Moves for iPhone

January 27, 2013 | Comment

Moves for iPhoneRecently I have been getting more interested in my personal health as I try and shed some pounds – so much so that I have even built the website The Chubby Challenge to help me and others do so.

Been a gadget lover this has inevitably led me to look at some technology to help with fitness, weight loss and well-being. Currently there are two players in this market: Nike and Fitbit. Both produce hardware that will record your activity during the day (and night with Fitbit) allowing you to see how active you have been. They both do this … Read the rest

Rule #1 – No Matter How Much Testing You Do Users Will Find Something You Didn’t

January 19, 2013 | Comment

The Chubby Challenge End DateI was casually looking through the database (as you do) for my side project The Chubby Challenge yesterday when I noticed something odd. The latest challenge to be created had a blank end date, something that you are not supposed to be able to do.

I immediately went to my test site to see if I could reproduce the issue and what I found was that even though you are supposed to select a date using a date picker you can still type something, anything, into the associated edit control. I guess that this is precisely what the user had … Read the rest

Embedding docs

January 17, 2013 | Comment

In my previous post I included a viewer that allowed you to page through PDF file. This used the Google Drive (nee Docs) Viewer.

You may already be familiar with this for viewing attachments in GMail and documents in Google Drive but you can also access it directly using the snippet of code shown below:


<iframe src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8p1gAHHCMytS3ZrazdoRWVZVmc/preview" width="640" height="480"></iframe>

According to the documentation Google Drive viewer allows you to preview over 16 different file types, listed below:

  • Image files (.JPEG, .PNG, .GIF, .TIFF, .BMP)
  • Video files (WebM, .MPEG4, .3GPP, .MOV, .AVI, .MPEGPS, .WMV, .FLV)
  • Text files (.TXT)
  • Markup/Code (.CSS, .HTML,
… Read the rest

The Bane of Family Tech Support

January 12, 2013 | Comment

arrgh!One of the occupational hazards of working in the IT industry is that you become official tech support for family and friends.

There is a expectation that you will be an expert in all forms of technology.

My mother-in-law regularly asks me questions about her android phone, for example, despite I having never owned or used such a device. My requests for her to move to an iPhone or use my wife who has exactly the same phone as her have so far gone unheard!

Sometimes, however, the job is made so much harder by mischievous software vendors and I … Read the rest

Slingshot

January 10, 2013 | 1 comment

WOXOM's SlingshotAt the end of last year a friend give me an early Christmas present in the form of a SlingShot.

As the picture left ably demonstrates the SlingShot is a device to hold your phone to aid stability. Hidden in the hand there is also a kickstand that additionally allows it to work as a mini tripod too.

As the name suggests SlingShot looks like a catapult but rather than firing your precious phone off into the distance it holds it securely. The SlingShot works with many phones due to its flexible design. It will even work if you … Read the rest

Roll your own Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi

January 7, 2013 | Comment

ownCloud logoFollowing the success of hooking up my Raspberry Pi to my BT Home Hub the next step was to do something useful with it.

I am a very active user of cloud services, particularly Dropbox and Google Drive. Both work well but in order to gain additional space you have to pay but what if you could run your own service and add as much storage as you liked? Enter ownCloud a Dropbox lookalike that you run on your own server.

In my case the server is my Raspberry Pi and a 500gb harddrive attached providing the storage and it … Read the rest

Google Chrome 2012 A-Z

January 5, 2013 | Comment

John Rentoul in the Independent produced an A-Z list of sites Google Chrome takes you to if you just press the first letter and press enter. If you are logged in to Google then these results will be tailored to your usage.

I thought that it would be interesting to do the same and my results are below. What was interesting was that it was quite narcissistic in that several of my own sites appear on the list, although not this one. I was also surprised by what was missing. For example I would have expected to see Autosport under … Read the rest

Do Not Disturb (Ever)

January 3, 2013 | Comment

IMG_5978So here’s a fun way to start the new year, with a bug courtesy of those kind people at Apple.

In iOS 6 they added this great new feature called Do Not Disturb (DND) which allows you to either manually or automatically silence your phone but still allow incoming calls from certain groups of people, those marked as your favourites for example.

It works really well, or at least it did until the turn of the year. Since yesterday Do Not Disturb is staying permanently on. You can see that on the picture left with DND supposed to go off … Read the rest

Pi Powered

December 30, 2012 | 1 comment

Raspberry Pi Powered from BT Home Hub The Christmas break has given me an opportunity to get leave aside the pie and get out the Pi. In doing so I have discovered a really neat way of being able to keep the device permanently powered and connected.

Our broadband is provided by BT and as part of the package you are supplied with a router called a “BT Home Hub”. I have always known that there was a USB port on the back of the hub but until yesterday it hadn’t occurred to me to plug in the Pi. Lo and behold it provides enough power to … Read the rest