Kickstarter is a stock market not a super market

January 26, 2016 | 1 comment

It’s no secret that I am a big fan of Kickstarter having backed many, many, many projects but, as you can see from the above screen grab, not everyone is of the same opinion and I believe that stems from a fundamental misunderstand about just what exactly a crowd funding site is.

The reason for the ire shown by the commenters above is that the project delivery end date is slipping and so people are becoming unhappy. In this particular project’s case the delivery date has slipped by approximately one month – in Kickstarter terms that is nothing, … Read the rest

Useful Excel for Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

January 20, 2016 | Comment

Like so many others I am a regular Excel user but having grown up on Windows finding equivalent keyboard shortcuts for the Mac can sometimes be a pain. Specifically how to manipulate cells.

So presented here as an aide memoir for me and hopefully it will prove useful to others:

Ctrl + u – edit a cell

Cmc + Alt + Enter – new line in cell

Enter – move to next cell below

Shift + Enter – move to next cell above< … Read the rest

Microsoft Universal Folding Keyboard

January 16, 2016 | Comment

Now that screens are getting bigger on mobiles it is becoming increasingly more practical to do work on them, especially now that Microsoft Office is available on most mobile devices.

The biggest issue I have though is typing on the screen. While it is fine for short emails and text messages it isn’t really practical for longer pieces such as this blog post. One issue is that the on-screen keyboard covers too much of the screen real estate. To overcome this I’ve had portable keyboards before but they have either been clumsy or heavy to carry.

Now enter Microsoft to … Read the rest

Now that Microsoft is Shutting Sunrise

January 5, 2016 | 2 comments

I have been a big fan of Sunrise but there was always a danger when it was taken over by Microsoft that they would eventually shut it down and that is now on the cards. I really like the way that Sunrise allows me to see in my calendar information other than my diary entries such as Tripit travel plans and Foursquare checkins and I didn’t want to lose that.

My initial thought was to do something through IFTTT but not all services were covered and I couldn’t get the options I wanted to change the entry colour, for … Read the rest

Installing ModSecurity & OWASP Core Rule Set on an Amazon EC2 Linux (CentOS) Instance

December 29, 2015 | Comment

NOTE: This post has been updated to include the requirement of mod_unique_id.

As part of some investigations at work I have been playing around with ModSecurity, the open source web application firewall (WAF), and the standard set of rules provided by OWASP. All our infrastructure is hosted with Amazon AWS so I thought that it would be useful to drop down the steps I took to get this working on a bare bones Amazon Linux box.

Install ModSecurity

You can, of course, compile ModSecurity from the sources but it is easier to install via yum, however, it is part … Read the rest

WordPress, Cloudflare, Caching & Version Numbers

December 23, 2015 | Comment

While I love WordPress one thing that really bugs me is its insistence on adding the version number to the end of resources, so you end up with links links this:

http://www.spokenlikeageek.com/wp-content/themes/required/style.css?ver=4.4

The version number is added to enable browser caching of files thereby speeding up page loads. The issue with this is if you make a change to the resource it is difficult to get the changes showing without clearing your cache. Additionally, as I am using CloudFlare this step by WordPress is superfluous.

All is not lost however, you can remove these version number by adding the … Read the rest

Pebble Time Long Term Review

November 26, 2015 | Comment

So I have had my Pebble Time Steel a few months now so I thought that it would be good to revisit it and put down my thoughts having had it a while. The first thing is that I have now received my steel band and the watch looks so much better for it than the “leather” strap it was originally sent with. I’m really pleased with the look and it is a step up from the original plastic version (original Pebble) I had.

The Good and the not so Good

The watch interface has had an overhaul and there … Read the rest

Halo Back: Good idea, but does it work?

October 21, 2015 | 1 comment

A while back, although in terms of Kickstarter dates it was positively recent, a project was posted that caught my eye called Halo Back. This was a glass screen protector with a difference – the bottom left area was “mapped” to the top left making it easier to click the back link on apps. That’s poorly explained but this cheesy video from the project does a better job:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/haloband/halo-back-make-your-iphone-perfect

Last week the Halo Back arrived and so I stuck it on. Unlike other screen protectors the positioning is quite important and so the makers have included a frame that fits … Read the rest

New Pebble Time Thoughts

October 7, 2015 | Comment

Just thought I would put down my initial thoughts on the new Pebble Time. I’ll do a fuller review, including the same tests that I ran with the old Pebble, in a few weeks when I have captured more data.

I’ve had my steel version a couple of weeks now and it really like both the look of the watch and the new interface itself. In fact Apple seemed to like the timeline too so they pinched the idea for their watch!

When you pledged via Kickstarter the Steel variant comes with both a leather and steel link straps. … Read the rest

The developer’s iOS 9 public beta conundrum

September 4, 2015 | Comment

[UPDATE – I’m being trolled by my bank! See the update at the end of the article]

The above is a conversation that I had with my bank about their iOS app and highlight, I think, an increasing issue that developers are going to have with more and more public involvement with beta testing.

I have been running iOS9 for a while now and on the whole it is pretty good but having beta software out in the wild does cause issues for developers of apps. It may not be possible to get fixes that are caused by the beta … Read the rest