Well, my friend and colleague Ian Forrester has done just that. Techgrumps is recorded (almost) every Sunday and is an opportunity to express your grumps about tech. Anyone’s welcome to come on and contribute. All you need is to think of something to “rant” about and the conversation flows from there. You don’t even have to be that geeky or techie: recent rants include YouTube monetisation and the lack of diversity at some tech conferences.

It might sound a bit “grumpy old men” – okay, it sounds exactly like that – but actually it tends to come across as an irreverent, somewhat comedic podcast that you can enjoy yelling at and disagreeing with from the comfort of your own home.

Listen to the last episode (Techgrumps 44) below or here:

So, if you fancy guesting on Techgrumps, drop us a tweet using the hashtag #techgrumps and get ready for the recording on Skype, Sunday nights at 10 pm.

Now that iOS 5 has finally come out of beta, I’ve been having fun setting it up on a number of Apple devices at home and work. By waiting until Thursday morning to install it, I seem to have avoided the issues reported by some users at launch. Everything downloaded smoothly and was verified by Apple’s servers without delay.

One of the features I’ve been most interested in seeing deployed on a wide scale is iMessage, which is Apple’s answer to BBM (BlackBerry Messenger). iMessage allows users of all iOS 5 devices like iPhones, iPads and iPods to exchange short messages, pictures and audio or video. It should be automatically set up for iPhone users, acting as a transparent SMS replacement to friends with iOS 5. On iPad and iPod Touch devices, iMessage needs an email address registered with Apple so that other users can get hold of you.

I had a go at setting up iMessage for Melbourne – so if you want to get hold of us, send us an iMessage: inbox@melbourne.co.uk.

iMessage is just another way we’re trying out for people to get in touch. It’s probably best to stick to the usual support channels for directed responses, but if you just want to say hi or ask a quick question, then go ahead and drop us an iMessage.

Printer drivers don’t keep up, perhaps because of the endless variants created mostly to sell ink cartridges, toners and other useless add-ons.

Unfortunately, Mac OS X Lion does not include drivers for the Samsung ML-1210, a cheap old black and white laser printer that I bought years ago. I should’ve remembered this as I had the same problem on OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard. The following solution works on all those variants:

In common with other variants of OS X, Lion supports CUPS – the Common Unix Printing System. This means that generic open-source drivers are available to use that enable Lion (and indeed Leopard, and Snow Leopard) to successfully print using this printer.

There are three separate pieces of software to install, including the driver, but all can be found at this page on the Linux Foundation website.

Essentially, you need to download each Disk Image listed (Samsung GDI, Foomatic-RIP and GPL-GS) and run the installer inside each one.

Once you’ve done this, open System Preferences and then click Print & Scan. Click on the small + icon on the left which should bring up the Add Printer dialog box. Samsung ML-1210 should already be listed and, under ‘Print using the Samsung ML-1210 Foomatic/gdi driver should already be selected.

Click ‘Add’ and the printer will be added to the list of available printers on your system. Sorted!

Let’s take a quick step back – remember, Foursquare is more than just a game or a tool to announce your location. It’s a social recommendation engine: it lets people find out where their trusted friends and contacts hang out and allows them to share tips and advice about places, from where’s good to eat, to special offers. I wrote a blog post primer on this titled How to win Foursquare friends and influence people.

Why is this new? Until recently, Foursquare had a lengthy and manual process for approving your brand on Foursquare and many organisations nominated an individual to be followed instead who could be their ambassador.

Now, to create a Foursquare brand page, all you need is your brand’s Twitter account, some logos, at least five tips and in about half an hour, you could be up and running and being featured in Foursquare’s page gallery. I had a go this afternoon setting up a page for #smc_mcr in Manchester and came up with some ideas for you to harness the power of Foursquare pages.

Creating a page is a bit like using making a Facebook page. You log in with your own personal Foursquare account and then create the Foursquare brand page. You can then ‘act as’ that Foursquare brand page while setting up the page and leaving tips.

