Today we're talking about an application that I am very fond of. I have a love hate relationship with it at times though because I come and go while using it. It's called Castro and it's my podcast app of choice. Now, Castro works on an interesting concept. You use what they call your inbox to add media to your queue. Of course you can go in and listen to an episode whenever you want because across the bottom of the Castro application you have queue inbox library and discover. Typically you'll start in your inbox which will show you the latest episode or episodes of podcasts in your library. You then use your voiceover actions rotor by the way. Explore your rotor I noticed more applications using some rotor functions that you might not think about, but use the actions rotor and you flick down. On an episode, you can play cue, next cue, last clear or drag item. And when you're in the cue tab, you have additional options, for example, to move up cue or move down cue. So once you've queued up the episodes you want to listen to, there's a play button in the middle of the screen towards the bottom that you can use, or you can double tap on the cue button in the bottom left hand corner. Find an episode you want to play and flick down to play and double tap if you're listening to a podcast, no, most of the unmute presents podcasts do not take advantage of them at this time. But if you're listening to a podcast that takes advantage of chapter markers, if you have the paid version of Castro in the now playing screen, you can go into the list of chapters and deselect the chapters that don't sound interesting to you. And then Castro will seamlessly skip. Well, as seamlessly as it can skip to the next chapter for you in the podcast. So if you haven't yet, check out Castro. You can download it for free. Import your podcast from most podcast players. The Apple podcast player doesn't let you export, I don't think, unless they fix that, but download it, check it out, see if it's something you like, and drop us an email and let us know your thoughts.
Hi everyone, I'd like to share a really cool but rather obscure tip that just may come in handy for you while using the Zoom platform. So I was using Zoom back in 2018 before it was really a thing. I would get together on sometimes a weekly basis with a group of folks who were working on improving their businesses and doing some podcasting and such. And it was just a really great group of folks and I learned how to use Zoom. I would fire up my braille display and really just found it so helpful to connect in that way. Fast forward, just before the pandemic, I started a little crafting circle with the ladies at my church and I taught them how to use Zoom and I was kind of the zoom go to at work and it was just really something else. I love using the platform, especially on my phone with my braille display. So imagine my surprise when everything kind of unravels a couple months ago. I am facilitating meetings at work with our team of technology instructors, and so I lead the meeting and everybody let them in and all that sort of thing. And so imagine my surprise when I'm trying to navigate the meeting and this big obnoxious tap to talk button pops up on the screen. Very annoying. I can't navigate the zoom controls, I can't figure out how to get out of it and I have to leave the call and come back and it's just crazy. And I feel very foolish and sheepish as a tech instructor not to be able to navigate my way out of this little mess that I'm in. And I don't know how I got there, which is very frustrating. So I finally got tired of it and yesterday I was doing a little Google searching, our friend Google, and I was looking up how to disable self driving mode because that little button would pop up that I was in self driving mode while using Zoom and it was hard to find in the first place. I thought there was a setting involving self driving mode and that has now been moved to the focus settings section. And so it was definitely not on. So that was really perplexing. Nobody wants me driving and in the middle of the meeting or shortly thereafter, I'm in self driving mode. So I do a little Google search and I find this YouTube video and this person is explaining how in the world do you disable the self driving mode while in Zoom he might have been presenting on how you enable it, but either way, once I found it, I could shut it off. So what you're going to do if this happens to you is you're going to go to the more tab on the bottom of your screen on the right hand side and you're going to find settings. And so when you go into here, there's lots of things settings and this is one of them. This is kind of like a heading. And under here there are a lot of things that you can do. Meetings button, but you first want to double tap on meetings audio. So quite a ways down the list. We're going to hit the jackpot here.
Auto connect audio offs. Mute my microphone. Use original audio. This will video turn off my video. Touch up my appearance, backgrounds and effects, but keep virtual background for aspect ratio. Original hd video mirror my video switch. Show video preview switch picture in picture. Switch button off.
Just as an aside, I did turn that off because I'm very annoyed by picture in picture. It makes it hard to navigate the screen and, you know, it's just useful to the sighted people. So I turned that off in a hurry.
Advanced button general now here's general, this.
Is what the section we're looking for here. It's not a button or it's not anything to double tap, it's just a section.
Always show meeting controls. Switch button off show closed captioning when available show my connected time switch button show name when participants join. Show non video participant ask to confirm when leaving a meeting. Safe driving mode swipe right to disable video and audio when driving switch button off.
There you have it, this self driving mode. If you swipe right, you can disable or enable it. And so what happens is I turned this feature off because it was on. So what it was saying is when I swipe right, I would be turning on safe driving mode. Now, the peculiar thing is that it has interpreted my swipes with voiceover apparently as a swipe right, which I mean, we're all swiping and clicking and tapping and such, you know, so it's, it's kind of a really disruptive setting because somehow Zoom has interpreted my swipe right as my desire to turn on safe driving mode. Not good. So I quickly, as fast as I could with my double tap, turned that sucker off. So now it's the self driving mode. Ability to turn that on with a swipe right is now off. So I would encourage you, unless you really want to activate that setting accidentally, to go in there and turn that off. Now, I don't know whether this is tied to a particular Zoom update. I don't know how it got turned on, but you just might check that setting in case it gets you into a little trouble. So there you have it, a very obscure but absolutely helpful tip on using Zoom with voiceover today, I want to.
Talk to you about a really cool travel device. This is called the Anker Magsafe. Go three in one. This device charges all of your gadgets, phone, AirPods, Apple Watch, all using MagSafe technology. This means everything charges magnetically. It folds down into a really small square and makes it super easy. So you can stick it in any go bag, take it with you in any suitcase, and it's all you would need to charge your phone. AirPods Apple Watch when you take it out, you pull the front up and your phone will magnetically click to the front. Your AirPods will go right in the back on the bottom, and then the watch part folds up from underneath and you can click your watch right onto there and charge all three devices at the same time. The bottom has little rubber feet to prevent sliding on a table or sliding off. It gives it a little bit of a grip so it'll stay in place while you're charging your devices. It has a USB C port right on one side, so you can use any USB c cable and any USB c wall charger. Now to note, this does come with a USB C cable as well as a USB C wall charger. So you have everything you need right out of the box. But you can definitely use other USB C cables that you may have and other USB C wall chargers that you may have as well. It comes in two colors, black or white, so pick whichever one suits you the best. Just make sure that your devices all are capable to charge magnetically. With Magsafe technology. I love the idea of only having to worry about carrying one thing and knowing that I'll be able to charge all the things with one charger, and that's really cool. So check this thing out. It is called the Anker Magsafe go three in one and it's a really awesome little piece of go technology to have with you all the time. Check it out and enjoy.