All that Snoo
-
New CRTC Wireless Regs
It looks like the new CRTC cell phone regulations have been enacted. We may still have 3 year contracts in Canada but with zero termination fees after 2, we effectively have the shorter period now. It remains to be seen whether carriers will make up the difference with reduced subsidies (higher handset prices) or still…
-
Google Play Books
I was excited to hear about Google Play books now accepting uploads of your own ePub and PDF books. Up to 1000 can be uploaded and read (and theoretically synced) between devices. All the advantages of say, the Kobo environment without the downsides (namely, having to buy all your stuff from Kobo). I envisioned a…
-
Backbone dynamic elements
I recently discovered Backbone’s setElement function. What it allowed me to do was dynamically create a view’s container in Javascript and transfer/assign the view and its events to the new element. Using jQuery within the view initialize event: this.el = $(‘<div id=”\’newView\'”></div>’); this.setElement(this.el); $(‘#content’).append(this.el); I manipulated the this.el attribute directly, without using an interim variable,…
-
iWatch
The rumor mills are ablaze. Two things bother me about this though. 1) available later this year, and 2) prototype has battery life issues. Apple, as a rule, doesn’t let these two kinds of things go together. Battery life is almost certainly an early design goal. “Later this year” would mean “production now”. If something…
-
RealRacing 3
I, like many other racing fans, eagerly awaited Firemint’s latest offering in the mobile offering, RealRacing 3. I bought both previous games in the series (even got RR2 for two different devices). I was excited when I saw the videos, and excited to know it would be free! So when it was released, I kept…
-
iTunes (Windows) Podcast fix
iTunes is pretty decent for Podcasts. In fact, Lifehacker readers rated it the best.  However, it has some shortcomings, to be sure. The one that annoyed me the most is if you have a RSS feed of say, PDFs or ePubs like the magazines at jw.org, you can subscribe in iTunes whereby it will happily auto-download…
-
Local DNS on dd-wrt
My Linksys N400 started getting slow and completely stopped responding this morning. Â The only way I could get back into it was with a 30-second pin reset. I lost all of my DHCP reservations, of course, but those were a lot easier to restore than local DNS. I set my local search domain to “lan”…
-
Gunnars Glasses
I got myself some Gunnars glasses on a rather good sale the other day, after being a bit curious about them. I use a computer all day, every day, and I want to both protect my eyes and maximize their use. They’re not the ideal shape I would have preferred (I would have preferred a…
-
REST Authentication
I did some research the other day to secure my REST API using The Slim framework. I found a tidy little way to force HTTP authentication (basic, in this case) using this article as well as the PHP manual. I get the client to provide the user name and password, then I can look up…
-
PSN Plus
I got a 50% off deal on a 3-month subscription to Playstation Plus the other day. There was one or two freebies that I was interested in (Quantum Conundrum!). I discovered that I again have access to games I downloaded when I had a free trial a year ago or so. That tells me if…