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

Happy 10th Birthday Us!

June 5, 2014 | Comment

So I have been blogging on technology now for just over ten years it would seem, the first post was June 5th 2004. It’s somewhat ironic, however, that I am today writing this post in WordPress and the very first post was about Noah Grey’s excellent Greymatter another great CMS. This also means that I have been connected for about 20 years launching my first website in May 1996 – The Williams Database.

How things have change in that very short space of time. That first site was launched on the “free” 0.5 mb of space that was provided … Read the rest

A Tale of Two Chromebooks

May 30, 2014 | Comment

A couple of years ago I spent weeks searching high and lo for a Samsung Series 3 Chromebook which was the first of the really affordable cloud laptops. I finally found one and paid £240 – nothing compared to the price of some Windows and especially Mac laptops.

Initially I was amazed at the start-up time of seconds and the fantastic battery life. I found that I could access my email and calendar through the browser (as I had been for a while since ditching Outlook) and do all my general web-browsing. I was hooked and decided that, away from … Read the rest

A Potentially Dangerous Experiment

May 27, 2014 | 1 comment

Being mobile means I have to work in a number of different places on a number of different machines. The one constant is that no matter where I am I want and need to have my files with me. While I have Dropbox and Google Drive and and iCloud and Box and OneDrive and OwnCloud accounts I found that files that were in the Documents and Downloads folders on my iMac weren’t available to me on the move.

This led to a light bulb moment. What if I could store my Documents and Downloads folders in cloud storage? And so … Read the rest