sebflipper

After my trusty mobile phone which I have had for the last 4 years gave up the go on me I decided to replace it with a shiny iPhone.

For the most part its been a very good experience, however there where a few things that my old phone did slightly better like running multiple applications at the same time, letting you choose your own SMS ringtone (rather than limiting you to only 6!) and my biggest annoyance:

When composing a new text message every phone I owned in past told you how many characters you have left (before it starts sending multiple messages) and how many messages it was going to send in total.

This crucial feature surprisingly seems to have been left out on the iPhone! Which could leave me accidentally wasting my credit by sending 2 messages at once and annoying people with 2 messages (when I go over the 160 character limit). As the iPhone has one of the most advanced web browsers Safari built-in (with copy and paste support) I set out to try and fix it myself.

My solution: http://www.sebflipper.co.uk/iPhoneSMS (best viewed on an iPhone)

Update: Source is now available on GitHub

Read on for technical details…

Update 8/1/09: Boxee now supports BBC iPlayer out of the box!

One thing I have been waiting for on the Apple TV is access to the BBC’s iPlayer. I recently discovered Boxee which is an open-source media centre for Mac, Windows and Apple TV based on a fork of XBMC. It has a very nice and easy to use interface which will index all your video, music and photos and show you summary, ratings, trailers etc based around your content. Very handy for finding info about movies I have copied onto the Apple TV!

Today I stumbled across a plugin for Boxee/XBMC which allows you to view content from the BBC iPlayer, it doesn’t come preinstalled with Boxee however instructions can be found on their forums, I found that it works very well on the Apple TV playing content from all their channels and most popular lists with minimal effort.

If you haven’t patched your Apple TV to run SSH already theres a handy patch stick creator that will unlock your Apple TV and install Boxee aptly called atvusb-creator and your ready to go with Boxee. However if have already have SSH and nitoTV installed (like did) you can simply copy the atv-xbmc-launcher installer onto you Apple TV and follow the instructions on their Wiki once the menu item is installed you can press Update and it will download and install Boxee for you.

Once you have Boxee up and running on your Apple TV copy the plugin across and edit the source.xml then should should see a nice BBC iPlayer icon under Video->Internet!

Backing up data is normally something most people usually neglect (unless your on a Mac), and even if you do backup what happens if you get your stuff stolen or lost by hard drive failure or worst case scenario fire?

Enter the cloud, online backup is nothing new the only difference these days is you normally get more storage for your money. Over the last few weeks I have been keeping an eye out for different solutions:

Service	Pros	Cons
Drop Box	Backs up all your documents and photos online incrementally Keeps things synced across machines (and cross platform) Keeps revision history (so you can go back to previous versions of a document) Allows you to make files or folders public and gives a link to download or generates a photo gallery for you Works on Windows, Mac and Linux	Currently in beta (no public signup) 2GB for free account
	Unlimited storage (paid accounts) Social network for sharing with friends/family and tagging Easy to manage and setup galleries	Photos and videos only 100MB upload per month on free accounts Manual backup process
Mozy	Unlimited automatic incremental backups Set it up and forget it	2GB free account Doesn’t support Linux
Self Hosted	Can be used for backup as well as hosting websites, blogs and galleries etc. Backups work with open-source software like rsync Most hosting companies normally provide 100GB+ of storage space	Manual setup Complex to initially setup

Find out which one I chose after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

SVN is a useful application allows you to keep track of revisions/changes made to files (mainly for web development or even writers!) and keep projects up to date easily (which is what we use at work). It seems to be allot harder to setup on a shared web host.

So after much playing around with it and getting it up and running I thought I would create a how to guide on the Site5 Wiki about setting up Subversion for multiple users, with permissions and desktop setup (this guide should also work on other shared web hosts).

http://wiki.site5.com/SVN/Subversion_(SVN)_Setup_Guide

Last week I decided to use my mobile phone and bluetooth GPS receiver to log a weeks worth of commuting to see which route is the best and what days are the worst. I used a freeware tool called NoniGPSPlot on my mobile and TrailRunner on my Mac, which is geared more towards running, and biking etc but also works well plotting driving routes. It basically shows a line graph of speed allowing you to click on a curtain point and see where you were at the time, it also has nice integration with Google Maps, Live Maps and OpenStreetMap.

Bizarrely with the amount of accuracy with GPS these days you can actually see what lane you were in at the time and even if you were changing lanes. My findings are it takes longer in the mornings to get to work, in the worse case it took 1 hour 9 minutes to get in, where as it only took 41 minutes to get home, almost 30 minute difference! I think the main problem is the school run in the mornings seem to clog the roads quite a bit. Going different ways didn’t seem to save much time unless the motorway was totally jammed.

I can see people like TomTom building this sort thing into their next generation of GPS devices so that they can accurately model and predict what roads and at what time they will be jammed, as well as sending back live data to a central database to which can inform other GPS users to avoid certain roads.

You can also monitor my dodgy parking with the previous route overlays!

I have been along time Firefox user (even since the early days when it was called Firebird) swearing by it and setting it as my families default browser! The Firefox 3 beta’s have been around for some months now and I have been using the beta since January, overall its been very stable and allot faster than previous versions (especially on my Mac). Some of the notable improvements that I have been using are:

• Location bar allows you to search through your history as well as bookmarks and most often visited sites (see screen shot below)
• Improved bookmarks, smart bookmarks and a bookmark manager which supports tagging
• Customised skins based around what ever operating system you are using it on (Windows, Mac, Linux etc)
• Improved download manager
• Faster page rendering and improved memory management

The main feature which is very impressive is the smarter location bar that allows you to quickly access most often visited sites and bookmarks, I don’t think I could go back to Firefox 2 as I would be lost without it!

The only niggles that I have had with it so far is the Home and End buttons on my keyboard seem to be acting as Page Up/Down buttons on my Mac, which is kinda pointless having 2 sets of buttons that do the same thing, but luckily someone has fixed it (if only it would make it into the final version, rather than being a hack!) and the Foxmarks plug-in has only just been upgraded to support Firefox 3 (which synchronizes your bookmarks between computers).

Whats even better for me as a Web/PHP Developer, is that it fully supports ACID2 which insures that Firefox is standards compliant and will hopefully mean that it will be allot easier to make the design of a website look pretty much identical between other ACID2 compliant browsers (such as Opera, Safari and even the IE8 beta). Now all they need to do is make it ACID3 compliant!

On another note I updated WordPress (which powers this blog) to 2.5, which has under gone a revamped admin interface and its surprisingly painless to upgrade as all your custom themes and uploads are stored in a separate folder and I haven’t had to touch my custom template/theme since I installed it a few years back.

If your like me and have far too much music you will have probably transferred it all to an external hard drive, which is great as it frees up some space on your computer, but not so great if you forget to turn it on and you start up iTunes.

iTunes has the habit of marking all the files all the files it can’t find with an exclamation and then not syncing with iPods etc, which is why I wrote a an Automator script for my Mac to detect if my hard drive is connected:

tell application "Finder"
	if exists folder "LaCie 500GB Mini Hub:Music:" then
		launch application "iTunes"
		tell application "iTunes"
			launch
		end tell
	else
		display dialog "Please turn on LaCie 500GB Mini Hub" buttons {"OK"} default button 1
	end if
end tell

To use, open up Automator paste the code in and change “LaCie 500GB Mini Hub:Music:” to the name of your drive and location of your music collection, then save as an application, then just drag it on your dock and remove the original iTunes icon (you can even give it the same icon as iTunes by following this guide). If it detects your drive it will automatically load iTunes otherwise it display a message.