Tag: iPhone

I bought a new screen protector for my iPhone

My iPhone (4S) has been dropped numerous times, and it has a number of small chips along the edges of the front glass – and as I have ruined several Invisible Shield protectors I decided to try one of the new glass screen protectors – as it says in the ads:

SPIGEN SGP’s Steinheil GLAS.t is made to protect the LCD from damage and scratches with specially processed glass that has been reinforced to increase shock absorbency.The entire surface of the GLAS t is transparent and the back side is covered with a strong silicon adhesive for easy installation. When installed, there are no gaps between the LCD and the GLAS t which means the touch screen’s sensitivity is unaffected. To prevent any excess force from coming in contact with the edges of the screen protector we highly recommend that a case is used with the GLAS.t.

CAUTION
* As this is a glass product, please note that the edges of the glass are the most vulnerable areas. We highly recommend that you use case along with your GLAS.t to avoid chipping or cracking the edges of your GLAS.t.

[From iPhone 4 / 4S Screen Protector GLAS.t Premium Tempered Glass Series | SPIGEN SGP]

Notice the “Caution” bit – it seems like a bit of a downside.

But on the upside – it is really “better than invisible” on the iPhone, as it actually is a lot more resistant to fingermarks, and so thin that I can use it with my normal iPhone case.

servetome – StreamToMe Server for Linux/OSX/Windows

I am currently running StreamToMe on one of our Mac Mini’s – and it works perfectly. But I am really wondering of this could be a great use for a RaspBerry Pi:

Command line based Python server application for the iPad/iPhone StreamToMe app. It needs Python 2.6 and should run on Linux/OSX or Windows.

Does real-time transcoding between various formats and x264 using a customised version of ffmpeg.

(Note – If you are using 64bit Linux please pickup the stm.py(r45) from the trunk, it has a fix needed on 64bit OSs)

[From servetome – StreamToMe Server for Linux/OSX/Windows – Google Project Hosting]

Growl notifications from Ruby to Mac and iPhone and iPad

It turns out that it is ridiculously easy to send Growl notifications like these

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from Ruby – all it takes is a few line of code using the ruby-growl gem.

And the kicker? It can automatically be forwarded to the iPhone or the iPad using a excellent little app called “Prowl” .

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So now (as you can see above) any action on our RFI reader (soon to be RFID reader lock) will show up as alerts on the iPhone.

Belkin routers and Mac’s

I had to set up a Belkin wireless router today – and when it came to encryption I started off using WPA – all ok on the PC’s I sued, but the Mac’s, iPhone’s and iPad’s in the house refused to authenticate.

In the end it turned out that I had to use the extremely long Hex password – and from then on everything worked.

Austin Seraphin on the iPhone for the Blind

I had no idea about the usability for blind and the iPhone :

Moving, beautiful story:

Last Wednesday, my life changed forever. I got an iPhone. I consider it the greatest thing to happen to the blind for a very long time, possibly ever.

This is from June. Last week, he bought an iMac. (Via Andy Baio.)

Update: Fireballed; here are links to Google’s cached versions of his pieces about the iPhone and iMac.

★ [From Austin Seraphin on the iPhone for the Blind]

Import export challenges with Bookpedia and iBookshelf

We have a lot of books – and over the years we have tried to keep track of some of these in various versions of databases.

The current favourites are Bookpedia on the Mac’s – and iBookshelf on the iPhone, mainly because both of them can read barcodes using the built in cameras, a very handy feature.

This of course means that I would like to export data from iBookshelf on the iPhone and import the same data into Bookpedia, and as both support .csv files to do this, everything should be ok – not so.

The export file from iBookshelf looks like this :
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very good – but look at that second line – when Bookpedia tries to import this it looks like this :

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with a bit of experimentation I found that Bookpedia also needs quotation marks around the ISBN code – not exactly standard.

Building a dashboard in Ruby on Rails

As I really want to learn Ruby On Rails – and as I have chosen to build a “dashboard” for our home monitoring system (and not wanting to do it in Flash – as we have both iPhones and iPads) I found a ruby gem called “acs_as_dashboard” to start off with (version 0.4.0 for those that are interested).

But after wrestling with it on and off for 2 days and still not managing to get the application up and running I managed to find a downloadable demo called “acts_as_dashboard_example” – downloaded it, and it worked immediately!

This gave me a stable starting point – and I’ve now modified this with my own libraries, and managed to get it to display data from the home monitoring system – learning a lot about RoR as I go along. Excellent!

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Interesting tip for iPhone Internet tethering

Just so set the scene :

– I have a iPhone 4 (Vodafone UK)

– And I have a Boingo mobile phone subscription on it (around £4/month)

I am currently sitting outside Starbucks – on my MacBook – connected to the Internet using tethering from the MacBook to the iPhone.

It looks remarkably like I can use the Boingo subscription on my iPhone to connect my MacBook to the Internet through the iPhones wireless (ie Starbucks) wifi netowrk.

Hm

Streaming video from your server to the iPad

I just downloaded StreamToMe to my iPad to let me automatically transcode and stream videos from our video server (a mac mini) directly to the iPad – and it works (most of the time – unless it crashes).

It requires that you run a (free) application on the server – then the iPad will automatically discover all servers.

StreamToMe is an application for iPhone and iPod Touch that plays music and video files (in a wide variety of formats) streamed live from your Mac. If you connect the video-out cable for iPhone/iPod, StreamToMe can play through your TV, turning your iPhone/iPod plus Mac into a home media center.

[From Projects With Love: StreamToMe]