If your old computer breaks and it’s just not worth repairing, the problem arises of how to access your data. Getting the drive out of the old PC is usually pretty easy, even on a laptop, but trying to then transplant that drive into a new machine presents a whole new realm of problems.

I’ve been wanting to try out SiriProxy for some Arduino home automation projects, but I refuse to buy a new phone when my iPhone 4 is still working just fine. But then I realized; I have Siri already, on my iPad 3. Surely I could use that? Indeed you can. So in this tutorial I’ll walk you through getting SiriProxy working with your iPad 3 and Mac OSX.

Last time, I showed you a few ways of making your Arduino projects speech controlled via SiriProxy, OS X’s built-in speakable items, and some Automator scripting, or even a dedicated voice recognition hardware chip. I left you with a quick demo of me turning on my lights, but didn’t explain how I achieved that on the hardware side. Let’s look today at how you can control high power devices – like your kettle, or some floor lamps.

I’m really starting to love my Arduino lately; having gone through the basic tutorials and even made an LED cube, I was ready to tackle something far more complex. Fortunately, speech controlling an Arduino project really isn’t as complex as I’d thought – so here are 3 distinctly different approaches you can take.

jQuery is a client-side scripting library that nearly every modern website uses – it makes websites interactive. It’s not the only Javascript library, but it is the most developed, most supported, and most widely used. It’s one of the building blocks of any modern website. But what exactly is jQuery, what makes it so popular, and why should you care about it if you’re starting out as a web developer?

Times are tough, and as society moves increasingly towards digital services and everything online, there is never a lack of jobs for those with tech skills. If you’re sitting there thinking “you know, I really ought to learn some new skills”, then peruse this list and find something that appeals to you. You never know – [...]

Moves is a new iPhone app designed to track your activity – running, walking, and cycling – over the course of a full day. It’s free, and requires no additional devices. The only requirement is that it remains running in the background. You can download Moves from the iTunes store. When the app is running (either in the background or foreground), it uses the accelerometer to measure steps taken during walking or running movements, and GPS to track routes.

Last week, I looked at apps that genuinely help you sleep better by waking up at a moment when you’ll feel most refreshed. This week, I found an app that does all of that, and goes one step further – it actually claims to influence your dreams. Dream:ON is a freemium app, and available now in the iTunes App Store.

If you’ve got a company database full of product data, connecting that data to a barcode system can be incredibly useful. Perhaps your warehouse workers need a quick way of looking up the product location, or maybe they need to quickly find out the purchase price for a full box and not by unit. Whatever the situation, integrating barcode reading facilities can be an expensive and arduous task, but it doesn’t have to be.

I’ve always been a bit of a sleep experimenter, having for much of my life kept a meticulous dream diary and studied as much as I could about sleeping in the process. There are a number of apps now on both iOS and Android that claim to help you sleep better by waking you up at a good time. Let me explain how these apps can make such bold claims, and examine if they actually work. You might be surprised.

I’m a big fan of gamification, truth be told. I’d even go so far as to say our entire society should be gamified, with pleasures in life reserved as rewards those who actually contribute. Apparently that makes me a communist or something. But I digress; I’ve tried a variety of gamified systems for fitness and generally “getting things done”, and here’s how it worked out.

Fueled by a desire to take better photos, last year I got myself a nice DSLR for Christmas. I’m certainly no photography expert – but I did take the time learn a few tips I could immediately use to take substantially better photos. Some of these tips can be applied to any photo – not just using a DSLR – so even if you have a point and shoot or a camera on your smartphone, then it’s worth reading these.

I can’t say I’ve been entirely happy with having switched to Android – poor battery life, lack of system updates and general bugginess of my HTC One X being my main issues – but I heard a custom ROM could go some way to making me a happier Android owner. I therefore spent the afternoon trawling through forums, learning how to do the complete installation process from a stock phone, and I’m compiling that here.

As a technology professional, there a few things I consider as absolute essentials: a laptop, WiFi connection, and a cup of coffee. While some of us are content with intravenously injecting ever increasing amounts of ground instant coffee granules (or just drinking it, whatever), some of you no doubt go for the altogether more classy Starbucks. And then there are of those of us who hate Starbucks, but like good coffee, and wish we could have the Starbucks taste at home. This, dear readers, is where a Bosch Tassimo coffee machine comes in handy; and we’re giving one away at the end of this review.

You’ve bought an Arduino starter kit, you’ve followed all the basic guides, but now you’ve hit a stumbling block – you need more bits and bobs to realise your electronics dream. Luckily, if you have an Arduino board, you can simply stack functionality on top in the form of Shields. Shields are specifically designed for the Uno board to be the same shape and pin alignment; you simply plug them on, and you have instant upgrade of functionality.