2013
December
- The JXD 7800B Portable Android Games Console
It has been a while since I’ve had a new portable console to play with (and I’m still waiting for my GCW to arrive!), so let’s ease back in to this stuff with an Android-powered console from JinXang Digital (JXD): The JXD 7800B.
November
- The HP Chromebook 11
I bought a HP Chromebook 11 as soon as I possibly could when it was announced. I’ve had a couple of weeks to play with it now, so here are my thoughts…
- SusHack #1: Building the foundations of the Oxford Flood Network Stack
This past weekend I held my first hack day. This is a recollection of why/how SusHack came to be, and how the day went.
October
- Migrating from Outlook .pst to mbox and then uploading to an IMAP mail server
Microsoft Outlook uses a stupid/proprietary format to store mail locally. This is the burden I had to deal with recently while attempting to rescue mail from a friends dying computer.
- Gamification of life with the Fitbit Flex
Earlier this year, Jenny got a Fitbit Zip, it’s basically a pedometer, but with the added cool-factor that it can synchronise over Bluetoooth with your computer (and some mobile devices), so that you can see statistics about your daily step count, active times of the day, etc. all online.
- Adventures in IMAP: Migrating lots of mail to Atmail
Besides my day job as a front-end developer at 2degrees, I run my own web design company with my partner, called Marmalade & Jam. When launching Marmalade & Jam, I decided to go with 123-reg as I needed a quick way to get everything up and running, and at the time they seemed like a good deal.
- Making Postgres work nicely on OS X Mountain Lion
Postgres on OS X has been a pain in the ass for as long as I have had to use it. To start with, the version that comes with OS X is old, so I’ve always had to replace it with a better version.
August
- Adding support for <!-- more --> tag to Jekyll without plugins
Here’s a quick tip for an approach I’ve started using to split post content at a given point for displaying in an archive page, without using a plugin.
- Awesome Bash arrays
Just some examples of how to do things with Bash arrays, and their analogous examples in Javascript.
- On second thought...
… Google Hangouts for Chrome needs some work.
- Converting SVG to PNG online and in your terminal
This post is mostly for my own benefit on the rare occasion that I have to convert SVG files to PNG. I always spend a large amount of time looking for an online SVG to PNG converter or a terminal one-liner to do this.
June
- Chrome 'Add to Trello' extension
I attended the third Refresh Oxford hack day yesterday, hosted at Incuna’s offices in Summertown.
May
- Removing the Blackberry Desktop Software for Mac without having to re-download a 70mb installer from Blackberry
If you happen to have installed the Blackberry Desktop Software and you want to remove it and it’s annoying persistant daemons, you might have discovered that this can only be done by downloading the 70mb installer dmg, and running the uninstaller.
- Google's relaunched Hangouts -- Wow.
The long-speculated consolidation of Google Talk, Google+ Hangouts, and Google Video Chat has finally occured, and it’s pretty spectacular. My digital life is so dependent on Google services that it’s nice to find some cross-platform consolidation.
- So I've got a Raspberry Pi, now what?
I was going to title this post “In which I moan about the Raspberry Pi”, read on to find out why. I’ve had a Model B Raspberry Pi in my possesion for nearly two months now, and beyond playing with pre-built OS images for it, or setting up an AirPlay server, I’ve not really put the Pi to much use.
- Meta post about making this blog responsive and not using px
If you’re a returning visitor to blomg you might notice some changes to the design.
April
- jQuery UK 2013 - A tale of beer, colourful cakes and no wifi
Yesterday I attended the second jQuery conference in the UK (the first being last year, which I blogged about here). I failed to get any nice pictures at the event myself, so this blog post uses a collection of crowd-sourced pictures from attendees that shared them via Twitter, Instagram and Flickr.
March
- Fluid video embeds for your responsive website
Recently I came across an interesting problem, fluidly scaling iframe/embed code on a responsive design. The problem surfaced because I was using a fluid width and a fixed height for my video embed, and so at some screen sizes the video would look fine, and at others it would have some black banding at the edges.
February
- These tabs they are a changin'
The latest update to Chrome (25.0.1364.99) seems to have brought some slight tweaks the interface. The tab bar has seen some tweaks to the spacing of the close button, as well as the hover/active/inactive states of tabs, and the infamous blank ‘new tab’ button has been stretched a little. The inactive state of tabs and the ‘new tab’ button seems to blend in to the background a bit more too.
- Factory resetting a Nokia N900 from Mac OS X Mountain Lion
I had a Nokia N900 when they first came out, this was unfortunately shortly before Android had matured to a usable state, and so I didn’t use my Nokia N900 for long.
January
- Testing responsive layouts with the RWD bookmarklet
Lately I’ve been doing some work with responsive CSS and media queries. This bookmarklet has been very useful. It allows you to switch between four different browser widths (for iPad and iPhone in portrait/landscape orientations).