Meditations on #Locationgate

Over the past week or so there's been a furore about location tracking in iOS. While it initially appeared to be a fresh discovery of machiavellian intrusion, the story's a bit more complicated than that.

Space Honker v.0.1 for Mac

Space Honker icon

On Thursday, Farhad Manjoo of Slate vented his spleen about those of us who use two spaces after their full stops, a.k.a. "periods". This seems to have triggered a minor kerfuffle, though not for the first time. While I disagree with a few of his points, the premise is sound. Unfortunately I, like many others, have double-spacing ingrained. This app might help.

Using Google Earth to geotag photos in Aperture 3

After a couple of years of painful attempts to geotag all my photos, I've finally got something that might end up working: a small hack that grabs the current location from Google Earth and updates the selected images within Aperture (3.1). This post explains it, and how to install it.

About turn: From Orange back to Three again.

After barely a month at Orange, I'm heading back to Three. Call me Mister Indecisive, but I'm starting to wear out the UK's number porting infrastructure. Since switching to Orange PAYG, I've had a bit of a nightmare setting up the account, and finally once set up, I'm just not happy with the quality of their network.

Removing Ping from iTunes 10.0.1 (and 10.2.2)

iTunes 10 icon

If you're a fan of Apple's new Ping service, then you'll be happy to see the new Ping Sidebar and Ping buttons appear when you install the new 10.0.1 update of iTunes. However, some of us think it all worked perfectly well before Apple decided to hop on the Social bandwagon.

And back again: Leaving Three for Orange

Everything Everywhere. Where the hell is my missing credit then?

After a couple of months with Three PAYG, I've moved to Orange PAYG.

Three was fine, with a good, cheap service. However, I wasn't totally satisfied with their data rate. Coverage was good, but data still seemed sluggish. While it was marginally better than O2, and substantially cheaper, I still feel it's not as good as it could be. There's also something substantial missing from Three's PAYG offering: free WiFi. The lack of The Cloud or BT Openwhatever on Three is particularly noticeable. While I barely used it while on O2, there are several occasions where Three's coverage let me down and one of BT's nodes mocked me mercilessly sitting there with a strong signal in my iPhone's WiFi list.

Leaving O2 for... um... Not sure yet. (Updated)

FaceFaceFaceFaceFaceTime

It's been almost two years since I wrote the last installment of this epic journey. I've practically ceased blogging in favour of tweeting, but I do think it's worth an update now. After two years with the iPhone 3G on O2, I'm almost certainly going to switch... but I'm not sure who to go to yet, though.

Extracting pages from PDFs on OS X

XCode screenshot

I need to slice and dice a lot of images from a number of multi-page PDF files, but I don't happen to have the right bit of ImageMagick installed on my MacBook Pro. Instead, I took the slightly longer route of writing a utility to do it.

4D Sudoku: development postmortem

4ds-shot-1

The reason I haven't been updating this blog regularly for a long time is twofold: firstly, I haven't had anything particularly profound to say; and secondly, I've been busy working on 4D Sudoku, which has now launched.

Leaving Three after a year-and-a-half for iPhone 3G

my-thoughts-exactly

Back in December 2006, I wrote a post about cancelling my decade-old Orange UK phone contract, in favour of Three. Now I'm off again. I finally gave into the lure of iPhone. As a Mac (power?) user for eight years, and owner (and destroyer) of many of their products, the absence of iPhone in my life is fairly conspicuous. I always swore that I wouldn't buy the iPhone 2G, though.

MySQL and PDO on OS X Leopard, Intel

64ish

(NOTE: Make sure you read the comments for this post, as there's a better way to get around the 64-bit/32-bit problem without having to compile things. --Tom)

Inverted Index Searching as Stored Procedures

Screenshot of Google Code project

An old colleague of mine has persuaded me to release an implementation of an "inverted index"-based search library, written solely as MySQL Stored Procedures. Our combined work is now available on Google Code.

EyeTV 3

EyeTV 3 Icon

I've been a dedicated user of EyeTV for almost two years, to the point that I no longer watch TV on the big screen in the living room. Instead, I watch almost exclusively on my iBook. Back in May 2006, I wrote a post about EyeTV 2.2 and its shortcomings. Today, Elgato have released EyeTV 3.

Replacing the backlight on an iBook G4

IMG_2040.JPG

For a while I've been noticing significant degradation of the backlight on my dilapidated iBook G4. So, yesterday, my dad and I spent a few hours replacing the CCFL backlight bulb.

O2 Cocoon: Review, Part 3: Wrapping Up

O2 Cocoon

I've been using the O2 Cocoon as my main phone for a few weeks now, and I'm fairly happy with it. After covering the design of the phone and the music features previously, I'll wrap up by covering the rest of the features.