Just one word of warning: if your brand or organisation already has a Twitter account linked to a personal Foursquare account, you won’t be able to create a Foursquare page for it using that Twitter account. If this happens, just un-associate (dissociate!) the brand Twitter account from the existing Foursquare account before you try and create a page.

So, once you’ve got your page set up, what can you use it for? Pages let you do two things: leave tips at locations and ‘check-in’ to a location as a brand. Here’s some ideas for how you can use both:

1. Invite users to your stores or physical location

Foursquare’s all about recommending places, so why not recommend your own? Leave a tip inviting someone to pop in for a cuppa, browse your shop or have a chat. Digital technology often works best when it enables unexpected positive real-world interaction, so make it happen. Even if they don’t take you up on that offer, at least people will remember that there’s a physical location nearby.

It’s even better if you’ve registered any relevant locations and have added “Special Offers”. Also, some cities like Manchester, have a scheme which means that venues can opt-in to allow people to use their toilets for free. This is another idea for a tip and invaluable to know if you need to spend a penny in town!

A note about tips: your tips pop-up on someone’s screen when they check-in nearby, if they’re following you. They also pop-up if they’re not following you, but only if there are no other unread tips from their friends nearby.

Make sure you check-in whenever you visit one of your venues or offices too.

2. Leave tips about things you already like doing

Being on Foursquare is means you’re part of a community of people sharing advice, so get involved. As a brand or organisation, are there fun places that your staff or employees like to hang out? Where do you go for lunch, or a drink after work? Tell Foursquare and tell us why – is it a cheap place to get your daily bread or does it have a great vibe to wind down after a long day in the office?

You could also leave tips relevant to the type of location. For example, is there a really useful information resource that someone should check out?

This is a great way to engage in the general conversation – after all, it’s what most people on Foursquare tend to do. If you have staff parties or outings, then you can check-in to those venues using the Foursquare app. It’s a good way of showing that you represent real people who do ordinary things. And, it’s a great way to spread the love in your local neighbourhood.

3. Holding an event? Let everyone know how to get involved

This is a no-brainer: if you’re having an event that people might be interested in, let them know by dropping a tip at the location. It’s a simple way to promote your event and spread the word to those who might not even know you’re doing something in the area. When the event starts, you can also check-in to the location as a page and tweet that you’re there and it’s going ahead.

This is especially good for community-based events or non-profits, but equally for one-off visits to town by brands like pop-up fashion sales or book-signings. Make sure you add a web link and a Twitter hashtag to your tips and check-ins, so someone can tweet it straightaway.

4. Avoid disparaging tips about competitors (leave that to the punters!)

“My burritos are better than their burritos”. While this may be true, it’s not really the place of a brand or organisation to leave negative comments about the competition. Yes, there are negative tips on Foursquare, but what individual users do is up to them (and will carry far more weight than seeing effectively a self-serving tip.

5. Go global

With Foursquare, your brand or organisation can have a presence way beyond the locality you’re based. Say you’re a non-profit sponsoring projects overseas: leave a tip near there letting local users know how you’ve helped and how they can get involved. If you’re a manufacturing brand or cottage industry, why not leave tips near where you source your raw materials? Or, if you’re a sports team with a global following, let people know where you can meet other fans.

It could be interesting for those local users to know just how far something travels and where it’s used, and it helps raise awareness of your online brand. And of course, if you go travelling or exploring new places, check-in as your brand wherever you go and say what you’ve seen and how it influences your business.

In conclusion, try to make your use of Foursquare relevant, quirky and interesting: plain, irrelevant ad-spam is an instant turn-off and can lead to a negative response on Twitter.

Also, set up your page quickly! Don’t worry if it’s not perfect: I’ve no doubt that we’ll see these pages mushroom, just like they do on Facebook, and it’s best to put something up quicker than it is to wait around to see what happens.

Go ahead and try setting up your brand page now. Do you have any other good ideas for how to use Foursquare pages? Leave a comment below.

