen to the show:

Read the show notes on EamonnMallie.com