Belaycords Reversible USB Lightning Cable

April 6, 2015 | Comment

My Belaycords Reversible USB Lightning Cable arrived this morning and I’m pretty impressed and also left with the question why hasn’t this been done much, much sooner.

USB connectors have had one major problem (until the USB C arrived) in that they had to be inserted the right way round and when you were most likely to be doing that round the back of a PC in a dark corner it was bound to lead to frustration. It seemed that you had a 50/50 chance of getting it right but ended up always 100% wrong!

The Belaycord overcomes that … Read the rest

Resolving “Error 1 – Operation not permitted.”

March 31, 2015 | Comment

Trying to unpack a zip file this afternoon I kept coming across the error message “Error 1 – Operation not permitted.”. When I have had this before I have just switched from the default Archive app to Keka or Stuffit Expander and all has been good but for some reason that wasn’t working on this zip file.

Then I cam across the following tip on Stack Exchange. Drop into a terminal session, change to the directory with the zip file and run this command:

jar xvf <zip file name>

It worked a treat. Give it a go next time … Read the rest

Windows 10 Preview

March 26, 2015 | Comment

I finally got round to downloading and installing the Windows 10 preview this morning to allow me to test our web app with it and the latest version of Internet Explorer. I had also wanted to take a look at Project Spartan but it seems that isn’t available yet.

Like so many others I wasn’t a great fan of Windows 8 but based on the very brief look this morning Windows 10 is a vast improvement on what went before. The start menu has been restored and the titles are not incorporated and it’s not a bad look.

There is … Read the rest

2 Great Apps to Help you Show and Tell

March 18, 2015 | Comment

Working in a small business you have to get involved in all sorts of areas that might be outside your core skill set. In my case that includes producing training material to help our clients understand our products better. In order to make that as painless as possible here are a couple of great apps that I use.

Clarify

Producing documentation with screen grabs can be a real chore and while it is possible to use something like Microsoft Word it is much, much easier to do with Clarify.

The beauty of the app is the way that it lets … Read the rest

Why the next iPhone Might have an Inbuilt Coffee Perculator

March 13, 2015 | Comment

No sooner had the iPhone 6 been released did the tech sites start wondering just what might be in the NEXT release. Would it be the iPhone 6S? Would it have inductive charging? Might it be made from a metal only found on Mars? Could there be room for a larger battery? (actually Jony Ive says we wouldn’t like a larger battery and what the fuck do we know as users?)

This speculation is almost always unattributed and lacks any credible sources and is accompanied by a title containing the word “may“, “could” or “might… Read the rest

Hitting $1M in Pebble Time

February 25, 2015 | Comment

I waited a long long time for my Pebble to arrive after backing it on Kickstarter. But since the arrival of iOS8 and several updates to the watch firmware it was worked well and I really like the watch.

My only gripe would be that the font size is a bit small (even on the largest setting) and I wish that they would make it bigger. Apart from that it is just about perfect.

With all the news about the Apple Watch I had wondered what Pebble’s answer to it would be and yesterday we found out with the … Read the rest

Setting the Nest to Away

February 9, 2015 | Comment

I love the Nest learning thermostat now that it has built up a schedule but I feel that it could be doing more to help us save money.

One way to do this is set the Nest to away when I am, well, away. I currently have two ways of doing that:

1. via the standard Nest iPhone app, or
2. via the Nest Pebble app, Leaf.

Both these work well but you need to remember to actually do it and I never do. Worse than that if I do remember I then forget to turn it back on again.… Read the rest

Twitter Cards Validation Error

January 26, 2015 | Comment

Twitter have had a neat feature for a while now that allows for additional information to be included with a tweet that is then displayed when you expand the tweet. This is how it looks:

And on a mobile client:

To enable these you need to set-up some meta data on your website (there is a good guide here) and then validate this information with Twitter here. When I did so I was greeted by the following message:

ERROR: FetchError:exceeded 4.seconds to Portal.Pink-constructor-safecore while waiting for a response for the request, including retries (if applicable) (Card error)

This … Read the rest

Adding New Fonts to iOS for use in Word, Drafts and other Apps

January 6, 2015 | Comment

I have long loved the font that is used in iA’s Writer app but while I love the app I really wanted to be able to use the font elsewhere and particularly in Drafts.

After a bit of searching it was clear that the font used in Writer wasn’t available but there was a free alternative as part of Google Fonts called Cousine. The rest of this post will show you how you can get this font onto your iOS device. Firstly download the font package from the Google site.

You will need a copy of a font … Read the rest

Postman Pat and the Blue Screen of Death

January 2, 2015 | 1 comment

We were watching Postman Pat: The Movie last night (don’t ask) when I noticed a really nice little touch. When the robot Pat gets fried the display on his chest shows the blue screen of death. Well played guys!… Read the rest