Unfortunately, like Christmas, this can mean your eating habits suffer. Whilst attending a barbecue chez @cubicgarden last weekend, I discovered an interesting Twitter based app called Food Feed, which bills itself as an easy and simple way to track your food habits.

Using Food Feed is very simple. You just need to go to the Food Feed website and sign-in with your Twitter account. Then all you have to do is follow @having and start tweeting.

By tweeting “@having” at the start of your tweets, Food Feed can aggregate all your food tweets in one place, which means you can find them at foodfeed.us/username (like mine). Adding a picture in to your food tweets can make it more memorable or sum up a large meal!

You can share this public feed with anyone you want – your doctor, nutritionist or even your mother. It’s a great way to link up with other people eating the same kinds of foods for inspiration or, in my case, to improve my eating habits and put all my food tweets into once place. If your friend on Twitter following @having too, they can see your food tweets without it interfering with your wider stream.

Unfortunately, Food Feed doesn’t offer much more than a simple search and aggregation tool. It would be great to see it integrated with an app like Meal Snap that estimates the calories in your meal through a photograph. However, the downside of using Meal Snap is that you have to photo every item of food and the data gets sent to Daily Burn, rather than being quite as simple and easy to share as Food Feed.

Check out Food Feed for free and see if it could be useful for you.

Also, buying a Mac can be a relatively large investment, particularly for students – so you don’t want to junk it every time Apple release an upgrade. Of course, it’s not just the processor and RAM – what if you don’t have a newer glass trackpad with multi-touch, or an SSD?

So what does today’s launch of Mac OS X Lion mean for users of older Mac hardware?

Firstly, the minimum system requirements are very similar to OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The most important change is that you’ll need at least an Intel Core 2 Duo to run Lion. This means users with the very first generation of Mac and Intel hardware (Core Solo/Core Duo) are excluded from the upgrade. Also, while you can get away with running Lion on 2 GB RAM, experience from Snow Leopard suggests 4 GB is a comfortable minimum for multi-tasking.

You’ll also have to be running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, version 10.6.8 to install Lion. Even if you want to do a clean install, you must download Lion via the App Store first and then follow the various guides.

This morning, I took the plunge and installed Mac OS X Lion on my late-2007 MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM). It wasn’t a clean upgrade – in fact, I’ve upgraded it from Tiger to Leopard (on launch day) and then to Snow Leopard. The upgrade process was pretty smooth and didn’t require any input from me. A little over half an hour later, I was presented with the smooth iOS-style login screen.

Login was characteristically a slow experience – this is one thing that could be quicker, but I do have a number of apps that I set to launch on login, like Twitter for Mac, Chrome and the usual like Dropbox etc. Experience suggests a reboot and login is a pretty rare occurrence, so I’ve never been bothered by this.

However, this is where the problems seemed to start: Chrome was slow, sluggish. Twitter was updating slowly and I could hear my hard drive clunking away. Opening Activity Monitor, my processor usage wasn’t particularly high, but my hard drive was being ragged fairly hard.

In retrospect, this wasn’t too surprising – I had just installed a near 4 GB update to my operating system. A bit of advice from Twitter and this article rightly identified that it was simply Spotlight re-indexing my hard drive; given that it’s not particularly large, this only took about 15 minutes before things seemed to return to normal.

Beyond that, there don’t appear to be any major performance issues, despite the fact that my Mac will be at least initially transparently rebuilding its caches and defragmenting key operating system files. So far, I can’t use any new gestures as I don’t have a multi-touch trackpad. I’ve also turned off the iOS “scroll wheel” style scrolling through System Preferences (it’s labelled “Content moves in the direction of finger movement on touch-pad or mouse”). I guess if I ever start using my Magic Mouse again, I might change this, but for now, this isn’t something new I want to learn. Users desperate for gestures may benefit from a Magic Trackpad.

As for other new features, Mission Control works smoothly and as expected, unifying my ill-used Spaces and application windows. I also like the fact that Dashboard widgets appear in their own space (you can turn this off).

