Ask the Bear & Badger - The Bear and Badger

Yossarian

One thing worth remembering is that they don’t offer Bluetooth. If you’ve got an Android, it should be fine as the dongle will work, but there’s no way to get audio from an iPhone through them, annoyingly.

Nina

Yeah Android phone here. We do have an iPhone from B's work but I only use that to play Pokemon Go with my brother's account.

I think that even if I didn't want to use the dongle in Android I can use the audio cable to connect to phone. But we have 3 different Beyer Dynamics for music so I can't see myself using the steelseries often. Could be good for calling I guess but that's the lowest of priorities.

afgavinstan

Doing a housing application and need some help. They've got a 15-page form that was a pdf that's been printed and filled out. They also need (from both of us) 3mth bank statements which are separate pdfs for me, 3mth payslips each of which will be scanned in, and scans of my passport and drivers licence.

So, what is the best and easiest way to collate all this together in one document? Word? My own pdf? Trying to do all this on my phone which probably isn't helping.

Yossarian

Definitely not Word.

Personally, I’d attach them all separately, but if you can merge them into one PDF which isn’t so large that it can’t be emailed, you could do that.

Failing that, Dropbox links.

GooberTheHat

Microsoft office lens.

It lets you scan in multiple pages using your phone camera and save it as a single PDF and/or word doc, and also as separate jpg/PNG images.

afgavinstan

Oh, I opened office there and seen it put the camera scanning front and centre. These things pretty accurate? If it makes just how much I spend in the work canteen a lil blurry I won't mind.

I'll get to it. Thanks both.

Yossarian

I scan most things that need scanning with my phone camera these days. Never had any complaints about the quality from that.

GooberTheHat

afgavinstan wrote:

Oh, I opened office there and seen it put the camera scanning front and centre. These things pretty accurate? If it makes just how much I spend in the work canteen a lil blurry I won't mind.

I'll get to it. Thanks both.

Very accurate, and does character recognition too so it will create an editable document if you want it to.

poprock

I would do separate PDFs/JPGs for each of those items, clearly named and dated. Unless they specifically asked for it all in one document.

There’s a really good official phone app called Adobe Scan for taking photos, correcting them, and saving as PDFs.

afgavinstan

They didn't specify either way tbh. I'll do one for the completed application, and one for all supporting docs?

Mad dash cos I ran out of printer paper. Of all the times. Hmph. Now off to work!

Kow

IIovepdf.com is a free website that will let you merge pdfs together into one document. I use it all the time, outs very useful.

Blue Swirl

Why do I get completely different results when doing an image search in Google versus from inside Google Slides?

Kow

Maybe Slides only gets certain sizes or aspect ratios?

b0r1s

Cos Google will be looking at context. There is going to be an algorithm looking at use case. It may strip a lot of stuff it thinks is either not relevant for someone creating a presentation or it may also be looking at IP protection and wants to be seen to be reducing the ease with which people can steal copyrighted material for use in presentations. Are you seeing, for example, less topical results in Slides vs Google? If so that could due to the latter.

Google is also always testing on us and will be looking at how people use search and their products. It may have refined things already based on other user engagement.

For images I tend to use Unsplash.

Blue Swirl

Kow wrote:

Maybe Slides only gets certain sizes or aspect ratios?

Oh, perhaps.

b0r1s wrote:

It may strip a lot of stuff it thinks is either not relevant for someone creating a presentation or it may also be looking at IP protection and wants to be seen to be reducing the ease with which people can steal copyrighted material for use in presentations. Are you seeing, for example, less topical results in Slides vs Google?

This seems like a reasonable hypothesis. I wouldn't say "less topical" though. I was doing a search for "ten items or less" for a class on (un)countable nouns. (Some milk versus a lot of bottles, yadda yadda yadda.) When I did it in vanilla Google I got the signs you see in stores that set OCD types like myself off. When I did it inside Slides it was almost random. I'd defy anyone to identify the search term from the images I got.