O2 Cocoon: Review, Part 2: Music

O2 Cocoon

The first part of my review of the O2 Cocoon was mainly about the hardware: the look and feel of the thing you hold. This time, I'm going to look more at the phone's music features.

O2 Cocoon: Review, Part 1

O2 Cocoon

As you might have gathered from some of my previous posts, I do enjoy playing with new mobile phones, and I really enjoy ranting about them at length on the internet. So, I was stoked to receive an email on behalf of O2 offering to let me try out their new "Cocoon" music phone.

LG Shine KU970: The 3G Shine

LG Shine KU970 Main Menu

Thanks again to the LG Shine Blog, I received an LG Shine KU970 mobile phone to review. This is the newer 3G version of the KE970 I reviewed earlier this year.

iTunes Library Regeneration

The final major thing that "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod" has annoyed me from Day One: the monolithic bloaty binary library, and the accompanying tidy-but-inefficient XML backup. For a small library, it's no problem, but mine has major issues. Heck, and I don't even consider my ~40GB library to be particularly big!

iPod Video Conversion in iTunes

IMG_1969.JPG

The kludginess of video conversion for iPod in iTunes is another one of the things "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod". I don't like the conversion process, and I particularly don't like the bug I think I've found.

iPod Photo Bloat

In the process of replacing my iPod, I've noticed a couple of things "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod". After my previous rant about iPod reliability, I'm now onto the sloppy programming behind iPod's photo functions.

iPod Reliability

Last week, I got a new iPod Video 80GB from eBay, and in the process of transferring my media a number of things caught my attention. Some of these are known about already, but they're things "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod". I'm covering these in a few separate posts, as I've got quite a bit to say on the subject.

Mechanics Experiments with <canvas>

A couple of months ago, I spent a few weeks playing with <canvas>. The main reason was to write a game (currently on the back burner, but not "cold" as yet), and also to re-learn some simple mechanics and trigonometry I've forgotten since c.1993. I've put together a little bit of code ("testbed") which lets me put together simple interactive diagrams. Due to the lack of text support in <canvas>, unfortunately I can't label everything diligently. My old maths teacher, Mr. Slatter, would be horrified.

Transferred from GoDaddy to Dreamhost

I finally got sick enough of GoDaddy to buy a Dreamhost account and transfer (nearly) everything over to that account. Although I've only been using it for a few hours, I know I'm going to be far happier with it... especially the Subversion support. Setting up a post-commit hook as described below has made maintenance a lot easier.

LG Shine KE970: Everything Else

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Okay, I've covered the the physical aspects and the audio aspects, so now it's time to wrap it up by looking at the camera, the software and finally the phone-call-making bits of the LG Shine.

LG Shine KE970: Sound and Music

IMG_1459.jpg

On Monday, I covered the external hardware aspects of the LG Shine I've been loaned. For the time being, I'm going to skip the actual phone features, and play with the sound effects, ringtones and music features it offers instead.

LG Shine KE970: The Hardware

IMG_1425.JPG

Now that I've had a bit more of a play with the pre-release LG Shine that arrived on Saturday, I can now start to make a few conclusions. The first is that this really is a nice piece of kit.

LG Shine KE970: First Impressions

LG Shine KE970

This morning I received a pre-release LG Shine KE970 courtesy of the LG Shine Blog, as a lead-in to the product launch in early February. I've spent a couple of hours using it, and I must say I'm impressed so far. I've got about five pages of notes, niggles and thoughts that I'm going to write up over the next few days. In the meantime, I took some pictures of it, my old Nokia 6280, and some fruit. Not exactly art, I'll admit.

iPhoto, Flickr and EXIF munging using Perl

EXIF/IPTC/XMP tagging of GPS coordinates, folksonomy tags, and other goodness is a nice idea, but unfortunately, iPhoto and Flickr don't play too well together. Couple this with the fact that any decent support those products now have is not included for photos already imported into them. So, here are some notes resulting from some experimentation, along with the Perl code I wrote along the way.

Top 'n' things of 2006

Everyone seems to churn out at least one "Top-n" list of the year around Christmas time, so who am I to argue? Here's my Top (insert arbitrary number) list of this year, based on things that I've enjoyed or appreciated, in no particular order. I reserve the right to add to this list as I think of stuff.

Charles Kennedy's "Politically Incorrect" META tag

Google UK result #1 for 'charles kennedy'

Just noticed that the Rt Hon Charles Kennedy's website has an out-of-date META tag, to say the least.

...and joining Three

As noted in my previous posts on the subject, I changed mobile phone providers at the end of last week. On Saturday, a day after I ordered it, I received my new phone from Three. It's a refurbished Nokia 6280, and the tariff ain't too shabby.

Still leaving Orange...

