ASUS WL-33NUL Pocket Router Review

May 29, 2013 | Comment

The Asus Pocket Router was first announced at the beginning of year but has only just become available.

The box proudly announces that it is the “world’s smallest router”, which I don’t doubt that it is – it just also comes in a disproportionately large box, which seems a complete nonsense.

As you can see from the image left it really is small and portable with a usb cable that folds back into the case so, depending on how you intend to use it you might not need to carry anything else.

From the images that I had seen I … Read the rest

They Look the Same, Work the Same but…

February 9, 2013 | Comment

So these arrived in the post today – a Mini DisplayPort to VGA and a Mini DisplayPort to HDMI connector for use with my MacBook. Both have been packaged to look like their Apple equivalents and I can confirm that they certainly work like their Apple equivalents.

The difference? The Apple originals would have set me back £46.46 while these were £11.78, both prices included postage.

Pair this was a £1 HDMI cable from PoundLand and I am all set?

Is there anyone out there that could convince me that I would be better off buying the Apple originals?

… Read the rest

Google Authenticator Bug

February 1, 2013 | 1 comment

I am a big fan of Google’s Autheticator app which adds 2-factor authentication to a number of popular apps including Dropbox, WordPress, LastPass and, of course, Google accounts.

Since my mother-in-law’s GMail account was compromised and she wasn’t able to recover it I have considered the use of 2-factor authentication as mandatory rather than a nicety.

What this means in practice is that in order to access your account you need something that you know (the password) and something that you have (your phone). This should considerably increase your online security as if anyone does get your password they still … Read the rest

Embedding docs

January 17, 2013 | Comment

In my previous post I included a viewer that allowed you to page through PDF file. This used the Google Drive (nee Docs) Viewer.

You may already be familiar with this for viewing attachments in GMail and documents in Google Drive but you can also access it directly using the snippet of code shown below:


<iframe src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8p1gAHHCMytS3ZrazdoRWVZVmc/preview" width="640" height="480"></iframe>

According to the documentation Google Drive viewer allows you to preview over 16 different file types, listed below:

Image files (.JPEG, .PNG, .GIF, .TIFF, .BMP)
Video files (WebM, .MPEG4, .3GPP, .MOV, .AVI, .MPEGPS, .WMV, .FLV)
Text files (.TXT)
Markup/Code (.CSS, .HTML,

… Read the rest

Roll your own Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi

January 7, 2013 | Comment

Following the success of hooking up my Raspberry Pi to my BT Home Hub the next step was to do something useful with it.

I am a very active user of cloud services, particularly Dropbox and Google Drive. Both work well but in order to gain additional space you have to pay but what if you could run your own service and add as much storage as you liked? Enter ownCloud a Dropbox lookalike that you run on your own server.

In my case the server is my Raspberry Pi and a 500gb harddrive attached providing the storage and it … Read the rest

iOS Maps

September 21, 2012 | Comment

… Read the rest

A Holiday with Only an iPad

July 25, 2012 | Comment

I’ve just returned from a five day break in Spain. On past holidays I have taken a whole array of kit with me including various laptops. This time I left it all behind bringing only my iPad with me. To supplement this I also brought along my keyboard case, camera connector kit and chargers.

While this was supposed to be a holiday there was a possibility that I might be needed for any support issues that might arise at work. I was fairly certain that the iPad would be able to cope but I couldn’t be certain until I put … Read the rest

iSub Mobile Client for Subsonic

July 10, 2012 | Comment

One of the great things about the move to music downloads is that music on the go has really become much more practical. iPods and other such devices (I can’t think of anything other than iPods but I’m sure that they must exist) mean that you can carry around with you so much more than when having a Walkman meant carrying tapes and swapping them around. However, my music collection is too large even for an iPod Classic so being able to stream my music from a hosted server with a large capacity hard drive is ideal. I could have … Read the rest

Google Chrome on iOS

June 29, 2012 | 3 comments

So my favourite browser has finally made it on to my favourite mobile operating system as last night Google Chrome for iOS was released.

I have downloaded it onto both my iPad and iPhone and I’ve been immediately impressed with just how much it looks like its desktop siblings, which shouldn’t be a great surprise, especially on the iPad.

There are a number of great things that have been brought over from the dekstop versions including the omnibar that allows you to enter either a web address or a search term and Chrome is intelligent enough to work out what … Read the rest

Coding on the web

June 26, 2012 | Comment

I ceased to be a professional developer a number of years ago but I have still continued to dabble either when things needed doing at work or for my own amusement. I started out working on COBOL projects and the obscure FOCUS before I retrained to the wonderful PowerBuilder. Nowadays it is almost predominately PHP and a little bit of mobile development with Rhodes. I have never really been one for dedicated IDEs preferring to use a rich text editor such as Notepad++ on Windows and TextWrangler on Mac.

Recently I have been working across a number of … Read the rest