I'll give Unsplash a go. Never even heard of that, cheers much.

davyK

Kow wrote:

IIovepdf.com is a free website that will let you merge pdfs together into one document. I use it all the time, outs very useful.

These services are very handy but dont use them for anything that has personal/finance info. There is no way of knowing what is being done with the content.

There are instances of some of these being honey pots to harvest info.

pantyfire

davyK wrote:

Kow wrote:

IIovepdf.com is a free website that will let you merge pdfs together into one document. I use it all the time, outs very useful.

These services are very handy but dont use them for anything that has personal/finance info. There is no way of knowing what is being done with the content.

There are instances of some of these being honey pots to harvest info.

Doesn’t the free version of Acrobat allow you to add pages to a PDF?

Kow

davyK wrote:

Kow wrote:

IIovepdf.com is a free website that will let you merge pdfs together into one document. I use it all the time, outs very useful.

These services are very handy but dont use them for anything that has personal/finance info. There is no way of knowing what is being done with the content.

There are instances of some of these being honey pots to harvest info.

No, I wouldn't use it for anything very personal. But it doesn't need a log in or email address or anything and I use it through a browser that blocks cookies etc. so it should be ok.

davyK

@Kow - as long it isn't for anything personal.

It will be submitting the docs to a server somewhere to do the processing so there is no way of knowing if it's being scanned for certain content or even being copied.

I'd be especially suspicious of free services. Those things are free for a reason.

Sadly, you just cannot be too careful now.

We had someone in work using a fancy signature generator for emails. Turns out every time an email was sent there was a query off to a web server somewhere to download the signature. It was also gathering contact list details.

So if you sent an email with that sig, your contacts were copied. Then if whomever you sent it to forwarded it on, their contacts were copied too. Crazy stuff.

poprock

The classic example is downloading a free torch app for your phone – as in, an app that just switches on the camera flash so you can use it as a torch – and not realising that the app also scrapes every piece of data it can from your phone and sends it off to a database to aggregate and sell on for profit. Your contact book, location history, SMS logs, chat history, etc etc.

Kow

I don't know about iPhone but at least on Android you're going to have to agree to that before you install. I guess a lot of people just click yes.

davyK

IPhone apps are vetted before being published. They are far less likely to be malignant but of course that is no guarantee.

poprock

Kow wrote:

I guess a lot of people just click yes.

Bingo. How many T&Cs statements have you just scrolled past and agreed to without reading?

Kow

I generally don't click yes to anything without at least looking at the permissions. I am totally prepared to click no on every box on every website looking for cookie permissions. The bastards.

Blue Swirl

davyK wrote:

IPhone apps are vetted before being published. They are far less likely to be malignant but of course that is no guarantee.

Yup. Apple isn't going to go through every line of code and test every possible situation with every app. Just ask people who used Path.

cockbeard

The new Android 12 going is really good for this. I'm using the beta at the minute, and every app has to tell me if it wants to do something other than normal. Plus I get a green notification on the screen whenever the camera or microphone are being accessed, I click the dot it tells me what app is doing it. Then I can change the permissions for that app to "this time only" to stop it being sneaky on the future

Yossarian

One of those rare occasions when there’s a new feature coming to Android which iOS users have taken for granted for years.

Good to hear it’s coming at least.

cockbeard

How long you been waiting to say that

edit: that said, I've never noticed the iPhone do that, where does it tell me when the camera or microphone are being accessed?? Might bey lack of apps on there but I'd missed it

Yossarian

Little dot above the signal strength indicator on my iPhone X.

davyK

Blue Swirl wrote:

IPhone apps are vetted before being published. They are far less likely to be malignant but of course that is no guarantee.

Yup. Apple isn't going to go through every line of code and test every possible situation with every app. Just ask people who used Path.

yeah - Apple probably run new apps in some sort of test harness environment or emulator that detects OS calls, kernel calls, storage access, location services access etc. but there's probably ways of fooling that. Apple is far better at this and will improve but it's always going to be risky, especially for free apps.

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