February 10th, 2011 | Android, Fun, Geekery, Tech | Tim Heyes
In a bit of down time “Action Man” (Adam Maloney), one of our lead developers, has knocked up a native Android application for calculating your bikes gear inch:
“Gear inches is a system that assigns numerical measurements to bicycle gear ratios, to indicate how low or high a gear is.
This app will help you calculate your bikes gear inch by simply entering wheel, chainring and cog sizes.”
A useful tool for us Android carrying, fixed gear riding techies!
Grab it for free here, here or here
January 13th, 2011 | Air, Flex, Geekery, Tech | Matt Bryson
We had a challenging situation on our hands this week.
We are building an AIR application for a client, that has an HTML control in one of the windows and this HTML control loads up an HTML page with an embedded SWF, both locally hosted within the application domain.
In the prototype for the app, all worked fine. However, once we started to build the final application, the external SWFsuddenly failed to load!
The HTML page loaded up fine, and we could execute javascript from it but the SWF would not load at all. For some reason the HTML wrapper was simply refusing to load it.
January 6th, 2011 | Android, Geekery, Tech | Tim Heyes
We recently upgraded our Exchange server from 2003 to 2010 SP1 which has given us some great new features, including the far better web mail which actually works properly on non-IE browsers.
However, for the majority of the Android users in the organisation the change meant that the default email application stopped being able to connect and returned an “Unable to open connection to server” error.
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November 22nd, 2010 | Company, Data, Geekery, Tech | Matt Bryson
Back in July when the boris bike scheme started we went out and tried the bikes along with some of the apps that had been released (read the post here). At the same time we had a look into the API’s and plotted the location / availability of the bikes over time. However, we totally forgot to upload our little experiment!
You can now see the result – Boris Bikes on our labs site.
September 2nd, 2010 | Air, AS3, Flex, Geekery, Tech | Matt Bryson
Update : Thanks to Paul Robertson for pointing out that as of AIR 2.0.2 released a couple of weeks back, there is native cross platform GZIP support in Air. However, if you need to achieve this in the 1.5 runtime for any reason, the below is still applicable!
To reduce bandwidth many servers compress HTTP responses using GZIP encoding. Pretty much all web browsers support GZIP decoding, so the actual data transfered is a fraction of the final unpacked response. Flex/Flash apps running in a web browser can take advantage of this as the browser handles the HTTP responses.
However, Flex AIR apps which do not run in a browser don’t have this luxury. By default, the headers sent in a request from AIR do not accept GZIP encoding, and even if they did, Flex / AIR runtime has no idea how to handle GZIP de-compression!!
Thanks to the Flex community however, it is possible!
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July 30th, 2010 | Fun, Geekery | Tim Heyes
This afternoon, a couple of us decided it would be a good idea to try out London’s new cycle hire scheme and take out one of the “Boris Bikes”.
Naturally, we had to add a small element of geekery to this process and try out the apps that are currently available to help with the hire process. These are mainly aimed at helping you to find the cycle stations nearest to you, but some give you information about how many bikes are available at a given station.
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June 30th, 2010 | Geekery, Tech, Uncategorized | Adam Maloney
I’m no Mac hater (really) but the new version of Ubuntu they’ve moved the close, minimize & maximize buttons onto the left side like Macs.
I could probably get used to this, but why should I when I can easily move them back to my preferred position.
Here’s how:
ALT+F2 or in Terminal type
gconf-editor
Then find your way to /apps/metacity/general
Edit button_layout to “:minimize,maximize,close” ( without the quotes and with : )
And voila, in the correct position.
June 24th, 2010 | Geekery | Tim Heyes
We’ve always been fans of the XBox at Skinkers, not the 360, the original. Microsoft’s first console which is in effect a fairly low powered PC in a different case with the USB ports shaped a little differently.
What really endeared us to it was the fact that with a small outlay, a few tools and the patience to solder a new chip into the motherboard you could really get a little bit geeky with it: put in a bigger hard drive, add a USB keyboard, get it to turn on from the remote control, change the button colour and even install a basic little LCD screen in the front.
But the real benefit to us was the ability to run “homebrew” software on it – in particular an awesome application called XBox Media Centre (XBMC). Released in 2004, it allowed you to listen to music or watch movies served over the network. With some “Web 2.0″ modification to its web interface this provided the perfect solution for a democratic office jukebox – everyone could log in and add (and remove) songs from the day’s playlist.
Times change, technology changes and if anything we wanted to try to implement something new. So with the introduction of XMBC for Linux and the genius of Spotify, we were given the opportunity to run 2 new “jukeboxes” from a single system and have the pick of pretty much any music we could possibly want. And as music forms such a big part of the culture at Skinkers, we also decided it would be a good idea to make public what we’re listening to – both via WordPress and Twitter.
Both Spotify and XBMC have the ability to scrobble to Last.fm, so we can get the information to a single point. Last.fm also publishes “recent tracks” as RSS so we have a standard format to query.
Enter the 2 final pieces of the puzzle: Last.fm for WordPress developed by Ricardo González and twitterfeed, a great free service that tweets posts published via an RSS feed.