Overcast makes it fun to listen to Podcasts again After reading a lot about a new podcast app called Overcast created by Marco Arment, famous for creating Instapaper I downloaded the app just to check it out. I love Instapaper, an app that really has made me appreciate long form journalism, so I thought I’ll try to see if Overcast could make me interested in listening to podcasts again, something I haven’t done in a while. ...
Apple Airport Utility how to display more information While doing a Wi-Fi scan at work to get better reception and optimize the location and channel selection using NetSpot Wi-Fi Reporter, I had a problem. Our wireless network is set up with roaming, so when NetSpot Manager displays the scanned Wi-Fi device, it only shows the MAC address. So identifying an AirPort Extreme wireless router can be difficult, especially since Apple has simplified the user interface of AirPort Utility and removed a lot of information. One of them being what MAC address the AirPort unit has. So I needed a solution. ...
Mac OS X Finder Sidebar Shared Computer Icons not Showing up I started to have a problem with Mac OS X Finder where the Shared computers in the Finder window sidebar didn’t show up. I couldn’t even change the Sidebar settings in Finder Preferences. So I did some digging around and found out how I could fix it, but also how stupid I am. ...
MultiMarkdown on iPad - an update I have updated my list over how well iPad Markdown writing apps handle the more advanced MultiMarkdown rendering. I also added some new apps to the list of the features I tested. Since I wrote the article, a new favourite writing app of mine, Editorial has been added to the list, and also IA Writer which now has MultiMarkdown support. Almost all of the apps on the list supports Dropbox syncing, so writing in one application and rendering it in another that supports the features you need isn’t to hard. And with the enormous potential for scripting provided by Editorial, using x-callback-url schemes to send the text to another app for final rendering is pretty easy. ...
My Raspberry Pi Car Audio Player A lot of people are using the excellent Linux microcomputer Raspberry Pi and install it in their cars. Usually, they use a color screen that is touch sensitive, being able to play back video and music. But I’m only interested in high-quality audio playback, being able to have all my CDs in lossless FLAC format for optimal sound quality. So a 16x2 LCD with some buttons is plenty. I now have a working system (but not yet installed in my car.) here’s a description of how I’ve built it. Most of the installations I’ve seen the use of the audio out from the Raspberry Pi, but it’s only 11-bit and sounds like crap. I want to use an external DAC, and you can get that to work in XBMC, but only menu and music output, not films. There are some HDMI to audio converters, but I’ll instead use a quality USB DAC. http://youtu.be/wzmFZlpbBCQ ...
Inserting Score Card Research javascript After doing some research using Google Webmaster Tools to get my images indexed, I discovered that a JavaScript called b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js was loading without me installing it. I found out that the Disqus comment system adds it without my knowledge. That’s not ok, so I have decided to remove Disqus from my blog. It’s unfortunate, because it is a pretty good system. I like the ease of making comments, and also that you can follow comments you made on different sites with ease. But if they try to do sneaky stuff like that, they’ll end up in /dev/null (in the trashcan for non geeks). After searching with Google I found that this isn’t something new. It’s been going on for quite some time. Thankfully I have all my comments stored, so I’ll just have to use the build-in comment system in Wordpress. ...
hAtom errors and Google PageRank When I checked my blog in Google Webmaster I noticed a lot of errors in the Structured Data section. After fixing the errors in Wordpress by adding structured data, my traffic increased without any changes. That includes posts. So obviously Google uses hAtom when setting PageRank. ...
Audio Engineering Pioneer John Meyer: Stop Chasing The Next Big Thing, And Go With Flac Instead — Tech News And Analysis: John Meyer may be making really expensive loudspeakers, but when it comes to high-end audio, the audio engineering pioneer prefers free. FLAC, the open source audio format developed by Grateful Dead fans to trade bootleg recordings, is “the perfect format” for music aficionados looking for higher-resolution audio, Meyer told me during a recent interview. And to him, any company pushing trying to make a buck with selling upsampled music is just out to sell snake oil. “It’s tricking people who don’t know enough about technology,” he said. ...
Update: A newer, better version has been created. You can download it here. I use the excellent iPad app Editorial as my preferred text editor. I want to be able to upload images directly from Editorial to WordPress, using xmlrpc, so the images ends up in the media gallery, the files in the correct folders, thumbnails made and a Markdown link with the correct URL is created. So I’ve written a workflow you can download that gives you the ability to select some text (that will be the alt text for the image), and either upload the image in the original size, or resize the width to the dimension you specify. After the image is uploaded, the Markdown image code is inserted. Another good thing is that you have the ability to name the image file, which I haven’t seen in other solutions, like in Poster App, where you get the cryptical iOS internal name of the image. Not so SEO friendly. The easiest solution was to use the wordpress_xmlrpc module, so that needs to be installed before you can use the workflow! but I’ve written a guide about how to install the module/library here. If you forget to install it beforehand, you will get this dialog box with instructions on how to install it if you start the workflow. ...
Importing pipista modules in Editorial Lets face it, the Editorial App is a fantastic text/Markdown editor. It’s incredibly powerful with scripting abilities. But one of the most amazing tool for a power user is the ability to write Python scripts that can do almost anything. There are a lot of modules included with Editorial, but how do you add a library if it’s not included? There is a script for Editorials sister application Pythonista, that makes it easy to add modules, and you can use that for importing libraries to Editorial as well. The script is called Pipista. ...