Enforced Posting Silence

November 14, 2014 | Comment

You may have noticed that there haven’t many (any) posts for a while. This is due to the following email I received from my existing server host:

Thank you for your years of loyalty. We regret to inform you that VPS Unlimited will be closing permanently on November 17, 2014. All customers must move their data off to another provider before this date. This is a hard deadline. All data will be destroyed on November 18, 2014. There will be no way to access your VPS after this date.

Insert your own expletive here.

Given that I have about eight … Read the rest

iOS 8 Keyboard Issues

iOS 8 Keyboard Issues

October 7, 2014 | Comment

iOS8’s introduction of custom keyboards is one of my favourite features but like so much in this release it is very buggy. I’m not sure if the issues are with iOS or the keyboards or a combination of both but they are frequent.

Some of the issues I have encountered are:

1. keyboards not appearing
2. no words appearing when I type
3. no button to change the keyboard appearing (and not just in passowrd fields)
4. keyboards appearing all over the place (see below)

I’m sure that all this is fixable but right now I would describe the custom … Read the rest

Flickr Sildeshow Code Generator

Flickr Sildeshow Code Generator

September 22, 2014 | Comment

Despite all the changes over the years I still like Flickr but since the sexing up of the interface there are some things that I have found have become impossible to find. One of these is the ability to find the code that allowed you to embed a slideshow on another page (you can see an example at the bottom of the page).

Fed up with this I decided to take matters into my own hands a write a script to throw out the necessary code. Just copy the album url as follows and paste it into the form below. … Read the rest

Cutting the cord and ridding ourselves of BT

September 3, 2014 | Comment

When was the last time that your home phone got serious, regular, use?

That was the question I found myself asking when BT announced recently that they were upping their prices again. This got me to thinking about what we were actually paying for and I quickly came to the conclusion that we weren’t getting very good value for money.

The problem (for BT) is that there are so many other ways we can be reached these days whether it is email, text message, Skype, Facebook or even Snapchat. Very, very few choose to phone us and those that do … Read the rest

The Problem with the New Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs)

September 1, 2014 | Comment

Over the last year the number of generic top-level domains (gTLD) has been greatly expanded. gTLDs are what you see at the end of a domain such as .com, .net, .org etc. This was clearly felt to be too limiting and so a whole raft of new gTLDs were proposed and adopted. These include .london, .furniture and even .blackfriday. You can find a fuller list here.

To me these were interesting but not ultimately useful until I started on a new side project and needed a new catchy domain. After going through countless .com domain variations and finding that … Read the rest

Using Kindlegen with PHP on Linux to Create Kindle Files

July 15, 2014 | 1 comment

I’m working on a side project at the moment that requires the conversion programatically of a page of html to something that can be consumed by an Amazon Kindle. I did a quick search to see if anything existed as a PHP class library that I could use and while there was they were either hugely bloated or too alpha for my needs.

I then stumbled upon Amazon’s command line tool KindleGen which allows conversion of HTML and ePub docs to the MOBI format that the Kindle requires. This is a multi-platform too and, crucially, a version for Linux is … Read the rest

Happy 10th Birthday Us!

June 5, 2014 | Comment

So I have been blogging on technology now for just over ten years it would seem, the first post was June 5th 2004. It’s somewhat ironic, however, that I am today writing this post in WordPress and the very first post was about Noah Grey’s excellent Greymatter another great CMS. This also means that I have been connected for about 20 years launching my first website in May 1996 – The Williams Database.

How things have change in that very short space of time. That first site was launched on the “free” 0.5 mb of space that was provided … Read the rest