2012
November
- The woes of trailing commas in IE
If you leave a trailing comma in your JavaScript code, you’re a terrible person. It’s right up there with omitting semicolons as far as I’m concerned.
October
- Ubuntu (native) on the Nexus 7
Last week, a Ubuntu native installer for the Nexus 7 was released, along with instructions on how to install Ubuntu on the Nexus 7. The plan is that the Nexus 7 will be the ‘core’ device that Canonical will build their tablet version of Ubuntu around. Right now, it’s quite experimental – the interface sees no tweaks for the tablet interface, beyond having an onscreen keyboard available.
- A simple 'stacked paper sheets' effect with CSS3
This is just a short post about an unobtrusive CSS3 effect that I”ve used on some projects lately. Using the ::before and ::after CSS pseudo elements and some CSS3 styles you can make a simple HTML element look like a stack of paper sheets.
August
- Installing MySQL on OS X Mountain Lion
I was having some issues getting MySQL installed on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and then I came across a useful article describing how to do it.
- The Nexus 7 Android Tablet from Google
I’ve been putting this post off, and it has been hard. I usually like to declare my love for a new gadget just moments or hours after unboxing it; I’ve had a lot of tablets over the past couple of years that I’ve done that with, only to later change my mind, so I thought I’d use the Nexus 7 for a little while and then splooge about how much I love it, here on my blog.
July
- Making HTML5 input placeholder text behave in Safari
Making assumptions during web development is never a good idea – especially if your assumptions are about the way a new feature will behave across modern browsers. This is an issue because of two things:
- Getting to grips with git log
git is a powerful tool. After using it for the past couple of years I’m still finding new/powerful things that can be done with it.
June
- Saving your CSS changes in the Google Chrome inspector
In the process of rapid prototyping and trying out new CSS styles I often find myself making changes to styles within the inspector in Google Chrome. This works quite well, but I’ve always had a process like the following:
- Dynamic location based desktop on your Mac with Satellite Eyes
I came across this awesome application today, it sets your wallpaper to a satellite view of your current location. The application features a number of rendering mode, and full support for multiple monitors.
- The Mele A2000 Android TV Box
I decided to buy an Android-powered set top box because my Apple TV 1 didn’t cut it for playing HD media, and I find it inconvenient to hook my MacBook up to the TV everytime I want to watch some HD media.
- Dealing with crappy memory management in OS X
Using a lot of memory-intensive programs throughout the day, such as Virtualbox virtual machines, Photoshop and numerous browsers each with a couple of handfuls of tabs, you come to realise how bad the memory management in Mac OS X is.
May
- Using jQuery to create a custom thumbnail for an embedded video
Recently Jenny asked me for a way to embed a YouTube video with a custom thumbnail that would play the video when clicked.
- A possible solution to 'bad interpreter: operation not permitted' error on Mac OS X Lion
Out of the blue I started having an issue in my Terminal.app on Lion where downloaded scripts/applications wouldn’t run. I first noticed this when trying to setup the Android SDK.
- High fidelity in low fidelity emails
Recently it was pointed out to me that Pizza Express provide a nice fallback for photos on their picture-heavy emails. Take the following example, from a promotional email they sent out earlier this year:
April
- On scrolling
Scrolling on the web is something that we take for granted when thinking about how users will interact with our website. There are two schools of thought on the subject: one that’s ingrained in how we interact with what we’re seeing on our screen, and the other ingrained in how we interact with the real world.
- Video integration with Jekyll
Adding some functionality to Jekyll to allow integration of YouTube videos is a pretty easy task. First we need a couple of things: A nice video hosted on YouTube The embed code for the video A Jekyll theme that supports video embedding
- Moving away from Twitter Bootstrap - Hello new design!
I decided it was time that I gave some attention to the design of my Jekyll-powered blog. I’ve been using a slightly modified version of the default Twitter Bootstrap theme since I moved to Jekyll, and that’s just not good enough. I’ve created the new theme from scratch, and I’ve thrown in some PJAX wizardry to make page-loading fancier. Gone are the old post-banners, and thumbnails (which to be honest I was adding just to make things look a bit less-boring), say hello to the new, larger hero banner for the latest post! You might notice some fancy effects on the homepage when you scroll, this is accomplished with a bit of jQuery and css3 to scale the title while parallaxing the hero banner. I’ve also made a forray in to a responsive layout, so if you’re viewing this on a screen smaller than 960px wide you will see some slight differences. But it’s not that different. Obviously the fancy stuff is dependant on your browser, but it should atleast look nice for anybody using Internet Explorer.
March
- Upgrading my Macbook Pro
I’ve had my Macbook Pro for about a year now. It’s the Early-2011 15” bells and whistles model. The specs (the bits we care about, if you can’t be bothered to click the link) are as follows: CPU: 2.2ghz Core i7 RAM: 4gb (2x2gb) DDR3 HDD: 750gb
- Updates to my 'install all firefox' bash script for Mac OS X
I wrote briefly about my install-all-firefox shell script back in December last year. Since then the script has received a complete rewrite, and some new features.
February
- jQuery UK Conference 2012
Yesterday I attended the first European jQuery conference, which was hosted here in Oxford at the Saïd Business School. This was the first big conference I’ve been to (though I’ve attended a couple of local ‘Geek nights’ and ‘design jams’).
January
- Adding more post metadata to Jekyll with YAML
NB: This flurry of content might be shortlived, but for now I’m excited to be posting again so shush! Jekyll, as it turns out, is a really nice blogging platform static site generator. One of the nice things about it is the flexibility. In my current Jekyll set up I’ve added metadata to the YAML for posts, so that I can optionally define a post cover (or image, if you’d prefer) and a width for the cover.
- On migrating from Tumblr to Jekyll Bootstrap
I’ve been toying with the idea of moving away from Tumblr for a long time now, having had my own share of problems with Tumblr downtime.
- Synchronising your Sublime Text 2 preferences with Dropbox
I use Sublime Text 2 both at work and at home, and it’s hard to manually keep my settings/packages in sync.