I haven’t seen much evidence of iOS-style ‘instant’ switching to apps, though Word for Mac 2011 and Photoshop CS3 did both bring up the last few documents and images that I worked on when I quit and restarted the apps. The Launchpad also works smoothly, but for me, this feature is far less useful than using a launcher like QuickSilver as a launcher/Spotlight replacement. Launchpad is marginally quicker than using the Finder to launch apps, but QuickSilver’s “double-tap and type” is much quicker and targeted than Launchpad’s full-screen browsing of all my forgotten apps.

But what about the other bundled apps with Lion – like the new Mail, iCal and all the other small upgrades? As a user of Sparrow, I don’t foresee using the Mail app, which shares many similarities with Sparrow already, but isn’t quite as slick when it comes to supporting Gmail specific features. iCal’s full-screen view is a dream for at-a-glance viewing though.

Unfortunately, if as a user of an older Mac, you continue to rely on apps written for PowerPC, you’ll find that Lion is the end of the road: Rosetta is finally dropped, the software layer that lets you run PowerPC apps on Intel hardware, along with Front Row. Users may also have to install their own Java and Flash

Ultimately, what OS X Lion offers for your Mac is a number of enhanced and improved features including, Auto Save and Versions which will be a boon for anyone struggling with crashy apps or editing large documents. The updated user interface is also pleasing to the eye, offering a crisper interface that continues to make Aqua one of the most pleasant UIs of any operating system.

And for just $29.99 or £20.99, Mac OS X Lion is comparatively good value for money as an upgrade for your older Mac. Download it from the App Store now.

One of the first gadgets I remember owning was a Fisher-Price tape player and recorder, with which I spent hours recording fake radio shows and “mixing” in tracks that I’d play from my dad’s HiFi system. As I got older, I wasn’t tuning into the Top 40 on Radio 1, but instead the soothing voice of Clive Bull doing late night on London’s LBC 1152 AM would accompany me as I drifted off to sleep.

My love affair with speech radio has continued on and off since then, and as creating and recording audio has become easier, I continued to dabble, but without any real training. A radio experience day at a community radio station in Norfolk gave me a chance to try out what it’d be like running a show, but it seemed like hard work.

What I really wanted to do was just… talk. Talk, to myself, to listeners, to friends about anything that might interest me. I didn’t want to have to learn to drive a desk, or think too hard about when to fade in music or the technicalities of capturing a voice. But I did want to make fun, interesting and compelling content in easy to digest clips that don’t drag on.

That’s why I really enjoyed the recent Omniversity course, Radio Production for Pod and Cloud Casts. Armed with just my iPhone and my Mac, I enjoyed a hugely hands-on day with Barney (aka Doodlebug Presents) and other coursemates where we learned just how quick and easy it could be to grab people for sound clips, edit and stitch together some conversations and polish it all off in a neat little package – easily published online.

Course leader Barney has a wealth of hands-on experience producing audio for the web and other channels. His relaxed yet knowledgeable style makes this course a pleasure. Taking advantage of World Record Store day happenings just around the corner meant that we produced a fun and interesting podcast of a very topical event, so everything we did had real and immediate relevance. It was a real buzz and gave me the perfect template for other podcasts I might do, both personally and professionally.

Check out the first MadLab podcast that we did about World Record Store Day.

… and a more recent piece I threw together ahead of attending Carmen as part of Opera North’s blogging event.

Thankfully, the Omniversity is running the course again on June 11. It’s an all-day thing, with lunch included in the price, so if you’ve got an interest in producing a piece of radio and “exploring the theatre of the mind”, check it out.

As part of a global Twitter Festival, or ‘Twestival‘, we’re coming together at an event on 24 March to raise money for Wood Street Mission, a local charity whose aim is to alleviate the effects of poverty on children in families in Manchester and Salford. The charity was chosen with input from across the community.

Read more: One week to go for Manchester Twestival – get your tickets now – Social Media Manchester.

Read more: A month of social media in the north west – Social Media Manchester.