Jasonified.

jestone: (via - Tiefighters) Death Troopers - by Jeff Carlisle

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:14:18 +0000

(via - Tiefighters) Death Troopers - by Jeff Carlisle

Tweet4me up and running

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 09:59:52 +0000

Quite pleased so far with the performance and reliability of the service and the take up by users.

Great comments and feedback and hundreds of scheduled tweets being loaded per day.

Looking at integrating with Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) and other services. Also looking at white label options for specific twitter clients and services.

Also planning to refactor the code and rewrite it in something else, possibly .net or ruby.

Tweet4me, Scheduled tweets from ANY twitter client http://tweet4.me

Tweet4.me - scheduled and delayed tweets from ANY Twitter client

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Tweet4.me - scheduled and delayed tweets from ANY Twitter client:

Procrastinated over it for 2 years, no-one else did it do wrote it myself and been using it for weeks to great effect. Post scheduled tweets from Twitter, Flipboard, Tweetbot, any Twitter client using special, Direct Messages to @Tweet4me!

GigaOM in what's next for the MacBook Air

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:09:46 +0000

GigaOM in what's next for the MacBook Air:

Eric’s Ogg on the next MacBook Air:-

“So it’s going to have to come with advances in software, in interfaces and new forms of input, like voice and touch”

Voice? Really?

Nonsense.

My work Halloween outfit

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 19:54:28 +0000

My work Halloween outfit

Jonathan Ive tribute to Steve Jobs. Wonderful stories about...

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:33:10 +0100

Jonathan Ive tribute to Steve Jobs. Wonderful stories about checking into hotels and Steve’s sense of humor.

I discovered by accident tonight a way to override Siri...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:06:02 +0100

I discovered by accident tonight a way to override Siri instructions:-

Press the home button to issue a command
The moment Siri thinks it’s interpreted the instruction, press the Mic button
(this has to be done *before* Siri acts on the command)
Press the instruction text
You can now edit, change it and hit done when finished
Siri will pick up where she/he left off with the new instruction

I don’t know yet if this helps/affects recognition, just thought I’d let you all know.

An Apple Television would mean the death of the Cinema Display

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:07:57 +0100

The tech sites are rife again with stories about Apple planning to release a branded television set within the next 18 months.

I say If they do, it’ll mean the death of the Cinema Display.

Why?

Any Apple TV set would have to work with external devices to be at all useful. Most likely this would mean multiple HDMI inputs, possibly a DVI, maybe a Component/Scart interface (although the latter are unlikely I admit).

Hell, it may even have a Thunderbolt port.

Also, being Apple they’ll probably add USB ports for connecting external media, charging devices, a variation of iOS like we’ve seen on the Apple TV 2 hardware and all this with ethernet and/or wireless connectivity built in.

They might even throw in a FaceTime camera - makes since to have tele-conferences through your “tele” right?

Finally, if they want to compete with regular TVs then they’ll probably have to consider a built in digital tuner with (most likely) recording capabilities. You could use an external tuner but built-in would tie in nicely with iTunes/iOS etc.

So what’s the problem?

Price.

If the price of a full-blown TV is too HIGH then they are too close to the cost of a full-blown iMac. We’ve already seen stories of people buying iMacs instead of Cinema displays and using the target display mode to use it as a monitor!

If the price is too LOW then why buy a 27” Cinema Display when the TV will most likely come in sizes upward of 27” AND will have connectivity to your computer?

Apple are unlikely to release a TV set without external connectivity that is designed NOT to allow you to connect your Mac to it. So here’s what they’d need to do :-

a) reduce the price of the Cinema display dramatically,

b) price the TV set between the Cinema display and a base iMac,

That’s a pretty big challenge.

My feeling is that if Apple release an Apple Television then it WILL replace the Cinema display and on that basis an Apple Television would mean the death of the Cinema Display.

Why OSX will be renamed iOS in the near future.

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 09:29:38 +0100

Lets face it OS “Ten” isn’t going to make much sense when the version number goes beyond 10.9.9.

Apple could of course forget the link ( as most of us have) and call it OSX 11 but there’s a very good reason why they will consider rebranding OSX to iOS.

Let’s review some numbers:-

Windows is used by approx 400m users worldwide.

OSX is approaching 60m users.

iOS is upward of 200m users.

Given Apples love for massaging figures (e.g. including iPhones, iPads, iTouch AND classic iPods for the purposes of “mobile” statistics) there’s a million good reasons to rebrand a future major upgrade of OSX as iOS.

Well, 260m+ reasons actually.

A conversation with Leo aged 2 1/2 re his sister, Poppy who is almost 1

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 16:53:18 +0100

Me: you need to look after Poppy, she’s only tiny.

Leo: when I get big and strong?

