Flic: The Wireless Smart Button

November 21, 2014 | Comment

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There is something about the simplicity of Flic that I like. That it has no interface and is just a single button but can do so much really appeals to me. Example of what can be achieved with the Flic are:

  • play music
  • control lights and heating
  • take a picture
  • send a distress signal
  • notify someone of your location.

There are also a good number of integration partners:
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Of course like other crowdfunding products what is delivered might not live up to the hype but this is sufficiently different to have a reasonable chance of delivering on its promises. Come … Read the rest

Can you have too much cloud storage as Microsoft offers unlimited space?

November 18, 2014 | Comment

Recently Microsoft announced that everyone with an Office 365 subscription would be granted unlimited storage on OneDrive, their Dropbox and Google Drive competitor. If it doesn’t seem long ago that they bumped up the storage from 15gb to 1tb then it’s not, because that announcement was made just last June.

On the face of it this seemed like great news – all the space to store whatever you want. However, the reality is somewhat different. Firstly this is a syncing service (as they all are) and so the absolute maximum you can sync is the size of your hard drive … Read the rest

Enforced Posting Silence

November 14, 2014 | Comment

You may have noticed that there haven’t many (any) posts for a while. This is due to the following email I received from my existing server host:

Thank you for your years of loyalty. We regret to inform you that VPS Unlimited will be closing permanently on November 17, 2014. All customers must move their data off to another provider before this date. This is a hard deadline. All data will be destroyed on November 18, 2014. There will be no way to access your VPS after this date.

Insert your own expletive here.

Given that I have about eight … Read the rest

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