A Holiday with Only an iPad

July 25, 2012 | Comment

I’ve just returned from a five day break in Spain. On past holidays I have taken a whole array of kit with me including various laptops. This time I left it all behind bringing only my iPad with me. To supplement this I also brought along my keyboard case, camera connector kit and chargers.

While this was supposed to be a holiday there was a possibility that I might be needed for any support issues that might arise at work. I was fairly certain that the iPad would be able to cope but I couldn’t be certain until I put … Read the rest

iSub Mobile Client for Subsonic

July 10, 2012 | Comment

One of the great things about the move to music downloads is that music on the go has really become much more practical. iPods and other such devices (I can’t think of anything other than iPods but I’m sure that they must exist) mean that you can carry around with you so much more than when having a Walkman meant carrying tapes and swapping them around. However, my music collection is too large even for an iPod Classic so being able to stream my music from a hosted server with a large capacity hard drive is ideal. I could have … Read the rest

Google Chrome on iOS

June 29, 2012 | 3 comments

So my favourite browser has finally made it on to my favourite mobile operating system as last night Google Chrome for iOS was released.

I have downloaded it onto both my iPad and iPhone and I’ve been immediately impressed with just how much it looks like its desktop siblings, which shouldn’t be a great surprise, especially on the iPad.

There are a number of great things that have been brought over from the dekstop versions including the omnibar that allows you to enter either a web address or a search term and Chrome is intelligent enough to work out what … Read the rest

Coding on the web

June 26, 2012 | Comment

I ceased to be a professional developer a number of years ago but I have still continued to dabble either when things needed doing at work or for my own amusement. I started out working on COBOL projects and the obscure FOCUS before I retrained to the wonderful PowerBuilder. Nowadays it is almost predominately PHP and a little bit of mobile development with Rhodes. I have never really been one for dedicated IDEs preferring to use a rich text editor such as Notepad++ on Windows and TextWrangler on Mac.

Recently I have been working across a number of … Read the rest

Apple Branded USB Stick

June 19, 2012 | Comment

I recently wiped my MacBook Air and restored it to factory settings, a process that was necessary but added a few grey hairs to my head.

Delivered with my MacBook Air was a neat little USB stick that contained a recovery image for Snow Leopard, however, this was superseded with the introduction of Lion that creates a recovery partition on the hard drive itself. So I did the restore entirely from this recovery partition, at least that was the theory, something and I am still not clear what, went awry in the process and Internet Recovery kicked in. This simply … Read the rest

WordPress 3.4

June 15, 2012 | Comment

So the latest version of the WordPress blogging and CMS platform, on which this and so many other sites are based, has been released. Version 3.4 brings a number of new improvements such as the really neat Twitter integration you can see below. To get this to work you simply need to cut and paste the tweet URL into the editor and you are good to go. So to get the block displayed all I had to do was include the following:

https://twitter.com/spokenlikeageek/status/213251531871490048

I have been playing about with WordPress more and more since the hacking incident, mainly to … Read the rest

The Fascinating World of Top Level Domains

June 14, 2012 | Comment

Yesterday was another big day for the Internet when details of who had applied for what ” gerneric top level domains” (gTLD). A top level domain is the bit that comes after the final period in a domain name, so .com, .co.uk.org etc. A process was begun a while back to open out the allocation of gTLDs and allowing anyone to apply for a gTLD so I could apply for .neil, for example. In practice only those with deep pockets could apply and it is fascinating to see who has.

Ignoring that this could be incredibly confusing for users the … Read the rest

Three Offers up Cheap(er) Mobile Roaming

June 13, 2012 | Comment

Here’s a welcome bit of news just two days before I go off on a weekend break to Denmark – UK mobile provider three are introducing an all-you-can-eat mobile roaming tariff of “only” £5 per day. Called the Euro Internet Pass it allows monthly contract customers to access the web on the go.

One of the real frustrations of travelling abroad in the past has been that if you wanted to use the maps app on your phone to find out exactly where you were and where the restaurant was that you were making for it could have cost you … Read the rest

Who’s Stolen my Cursor?

June 12, 2012 | Comment

I started to notice yesterday that when on Google Chrome after a couple of second of inactivity the cursor would disappear. A quick search shows that people have been reporting this issue as far back as 2009.

Further investigation seems to show that the issue is caused by having certain websites open (including this one). Others have suggested that the culprit is the Flash plug-in, although I am not convinced of that.

Has anyone else had this issue? Do you see the problem when Spoken Like a Geek is open? I would be interested to know so leave us a … Read the rest

If This, Then That

June 11, 2012 | Comment

Sometimes the Internet throws up a really simple but great idea that makes life much easier. If this, then that or ifttt to be more accurate, is one such idea.

ifttt allows you to create tasks where an action is carried out on some event. So, for example, when an email is received from a certain email address a copy is then forwarded automatically to another account, or when the Guardian tweets that the latest Long Good Read is available the text is sent to Instapaper. These are two examples but given the long list of services that ifttt … Read the rest