Martin Bailey appeared on Talk Radio with hosts Andy Jaye and Tamer Afsahani on December 9th to talk about the second edition of his book, The Useful Book of Gadgets, Gizmos and Apps. 

Arguably one of the biggest phone launches this year has two debates raging – paying £1000 for a phone and ‘the notch’. So, the question is, should you spend a lot of hard-earned cash on the iPhone X?

As a self-confessed terrible cook that can burn water and famously broke a blender trying to blend mashed potatones (true story!), can Weber's Q2200 barbecue help me to produce food that neither cremated or lethal?

Here in the UK air conditioning is not common-place in the home, as the climate doesn't warrant it and they are often noisy and almost always expensive. A fan only offers momentary relief when the mercury starts to rise, so once again crowd-funding comes to the rescue to offer an elegant solution in the form of the beautifully crafted Geizeer ice cooler.

Backups; We know that we should be doing them regularly, but the fact of the matter is that many of us only consider this retrospectively once the data is lost. In the past backing up used to be limited to just your computer, but most people now have multiple devices – PCs, laptops, tablets and mobiles – all of which store precious data in the form of videos, pictures, emails and documents.

The question you have to ask yourself is this: If I lost my PC/laptop/tablet/phone right now what exactly would I lose? If the answer is too painful to contemplate then read on!

Before we look at individual device types we should explore the different types of backups you can make. Note that this is not an exhaustive guide – merely something to point you in the direction of popular solutions.

What is important is that you should always have more than one backup type, just in case one fails. It also needs to become routine – set a dedicated time to perform backups if you cannot automate them.

St Valentine’s Day is not one traditionally associated with technology, but everyone needs someone to love, and you can show that special nerdy person in your life how much you care with these suitably geeky gifts.