iOS 8 Keyboard Issues

October 7, 2014 | Comment

iOS8’s introduction of custom keyboards is one of my favourite features but like so much in this release it is very buggy. I’m not sure if the issues are with iOS or the keyboards or a combination of both but they are frequent.

Some of the issues I have encountered are:

1. keyboards not appearing
2. no words appearing when I type
3. no button to change the keyboard appearing (and not just in passowrd fields)
4. keyboards appearing all over the place (see below)

I’m sure that all this is fixable but right now I would describe the custom … Read the rest

Flickr Sildeshow Code Generator

September 22, 2014 | Comment

Despite all the changes over the years I still like Flickr but since the sexing up of the interface there are some things that I have found have become impossible to find. One of these is the ability to find the code that allowed you to embed a slideshow on another page (you can see an example at the bottom of the page).

Fed up with this I decided to take matters into my own hands a write a script to throw out the necessary code. Just copy the album url as follows and paste it into the form below. … Read the rest

Cutting the cord and ridding ourselves of BT

September 3, 2014 | Comment

When was the last time that your home phone got serious, regular, use?

That was the question I found myself asking when BT announced recently that they were upping their prices again. This got me to thinking about what we were actually paying for and I quickly came to the conclusion that we weren’t getting very good value for money.

The problem (for BT) is that there are so many other ways we can be reached these days whether it is email, text message, Skype, Facebook or even Snapchat. Very, very few choose to phone us and those that do … Read the rest

The Problem with the New Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs)

September 1, 2014 | Comment

Over the last year the number of generic top-level domains (gTLD) has been greatly expanded. gTLDs are what you see at the end of a domain such as .com, .net, .org etc. This was clearly felt to be too limiting and so a whole raft of new gTLDs were proposed and adopted. These include .london, .furniture and even .blackfriday. You can find a fuller list here.

To me these were interesting but not ultimately useful until I started on a new side project and needed a new catchy domain. After going through countless .com domain variations and finding that … Read the rest

Instagram’s Hyperlapse

August 29, 2014 | Comment

Instagram, Facebook’s $1B lovechild, this week released a new iOS app called Hyperlapse that allows time lapse videos to be shot without the shakes that are usually associated with such videos.

I took a quick example on the bus into town yesterday and as you can see it is really steady. With hindsight I wish I had held the camera in landscape mode!

If all this sounds familiar that will be because Microsoft Research documented just such a technique earlier this year which got widespread attention including on the BBC. So congratulations to Instagram for getting this out so … Read the rest

An iPhone Remote Shutter? It’s a Snap!

August 20, 2014 | Comment

For a while now it has been possible to take a picture with your iPhone using the volume controls on the phone and this also extends to the controls on the headphone mic too. But what if you need to be further away than the length of the headphone cable? Turns out that there is a cheap (under three quid) device for that.

This little two button widget works over bluetooth and emulates the keyboard for sending the command to trigger the camera shutter. It is incredibly simple to use in that you pair it with your device, start the … Read the rest

Is My Tile Here Yet?

August 4, 2014 | 2 comments

About a year ago, well to be accurate as I write this it was 382 days ago, I ordered some tiles. No not bathroom tiles but a small bluetooth device about the size of a postage stamp that you can stick to almost anything and then using a companion app hunt them down when you have mislaid them. This also included a neat feature that allows you to effectively declare a tile lost and every other tile user can then be on the look out for your lost item, which is pretty neat.

The downside of them are that … Read the rest

What to do in the event of an NTP attack

August 1, 2014 | Comment

Earlier this week the server that hosts this blog and other sites that I run became unreachable. I know this because it is being monitored by New Relic and I got notifications emails. I couldn’t access the server either via HTTP or SSH so all I could do was reboot it and hope I could hop on. The issue had the feel of a DoS attack and so once I was back on the server I stopped Apache and inspected the logs. A while later, I restarted the service and all seemed ok.

Then I received this worrisome email from … Read the rest

Using Kindlegen with PHP on Linux to Create Kindle Files

July 15, 2014 | 1 comment

I’m working on a side project at the moment that requires the conversion programatically of a page of html to something that can be consumed by an Amazon Kindle. I did a quick search to see if anything existed as a PHP class library that I could use and while there was they were either hugely bloated or too alpha for my needs.

I then stumbled upon Amazon’s command line tool KindleGen which allows conversion of HTML and ePub docs to the MOBI format that the Kindle requires. This is a multi-platform too and, crucially, a version for Linux is … Read the rest

Creating Good Looking Product Shots on Devices

July 4, 2014 | Comment

A while back I wrote about what I described as “One of the most amazing websites” I had seen and it was great. Placeit allows you to create screen mockups by uploading a screenshot that is then rendered into a chosen device. Unfortunately when I went back recently the prices had sky rocketed. To download even the most basic image now costs $8 a pop and a “casual” plan is $29 a month. For someone that uses the service about once a year that was prohibitively expensive.

I should state at this point that I have absolutely no issue with … Read the rest