Since the release of iOS 13 and the new iPhone 11 & 11 Pro range, I have had quite a few people ask me about how to take a Burst photo on the phones.
Burst photos are are a series of photos taken right sequentially after each other, which then allow you to select the best one. This is most handy when you taking photos of high action or fast moving objects.
As an example below I took this photo in a series of burst photos when trying to capture the lightning in a storm. I took over 150 images in the burst, but just this 1 that captured the lightning strike.
Previously, in the previous generation of iPhone models (iPhone 10 and below) you simply used to hold down the shutter button in the Camera App. That has all changed now, and you have to now Swipe Left (towards your camera roll) to activate Burst Mode. As long as you keep holding the button in to the left it will keep taking photos. If you hold the shutter button in (like you used to) the camera will start recording video
8 Miles is exactly 12.8748km’s. Or 12874.80 meters. Or if we’re going to get technical here, it’s just shy of 515 lengths of a 25 meter pool. 515 lengths of a pool ?
And so, on the 8th & 9th of February 2020, I’ll be swimming ALL 8 races at the largest open water event in the world, The Midmar Mile. I’ve joined the team from Friends of the Swimmers Trust & The Chad Le Clos Foundation, which promotes and provides Learn-to-Swim opportunities to communities on the North Coast of KZN, to help raise funds for this amazing cause.
Being a swim family that attends numerous gala’s and open-water swims, we believe that every child is a swimmer, and drowning CAN be prevented with teaching EVERYONE to swim.
Before I tell my story of how I got here, I wanted to pop the link for Fundraising in here ->
I’ll get to the nitty gritty of the Fundraising in a bit. (Read the story below first though!)
You may be asking yourself, “how did you get here?”
It’s quite a story, but I’m going to cut back to Feb 2018. It was, ironically, 3 days before the 2018 edition of the Midmar Mile. Our 3 (awesome, amazing, talented) kids were entered into their first Midmar Mile event. I had been attending a strength training gym for the last couple of months, and was at an early morning session with my daughter. My set for the day included a dead-lift, which I had done plenty times before. It was my last set, and I pulled up and felt the most crazy, ridiculous pain in my lower back.
I immediately knew something wasn’t right and went straight home. Over the next couple of days I treated the pain with a couple of painkillers and anti-inflammatories. The Saturday morning before the Midmar event, we were staying on a farm in the Midlands, and when I woke up, I could hardly move. . The injury had progressed to a point where my wife had to take me down to the local hospital in an attempt to see how we could alleviate the pain.
The Sunday was the main event and we went down to the dam. It was an awesome day out with the family and once again, our kids made us super proud!
Allow me to be open with you about my life at the time: It wasn’t great. Far from it. I was overweight. Not just a little, but a lot. The “Strength Training” hadn’t helped, but I also ate terribly. It is hard for me to try and actually establish what my weight was at that time in my life, because, well, every scale we had used just showed “OL”. Which I guess stands for “Overload”.
No scale could go past 150 kgs. This meant I was well over the 150 kg mark. And more likely closer to 160 kgs. Obesity was completely real. And it sucked. Obesity drags you into a dark place, without you even knowing. You are always tired, sick, grumpy and just fed up with everything.
Fast forward a couple of months to June, and I was fortunate to get an amazing 3 week trip around Southern Africa, which wasn’t easy given the extreme back & leg pain I was in.
On my way home I called my wife and asked her to make an appointment with the doctor I had seen before I left, to see if we can fix this. When he saw me, he suggested we do a laminectomy to remove a disc that had slipped in my lower back. It meant I had a 6 week recovery period, but I knew it had to be done.
6 weeks on your back isn’t as fun as it sounds. But, it gave me lots (and lots) of time to think. I knew I had to make a change to my lifestyle & body, to make sure that, one day, I would be able to see these kids WIN the Midmar Mile.
On the 2nd of September 2018 I celebrated my 40th surrounded by an amazing group of friends & family. 4 days later I went to the doctor for my final check up. They gave me the all clear and when I asked if I could start exercising. They agreed, as long as I went easy.
And then every day I went back and swam more, until I was swimming 1.6km non stop after 2 weeks. IT WAS AMAZING.
Because swimming is a low-impact exercise, it gives a cardio workout while simultaneously building muscle, and as I soon started to find out, it also helps shed weight. I started losing weight and I could start feeling a difference in my body. I also started doing Parkruns on Saturday mornings, and even got a Mountain Bike. I basically became a pro athlete, right?
Fast forward to October 2019.
I feel like a brand new person. More than 30kgs down.
Like a different person.
Like I want to make a difference.
Like being able to do things I never thought were possible.
Like being able to believe in yourself.
Like swimming 8 miles, or 515 lengths of a pool, over 2 days
I’m about to embark on eight Midmar Miles in two days. From over 150 kgs, to eight Midmar Miles in a single year. I want you to know, that no matter how dark things may seem, they can get better. You do have what it takes. Trust me. You don’t need to believe in yourself, you just need to believe my story.
