Just occasionally everyone raves about a piece of software and I really don't get it. I never got Pinterest or Instagram, for instance. In those cases it's just that they aren't really useful to me - but the service I'm struggling with here really feels like it's something that should be valuable. And time after time I go to it, think hmm... and get nowhere. It's called IFTTT , short for If This Then That, and its role is to automate those trivial repetitive tasks we find ourselves doing. The concept is simple but powerful. You have a trigger, which is something happening on anyone of 82 services (or 'channels' as IFTTT confusingly calls them), such as email or Facebook or Evernote, etc. etc. When that something happens, IFTTT automatically carries out an instruction. It could be to send you a text, or perform a task in another service. Examples work better than the abstract with this kind of thing. You can write your own 'recipes', but IFT...

A Barclaycash slip - lug holes either end of blue strip On a university tour with one of my daughters the other day, after an hour of trying (and often failing) to make out what a 'student ambassador' with an impossibly thick accent was saying, I stopped at a cash machine and was overcome by a sudden wave of nostalgia. The thing is, I first used a cash machine when I was at university. But, children, we are not talking cash machines as you know them today. There was no plastic card involved. This was Barclaycash, a cross between an ATM and a chequebook. You put the slip in drawer 1, entered your pin and opened drawer 2 Customers were issued with a book of little slips and a PIN. The slips were for fixed amounts of money and had to be located on little lugs before the machine ate them and spat out the cash. Or, rather, you opened a drawer and there was cash waiting. (I had forgotten until seeing the example above that you signed the slip, just like a cheque.) Ah, h...

I seem to have posted a string of rants lately. Perhaps it's something to do with it being half term this week (parents will understand). So here we are, fresh and revitalized(ish) on a Monday morning, and I think it's time to take on the bankers. No, not about the ridiculous bonuses earned by those in certain sectors of the business. Nor even about their abysmal handling of world finances leading to the recession. This is more practical everyday stuff. When will banks learn that weekends are trading days? The high street banks make a pretence of being open on Saturdays. Some even open their branches on Sundays (though not many). But this is a zombie-like facade. Underneath everything is dead. Can anyone explain to me why it is that electronic transactions made over the weekend don't go through until Monday? Is there something special about banks' computers that mean they have to rest over the weekend? Despite all the so-called modernization and the ability to put t...