Me: yep but also now, remember you’re her big brother, she’s only little.

Leo: Yes, I am.

Leo: and when I’m big and strong I can throw Poppy in the air?

Me: mmm, let’s go just over that looking after Poppy thing again….

Hey! Really love your blog, I was having some issues with Hamachi and my main internet network connection, and that fixed it right up. :) I use it to host a minecraft server. Thanks!

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 19:09:27 +0100

Thanks, glad to help!

Kernel panic installing Snow Leopard? Try Lion

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 01:00:31 +0100

I’m not sure when it happened, what firmware or hardware upgrade changed things but inexplicably and without warning I was unable to re-install OSX Snow Leopard on my 2010 Unibody Macbook Pro.

No matter what I tried, a standard retail Snow Leopard disk, the original disks that came with the Macbook Pro, the same result - a kernel error on startup.

I looked on-line, I tweeted and found more and more people with exactly the same problem. I even put the original hard drive back in (which I’d replaced with an SSD) and the original RAM. I reset PRAM etc and still a kernel panic.

I couldn’t re-install OSX and the result was an abomination; a Macbook Pro running only a bootcamp partition with Windows 7 running natively. Worse still, I could only run OSX in a VMware installation within Windows 7.

I was definitely going to hell.

But suddenly it has all changed. OSX Lion has been released (well the GM in my case) and after burning it to a disk and trying it, it installed successfully.

So if you have an iMac or Macbook that won’t install OSX Snow Leopard, try downloading to spare/friends machine and burning a disk - you may be pleasantly surprised.

Using a remote server to sync/transfer data faster

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 10:46:04 +0100

In the process of upgrading my mailbox to an Exchange 2010 I’ve found a neat way to do it without affecting my local network speed.

Using a remote server that’s connected to a very fast Internet connection I’ve installed Outlook 2010 and setup both exchange accounts. All I need to do now is drag emails between both accounts and the changes will be synced up to the new box.

The advantage of doing it using the remote server is a) I don’t have to my notebook syncing at home and eating up bandwidth and b) the remote server can transfer gigabytes in seconds which means it’ll be quicker.

Obviously this could also help with remote data transfers of any kind.

Useful tip of you manage/use remote servers.

IDEA: "Responsive content"

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 22:50:31 +0100

I’ve talked about this concept in sales pitches with prospects, with clients and privately and thought It was time to “put it out there”.

This idea was inspired when Heath Ledger died and I’d visited an HMV to see copies of his film, Knights Tale next to the tills.

So here’s how it works (in the example above):-

1. You run a site that sells DVDs, Music etc.

2. You ensure your web content, e-commerce products are well described with keywords, actors names, locations etc, all properly indexed/tagged.

3. You choose a selection of news/feed “sources” that will be used to trigger content and having a weighting system in place to rank the data received. (ideally you’d want news sites, twitter, but could have as many as you like).

4. You build a “bot” which has the job of taking these feeds in, filtering by relevant content keywords and then matching these against your own index finding relevant content and promoting/displaying it.

So for example, an actor is reported dead by the BBC, Twitter, Reuters etc. Your bot picks these feeds up and is filtering for specific phrases/keywords/names. It matches this against similar words in your site/database and the result?

The actors DVDs are “featured” on your front page of your site and automatically.

The best bit you don’t have to be specific - you don’t have to say they’ve died, you don’t even care if they have - you’re just reacting automatically to the fact that *this* person is being discussed by multiple feeds/sites and multiple times.

You’re reacting to the trend and promoting your products/articles/content accordingly.

Another example - you run a site that sells home safety products e.g. smoke alarms, fire extinguishers etc. One day news reports come in of a house fire where a smoker detector wasn’t installed or working or testing. The bot kicks in, collates the stories, filters the common words and matches/cross-checks to your product database and FAQ/Knowledge-base.

Next minute, articles and videos you produced about checking smoke detectors are promoted to the front page with smoke detectors as featured products. You Twitter feed is showing links to smoke detector test articles and tutorials and this can happen in almost real-time and automatically.

I called it “Responsive content” - no doubt someone else has called it or will call it someone else and Apple will call it iContent. Oh well.

If it exists, I didn’t know, didn’t check and blew it.

If it doesn’t exist, you implement it and you get rich, throw me a bone or at least a bit of credit.

Wireless Airplay mirroring and split screen video demo

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 23:17:00 +0100

Back in April I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post in which I said I’d “just played with Apples new games console” after plugging the iPad 2 into an HDTV via HDMI and playing Real Racing 2 in split screen mode.

Following on from that I described in another post how this split screen feature didn’t have to be limited to games and any application could implement the feature such as iMovie or the iWork suite.