Continuing on from my previous post about leaving Orange... I got a call from Orange Customer Relations (07973100194) this morning about the PAC code I ordered on Saturday. The woman calling was very nice and polite, was calling to get me back as I am a "high valued customer". Once I explained why I was leaving, she got the point that I had made up my mind, and instead asked if I could elucidate so she could pass on my comments as constructive criticism. We had a long and pleasant chat.

Leaving Orange after ten years

I just called Orange customer relations to request my PAC code after finally deciding to move to "3" or Three as I'll call them from now. I've been a contract customer with Orange for just over ten years, and I'm just no longer feeling the love.

Dull New Theme

You may have noticed that I've changed to a different WordPress theme (again). I've been meaning to do so for a while now, especially since the site has not been working in Microsoft Idiot ExploiterInternet Explorer.

Search Engine Article in php|architect Magazine

I just got the regular monthly email from php|architect Magazine informing me that this month's issue is ready to download, and listing all the wonderful things inside. Turns out they went ahead and published the article I wrote for them a couple of months ago.

Hitachi GST (no longer) Sucks

UPDATE January 2007: I got the replacement drive, and it has been working fine for a few months now. Hitachi's service was quick and painless, and while I'm still not 100% sure about the quality of Travelstar drives (since I've had them fail since the IBM days), I'm satisfied that the problem's fixed.

Mac Flight Tracker widget timezone bug

The Flight Tracker dashboard widget that comes with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) seems to have a fairly major bug. However, this bug seems to be the result of something quite obscure to do with timezones, and it only seems to manifest itself in the UK during the summer.

X11 Colors list for Mac OS X

A friend of mine is a recent newbie Mac user, after finally succumbing to the shiny white lure of the MacBook. As an expert Unix user, he was missing the old X11 colours list, because he can't have his terminal set up with a horrible shade of puce without having to work out the RGB values for it.

Stupid annoying missed call alerts

[... from companies I will (now) never buy from or do business with] Over the past few weeks I've been getting some missed call alerts on my mobile phone. These aren't the normal type you get when the phone actually rings: these are the text messages I get from Orange when the call is too short (this case) or my phone's off or out-of-range. The numbers: 0800 915 7111 and 0800 915 7113

loginwindow.plist Is My Enemy

I've been trying to track down a few annoying apps that start up on my iBook and can't be found in any of the usual places. I checked the normal places: the Login Items for my user, LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons, and a few other places... I forgot to check loginwindow.plist.

GMail for your domain

As I mentioned in a post on Underscore, last week I got an invite for GMail for your domain. This is a new beta service where Google acts as your domain's MX.

Why not much has been happening here

For various reasons, I've been a bit quiet on this blog since setting it up. The reasons:

GoDaddy, mod_rewrite Update

It looks like GoDaddy might have tweaked their .htaccess / mod_rewrite support. As I wrote in an earlier post, the way GoDaddy was supporting .htaccess was causing some confusion, in that even if you uploaded a correct .htaccess file, it could take some time to register. This might have changed.

Image resampling for LCD screens

This article covers the use of the RGB subpixel antialiasing technique used in various software packages including Adobe Reader, Mac OS X's Quartz font rasterizer, XRender, Microsoft ClearType, applied to the improvement of quality of non-text images. It includes a testbed and some sample code in C and PHP.

.htaccess, mod_rewrite on GoDaddy

Even though GoDaddy supports mod_rewrite, there are some definite peculiarities about their setup, with regards to .htaccess and PHP execution. Hopefully the observations I've made in this article will be of help if you're coming across the same problems I was.

EyeTV 2.2, EyeTV for DTT (USB)

The EyeTV for DTT is a tiny little box with an aerial socket and a USB socket that happily sits in the gap between the wall and my bed, with a long USB cable leading into the iBook wherever it is in the room. After buying it on eBay, I had to fork out another chunk of money for an upgrade from EyeTV 1.8 to 2.0, since all the fun stuff is in the 2.0 rewrite. Unfortunately, this turned out more expensive than it would have been to buy a new EyeTV for DTT with EyeTV 2.0 bundled.

Introduction to yet another blog

Hello.. I'm a 31-year-old programmer and web designer, living in Portishead, near Bristol, UK. I'm currently taking some time off to recuperate after having orthopaedic surgery in April, and am keeping busy by learning programming for Mac OS X (Cocoa) and OpenGL and putting together some fun projects.

I've set up this blog as a temporary measure to put some notes about stuff I've discovered while doing some coding on my latest project, and some other scribblings that might prove interesting to some.

I haven't spent much time at all on hacking this blog together. I started off with Nucleus CMS and spent some time shredding the default skin into something usable. Then I decided to switch to WordPress, and had to do it all again. I've put together this temporary theme, which serves my purpose for the time being. However, it's still not what I want. One of these days I'll get around to redesigning it properly. In the meantime, this template's not too offensively ugly, so it'll do! Comments and feedback are welcome.