All Ping

Kids born into the tablet generation are exposed to more gadgets, devices and Internet tools than any other generation before theirs. Toddlers can navigate their way in a mobile device like a duck takes to water but they have little to no way of knowing how to be responsible with what they do to the contents of tablets and smartphones.

Here are 5 tricks you can turn your iOS devices kid-friendly (applicable for iOS 6 and above).

1. Block In-App Purchases

If you have a lot of games on your iOS devices (who doesn’t?) you will need this. With your credit card linked to your Apple ID, you really don’t want to make a purchase as easy as tapping a button, especially when the person tapping it does not understand what a ‘purchase’ means.

To block in-app purchases:

1. Tap on Settings > General > Restrictions.
2. If this is your first time using restrictions feature, tap on Enable Restrictions.
3. You will be asked to set a 4-digit passcode. Enter the passcode twice for confirmation.
4. Scroll down until you see the ‘Allowed Content’ section.
5. Under ‘In-App Purchases’ toggle it OFF.

Future purchases will require the use of the passcode you have just set to proceed.

2. Disable ITunes, Installing & Deleting Apps

If you are afraid that your kids might accidentally delete off some of your apps or download paid apps without you knowing, you can avoid that disabling this feature under iTunes.

To disable app installation and/or deletion:

1. Go to Settings > General > Restrictions.
2. Under Allow, turn OFF iTunes.
3. Turn OFF Installing Apps and/or Deleting Apps.

When you turn all 3 features, the icon for iTunes and App Store will disappear from your home screen, thus making the feature inaccessible.

3. Disable Safari And Protect Data

To make your device more kid-friendly, you can disable more features under the Restrictionsoption. You can toggle OFF Safari, so that your kid can’t visit any website via the browser while they are on the device.

To protect data inside your Mail, Contacts and Calendars, under the ‘Accounts’ section, set your accounts settings to ‘Don’t Allow Changes‘.

4. Set Up YouTube Account

YouTube has a lot of great content for kids and is a favorite place for kids to find animation, music, videos and the likes online. It is best to set up an account for your child. From there, you can make a video playlist of content you think are suitable for their consumption. This will also protect your own playlist from being unintentionally tampered with.

As an added step, before handing the device to the kids to watch, enable Guided Access, so you can disable other parts of the screen to make sure they can’t leave the YouTube app, and wander elsewhere unsupervised.

5. Create ITunes Account

Not only can you give them a YouTube account, you can also create an iTunes account in their name. Then, you can either set an allowance for their app purchases, or gift them the app. With this you can control and monitor what they spend on in iTunes

For children who are more mature with their activities online, this is also a good way to allow them to manage their own set of apps, without a credit card linked to the account. Note that if you are sharing a device with your kid, you will need to swap between accounts.

Summary

The tricks listed above are not foolproof especially against tech savvy kids who will undoubtedly one day outdo you when it comes to handling gadgets and mobile devices. So if the abovementioned methods do not work, you can always fall back on getting them to seek for your permission before they do anything on your devices.

Do note however that keeping your gadgets in working order is not as important as regularlychecking in on your child‘s activities online. Keeping an open communication style allows them to speak to an adult if they have questions, or whenever that need arises.

What about you? What are your methods in handling gadgets around users of much younger ages?

We do almost everything with our smartphones and tablets now including swap multimedia fileswith friends. However, as most of us would subsequently be annoyed to find out, different devices require different formats of the same file to be able to play it properly.

Whether it is a video, music or audio clip, or even just image files, to find compatibility you will need a one-size-fits-all super conversion tool.

Adapter is that converter tool to help you convert videos, audio clips and images to popular and less than popular formats. You will never look at a converter tool the same way again.   

Using Adapter

Get adapter here, it is supported on both Windows and Mac platforms, and it is free. For videos, audio and image conversion, you can do batch conversions instead of converting files one by one.

Check out what conversions Adapter can do for you:

• Video to Video
• Video to Audio
• Video to Image
• Audio to Audio
• Image to Image

Video To Video

When converting videos, Adapter lets you pick the platform you want to convert your videos into. By choosing which platform it will convert the video for, the settings will be optimized to suit the chosen platform.

With this feature, even if you don’t know which formats are the right ones, everything is done for you. You can choose to optimize videos for devices by:

• Apple
• Android
• Sony
• Microsoft
• Nintendo
• Blackberry
• Nokia

Time Cropping

Adapter also has a few handy tools like for example, Time Cropping.

Once you have a video that you want to convert, you can choose to crop the sections of the videos you want and ready them for conversion. This way, you need not waste time converting parts of the video that you don’t want included.