Well, with iOS5 it’s all got very interesting because along with a new OS update for AppleTV, you can now mirror the iPad 2 screen to Apple TV wirelessly and what’s more you can use split screen too.

iOS developer @bendodson has written an excellent blog post in which he talks about wireless AirPlay and even demos it and he’s written his own mapping application to show split screen working without wires.

Very nice!

Fixing Logmein Hamachi after disabling/enabling the virtual network card

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:55:05 +0100

If like me you use Logmein Hamachi for VPN access, you may have come across an issue where sometimes you lose internet access on your main network card even though Hamachi is turned off in the app.

The “fix” is to disable then re-enable the Hamachi virtual network card and this resolves the access issue.

However, once you do that you can’t connect to any Hamachi computers and get errors next to your server names.

The fix is to go into “services” in Windows and restart the Hamachi service - no reboot required.

There you go.

sam2themax: This was taken about a year ago. When I’m having a...

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 09:50:19 +0100

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

sam2themax:

This was taken about a year ago. When I’m having a bad day at work sometimes I dig it out and watch it again. It never fails to make me laugh.

iPhone 4S or 5 this year in JavaScript

Tue, 31 May 2011 06:12:00 +0100

If (iOSRelease == 5 && releaseYear == 2011) {

iPhone = “5”;

}

else {

iPhone = “4S”;

}

iPhone 4S or 5 this year? Answer by deduction....

Fri, 27 May 2011 23:20:00 +0100

So iPhone 4S or iPhone 5?

If we look at what we know about Apple and how they release products and iOS updates, *and* the dates/time-scales involved I believe it’s possible to accurately predict what we’ll see happen this year.

Before I start, here are the constants:-

1. We know that Apple have an (approx) annual release cycle - iPhone 1 - 4 have been released around the same time each year. This is the same for most of their products.

2. We know that Apple are going to “preview” iOS 5.0 at this years WWDC in June

3. We know that following an announcement / presentation of a new iOS version, they go through beta testing with developers and this takes *around* 3 months to complete.

(so June preview, we’re looking at September…hold that thought)

4. We know that we’ve missed the usual annual cycle for the iPhone (it should have been announced already) which means it’s most likely to be released after June/July this year.

5. We know that every *major* release of the iPhone has had an iOS dedicated to it. iPhone 1 = iOS 1.0, iPhone 2 = iOS 2.0, iPhone 3G/3GS = iOS 3.0/3.X, iPhone 4 = iOS 4.0

6. Apple (to my knowledge) have never released a new version of a hardware product within a year. (waits to be proved wrong shattering everything else I’ve spewed out here)

7. Apple have never released information on an iPhone release more than 5 months before it’s launch (iPhone 1 was announced Jan 2007 and released in June 2007)

8. The world ends in October (let’s come back to this one…)

So given what we know here’s what I think we’ll see:-

1. Apple preview iOS 5 to the world then release an iPhone 4S with iOS 4.X with hardware improvements leaving an iPhone 5/iOS 5 to Q4 2012 giving their competitors a *massive* advantage.

2. Apple preview iOS 5 to the world then release an iPhone 4S with iOS 4.X with hardware improvements and *then* release iPhone 5 before Q4 2012 (which would have to be Q1 2012 therefore busting the annual release cycle)

3. Apple preview iOS 5 to the world then release the iPhone 4S in September which runs iOS 5 and they throw out the whole hardware/iOS version match up leaving us to wait to Q4 2012 for iPhone 5.

4. Apple skip a new phone, release iOS 5 for iPhone 4 owners and we have to wait until Q4 2012 for iPhone 5 which will run iOS 5.X, some 15 months after it was previewed?

5. Apple merely “talk about” iOS 5 at WWDC, don’t show specific details and don’t demo it and it’s going to come out “some time in the future” and in the meantime we see an iPhone 4S that’s faster etc. running iOS 4.X .

OK so given all of this here’s what I end up with:-

1. iOS 5 will be announced *and* demoed at WWDC in June

2. It’ll be made available almost immediately as a beta to developers

3. Over the next 3 months it’ll be beta tested and updated to become a GM release

4. It’ll go gold in September at the same time as the iPhone 5 is released.

5. The iPhone 5 will be based on the same physical size/shape as the iPhone 4. It will definitely have a better camera, more internal memory and the A5 chip and most likely will it’ll stick with 16/32gb models. It’ll run iOS 5 and will be announced/released in a “mini” event at Apple Town Hall.

There you go.

ICO Cookie banner script for your site

Thu, 26 May 2011 12:27:00 +0100

I’ve written a JavaScript function to implement the ICO (www.ico.gov.uk) cookie regulation warning. Basically it displays a banner that is hidden when accepted.

You can implement it by adding the following to the top of your web page

For more info check out the Google project

(Obviously this only works with JavaScript enabled)