01792211844 Annoying calls to new phone

I recently bought a new phone (Nexus 4) and have not given out the details to anybody, except Apple. Today I received an annoying automated call informing me of money I could possibly be owed (PPI insurance most likely). This was obviously some sort of scam, but how did they get my number? There are 2 companies which I have allowed to know my number intentionally, which are Apple and of course my phone supplier Vodafone.

After looking into who might have my number, which now seems to be anyone, my conclusion if that my phone number has been retrieved from one of the apps I have downloaded recently. These apps can access my phone information and send it back to the company or individual, then they will sell it on. So these free apps from android can take information from your phone and sell it on.

Here is a list of possible suspects

• Lazors
• Flow free
• Real Racing 3
• Logo Quiz

It could be none of these, but somehow someone has got my new phone number and sold it on.

Screen Capture MAC

I use both Windows and Apple computers and I needed to find the best way to capture an area of the screen on my iMac. I thought I needed something like Cropper which I use in Windows, but have discovered iOS has it built in. Here are the following capture options I have discovered:

1. To capture an area of the desktop, press cmd+shift+4, this will give you a cross hair where you can select and area of the screen, this will save the image as a png file on the desktop.
2. To capture a application screen, press cmd+shift+4, to display the cross hair again, now hit the space bar and the icon will change to a camera and will select areas of the desktop.
3. To capture the whole desktop, press cmd+shift+3.

I thought this was great that Apple has included these features in iOS, I bet I will find some more useful features the more I use iOS.

How to Access Android files on Mac

I recently purchased a Nexus 4 phone, over the past couple of months I have been taking photos and video and wanted to transfer them to my iMac. I thought I would simply need to plug in the phone into the USB port and it would see the files, this is how it is done on Windows PC. At first I was a bit worried that because it was not Apple, and I had an awful feeling it would not work. But after doing some research all you need to do is download the Android File Transfer application, install it and you can see the files on your Nexus 4 phone.

Pomodoro technique using RicRac Stopwatch

As a software developer I have been looking at possible ways to increase productivity, recently I have spent a couple of days looking at the time management technique called Pomodoro. The basic process is to do increments of work which last for 25 minutes and then have a 5 minute break these are called pomodoros, then after 4 pomodoros you take a longer break of about 20 minutes. 

To do this I downloaded the RicRac Stopwatch, installed it and made a second copy by coping the directory, this then gave me 2 copies which I could have 2 different settings for, the first with a 25 minute countdown and the second with a 5 minute countdown. RicRac stopwatch worked well doing this, the issues I had was with the technique itself, my main criticism of the technique is that I work in an open plan office, and people constantly interrupt, which breaks the increments. For this technique to work I think I would need to be in a quite office or work from home.