Set the starting point of the video and the ending time and the cropping will occur at the start of the video conversion.

Working Within ITunes

For Apple device owners, Adapter allows you to directly convert and save the video to iTunes, so you can sync the video straight into your devices after the conversion.

Formats

According to settings, the converted video will be converted to the format which is compatible with the platform that you set for. But if you want to convert the files individually to other formats, you can.

Adapter can convert videos from and to:

• MPG
• FLV
• SWF
• AVI
• MP4
• MKV
• GIF

Or you can create custom settings.

Video To Audio

If you need to convert a video to audio, Adapter does that too. The created audio files are saved in MP3, OGG, M4A and M4R format. If those don’t work, you can convert it further in the audio section.

Video To Image

Adapter also has this feature where you can export video frames and save it as an image file. If there is any scene from the video that you want screenshot, just click ‘Export Frame’. The image will be saved in JPEG format.

Audio To Audio

As for audio conversion, you can convert the audio to:

• MP3
• M4A
• AC3
• ACC
• WAV
• OGG
• MKA
• M4R

Similar to the feature for ‘video’, for audio you can cut the video and convert it at the same time. And, the converted audio file can be directly saved into iTunes.

And like other converters, you can adjust the settings for sample rate, bit rate, audio channelsand encoder.

Image To Image

Other than converting videos and audio, Adapter converts images too. It can convert images to:

• BMP
• PNG
• GIF
• TIFF
• JPG

There are only minimal and basic settings for images: you can resize the image and adjust the image quality. Most of the time, that’s enough.

Extra: Download Video

Other than converting, Adapter can download videos from sites like YouTube straight from the application. After loading the video, if you press the ‘video’ tab, the downloaded video will be there. With that, you can get it converted straight instead locating the file and putting it into Adapter.

Limitations

As you can see Adapter is a great converter tool that has almost every conversion required figured out, in one application. But as with all tools, there are some minor limitations.

At the time of this writing, conversions aren’t supported for iPhone 5 yet, only up to iPhone 4S. We believe this is easily rectifiable. Another problem has to do with the video download feature – it isn’t actually working. We got the ad downloaded instead of the video plus the built-in browser doesn’t load very smoothly. But we still love Adapter because it is a conversion machine! Would you try it?

Cloud storage is, shall we say, the current way to store all our files for easy access on multiple devices. It is however, not without its list of pitfalls. While cloud storage is a great concept, we havelimited free space and have to pay for extra (yet rented, not owned) space to store our files in someone else’s servers.

Plug can plug up all those problems while still providing you an effortless way to make your files accessible on all your mobile and desktop devices.

Plug is a small adapter which transforms USB drives to a grouped storage space for your devices. An Internet connection is still required but as all connected devices have access to the same content, users don’t need to manually copy or move their files here and there anymore.

Getting Plug For 24/7 File Access

It is very easy to set up Plug. Connect Plug to a home Internet connection with a LAN cable and connect a USB drive to it. Then, install the Plug app on your devices. And you’re done.

With Plug, all the devices share the same storage. That also means that smartphones and tablets connected with Plug will have a lot more storage to save more pictures, documents and media files.

So what is the difference? For starters, compared to a cloud storage service like Dropbox, Plug doesn’t sync your files, it just groups them all in the same place. The Plug app allows access by any device to that group of files. Applications and system files are automatically ignored.

All other files (pictures, videos, documents, music etc) can be accessed on mobile devices as if the user is on the desktop.

What’s more, Plug also can connect the TV to the mix. With this, we can watch our movies without needing to transfer it from the laptop to the TV manually. Users can set the type of media i.e. video and audio files, they want to make available on the TV.

Need more space? Just connect another USB drive to Plug. The storage space adds up and users can plug in up to 8 USB drives. If you have 1 TB worth of USB drives connected to Plug, that is theamount of storage all your connected devices have, each

For users who seem to accidentally delete items all the time, Plug is a life saver. Every version of a saved document is backed up. If you mess up a document just look up an older version under History and retrieve that version. Plus, users can set a file accessible for offline viewing.

Lastly, if you have always been worried about the security of your files particularly those stored in Cloud, then Plug will lay those worries to rest. Plug uses a private key that is password-protected to authenticate any user found inside your Plug system. This private key is stored in your Plug and devices letting no one except you to access your data.

Plug is available at an affordable one-off price tag of $79 on Kickstarter, USB drives not included, but we’re sure you have a few of those lying around unused. Shipping starts January 2014.