Jailbroken iPad

August 3, 2012 | 1 comment

Despite being the uber geek that I am for some reason I have always shied away from jailbreaking my iDevices. Partly it is because that despite some frustrations I have been happy with the standard functionality delivered by iOS and hadn’t felt the need to jailbreak it. However, of late I have become increasingly frustrated with the speed of my iPad 2 particularly when it come to web browsing which has always been tardy on my browsers of choice: iCab Mobile and Google Chrome.

So it was of immediate interest to me when I read that a new tweak had … Read the rest

This is a Test Description

August 1, 2012 | Comment


As a developer you might, on occasions, add statements to help you trace through your code so you can see how far it has got and where any issue might be lurking. Occasionally you might forget to take out these trace statements and they go live for all to see.

This one was on the T3 website yesterday as I went through and cast my votes for their reader awards.… Read the rest

What I Love About Kickstarter (And What I Don’t)

July 31, 2012 | 1 comment

I am addicted to Kickstarter. There I said it. They say that the first step in overcoming any addiction is admitting that you have a problem.

For those not in the know, Kickstarter is a crowd funding site where entrepreneurs post project ideas and the general public gets to back projects that they like. Projects are pretty diverse from technology to music to art through to design so there really is something to everyone. Backing levels usually start at $1 and projects have between one and three months to reach their funding target. Project offer a range of backing levels … Read the rest

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