In conclusion, I have a goal of R12,000to raise over the next couple of months towards the Friends of the Swimmers Trust & The Chad Le Clos Foundation. As I mentioned earlier, the focus of these 2 foundations is to ensure that every child in South Africa is able to swim. South Africa’s drowning mortality rate is estimated to be around 1500 drownings PER YEAR. Across all age groups. And we can help prevent that.
If you can, I would appreciate any sort of contribution to help towards this fantastic cause.
My personal Online Fundraising page is located at
I’ll be posting some of my training in the buildup as well as event reports once we done with Midmar 8 Mile in 2020!
Since iOS13 dropped a few days ago, one of the questions I have been asked a couple of times is “What happened to the Find My Friends app?”
If you haven’t used Find My Friends before, then you probably wouldn’t even notice that the app is completely missing. I use the app quiet frequently to keep tabs of my kids when they out and also when I am travelling and my wife is out in the evenings with the kids. It really is a very handy tool!
However, if you use it to track family and friends then you will now find it combined into the “Find My” app. This used to be called “Find My iPhone” which can locate most of your Apple devices (including AirPods!!) The app icon also got a bit of a redesign, hence you may not know immediately where to find that either.
The app is now broken into 2 separate screens, People & Devices.
Not sure what Apple’s thinking was about merging these 2 apps into 1, but it did end up taking me a couple of minutes to figure this one out!
I’ve been doing quite a bit of swimming over the last couple of months after a back op in July last year. Everyday I do around 1-2km of swimming at the Gym, and am loving it!
One of the things I battled with in the beginning was recording my swims. I used to have the Apple Watch 1, which wasn’t Waterproof, so I manually updated it. But I recently upgraded to the Apple Watch 3, which is waterproof and logs your swims.
Once I had that sorted, I wanted to be able to keep track of what I was doing, and one thing that frustrated me with the Apple Health app, where your workouts are recorded to, is that it doesn’t allow you to export your workouts, or share them with other apps. More often than not, the info there is VERY simple, and doesn’t offer you the functionality to delve deeper into the stats, or show you how far you’ve trained over a certain period.
We all know Strava is the Go-To app for cycling and running, and the stats you get from there are amazing. They also offer the ability to log swims as well, and show you info on your pace & heart rate. Garmin Connect (the official Garmin app for Garmin Watches) also allows you to view a lot more info like speed over distance, number of strokes, average time & heart rate. Combined these apps show loads more info than the standard Apple Health App.
So I did some digging and came across an app called RunGap. RunGap (iTunes Link) allows you to export and import from various workout platforms and share your workouts. So, as an example when I am finished a workout on my Apple Watch, it can sync over to Garmin, Strava, TrainingPeaks and loads of other services.
RunGap is a free app to download, but they charge you R49.99 for a 3 month subscription to be able to post to other services. This is well worth it though!!
To get started once you have logged your workout in your Apple Watch, open Run Gap. You will need to setup the accounts you want to connect to before hand and authenticate with them.
You will then need to import the workout from Apple Health, and it will show you all the info about the workout in the Details screen.
You can then select Edit to add notes or rename the workout and then “Share” to share it to the various platforms. You’ll see it’s pretty instant and you can go into the other apps and view the info there.
This is a really great way to share your workouts to other platforms, and best of all you get your Discovery points for your workout. This is key when doing runs etc, because if you had to log it just in Strava as an eg, you won’t get your points. It has to be logged in Apple Watch
Sign up with my referral code marcfilsl you will get an instant R30 into your SPOT wallet.
The team at Virgin Money recently updated their popular Peer To Peer (P2P) money sending app, Virgin Money Spot, using Blockchain technology to record transactions between users.
The app allows users to send and receive money between each other through a virtual wallet, and now also allows payment to Merchants. Users can add debit & credit cards to top up their accounts, and withdraw funds to their bank accounts via EFT.
The new version of the app has been built on Distributed Ledger Technology (Blockchain) because of its inherent safety and speed. When modelling the new platform for the app, Virgin Money’s product development team referenced the South African Reserve Bank’s “Project Khokha”.
“All Spot transactions are recorded in our Blockchain ledger, which means they are tamper-proof. So, Spot is not only mobile, convenient and instant, it’s also secure,” said Virgin Money SA CEO, Andre Hugo.
Spot has seen exponential growth in the past month, said Hugo. The number of Spot customers has grown by 900% in the last 22 days, with P2P payments and group pay increasing by 265%.
This growth has been bolstered through an incentive system that allows users to receive R30 for each user they sign up, as well as sending the recipient R30.
The app is available for both & , and if you sign up with my referral code marcfilsl you will get an instant R30 into your SPOT wallet.
Since iOS13 dropped a few days ago, one of the questions I have been asked a couple of times is “What happened to the Find My Friends app?”
However, if you use it to track family and friends then you will now find it combined into the “Find My” app. This used to be called “Find My iPhone” which can locate most of your Apple devices (including AirPods!!) The app icon also got a bit of a redesign, hence you may not know immediately where to find that either.
Sign up with my referral code