All posts by Chris

Password Pet Peeve

Thanks to the 1Password Watchtower feature, I’ve realized that many of my passwords need to be updated due to the HeartBleed Bug.  While I’m at it creating new passwords, I’ve been upping the length of them. I’m continually frustrated by sites that refuse to list character max lengths and ones that don’t pre publish the acceptable character lists. Some won’t even tell why the password is unacceptable until after you try to save it.

My personal favorite was (site to be unnamed) allowed me to change the password to a 24 char length password. But they failed to warn me that the max length is 20 chars. So the password “saved” but I now did not know what it was. Nothing is more fun then wasting time going through the password reset scenario to find the 20 char limit.

So to all the web developers ( and the business types that make the dumb aesthetic decisions), please give us your password requirements clearly up front. Thanks!

Railfanning Concord NC 1-5-2013

I finally dug out my camera and took advantage of a beautiful weekend in the south to take some pictures. It proved to be a great day to catch some trains on the NS mainline between Charlotte and Salisbury. An even more eventful day was had by the crew of NS 119 who had their train go into emergency stop about a mile above where I was at. After they finally got going again, 800 feet later, the train emergency stopped again.

Just upgrade to WordPress 3.5, and now nothing works? One Solution…

If you are like me and upgraded to WordPress 3.5 and find that almost all of the JavaScript is now not working, this maybe why. When you log back in and try to do something like, add a post, you realize that none of the menu bars and plugins have loaded.

The first thing you can try is to enable Script Debug in the wp-config file. This solved the issue for me, but I don’t like a debug flag fixing errors so I dug a little deeper and found the following in the WordPress 3.5 Master Problem Page.

One solution courtesy of WordPress Support Docs: You probably have added Perishable Press’ 5G blacklist to your HTACCESS file. They probably changed the way they do rewrites in this version of WordPress and the HTACCESS file blocks other parts of WordPress from seeing critical files. If you look at JavaScript errors, you get file not found errors. Follow the link below and search for “5G Blacklist” on the page it will take you to the updated code from WordPress.

WordPress Support: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/troubleshooting-wordpress-35-master-list

Dropbox adding a music player? –Why?

It seems the Internet is abuzz with Dropbox’s acquisition of a fledgling streaming music player. I fail to see what the hype is all about. How is adding a music player to my Dropbox account somehow special and game changing.

In the ever growing and competitive online music space what could be done that already isn’t being done now. Why wouldn’t I use Spotify, or a service like it, that allows me to have a almost limitless array of their streaming catalog. Or if you live in a Google-centric world, the massive amount of free storage Google Play! Music offers. And let us not forget the ease of iTunes Match and not having to wait days for my entire library to upload itself.

Some have said that it is just an additional feature to get more free customers to bounce up against the paid storage limits. I can totally see how its just a nice add-on they want to have to try to help monetize their service. Without any licensing deals with the Music labels, I can’t see it being anything more than an upload service to stream it back to myself. And with that I give it a yawn.

MIT Tech Review: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/508791/will-dropbox-add-a-music-player-to-its-file-store

We are running out of metric prefixes for big data

We all want digital storage to keep increasing, but it seems that it is at a pace quicker than we can make up names to quantify it. It is hard to believe that we are hitting storage levels that seemed astronomical at the turn of the century. Looks like we’ll need to create new names to keep up with our insatiable love for big data.

MIT Tech Report – http://www.technologyreview.com/view/508526/will-big-data-get-too-big-for-the-metric-system-to-handle

Amazon Instant Video now available for the iPad

Sometime this morning Amazon released their Amazon Instant Video app for the iPad. The app allows anyone with an ipad to stream previously purchase movies and tv shows or for those with an Amazon Prime Account, access to Prime Instant Video. Finally for anyone that is in the Apple camp, you now have an option other than flash video in your browser to make use of your Prime Instant Video. It will also sync your place in a video so you can pick up where you left off on another device.

That is not to say the app is without its flaws. It seems impossible to find a search field to find video, so you either have to make do with Amazon’s recommendations or use the website to add content to your watch list. And sadly you cannot Air Play the video to your Apple TV (but you can stream the audio, which is pointless in my opinion). I don’t have a video out cable to see if that is disabled, but I’m betting it is.

All in all if you are either invested in the Amazon media camp or a Prime member such as myself this app is a no brainer to download. Finally I don’t have to sit at my Mac even more if I want to enjoy Prime video. Hopefully this will pave the way for an Instant Video app for the AppleTV, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Itunes store link: Amazon Instant Video for iPad

Jlabs Audio J4 Earbuds Review

I’ve been looking for a decent cheap set of earbuds that don’t sound horrible and will allow me try them to see if I really like the in ear style buds.

A few months ago I purchased a set of Meego brand ear buds that were on sale at Amazon for 15 dollars. Needless to say they were awful sounding. The made every type of music, even country, sound like hardcore deep bass rap. The amount of bass is already ratcheted up on any earbud, but those were all bass and no highs. Needless to say they were quickly returned to amazon.

So I was skeptical when Groupon had a set of JLabs Audio J4 earbuds on sale for $19. I also had a coupon for ten dollars off, so after shipping was added in I figured I can’t go wrong for $12. Continue reading Jlabs Audio J4 Earbuds Review

FitBit and My Newfound Fitness Craze

After much procrastination and finally tired of looking at my jiggling belly I decided I need to get back into shape. I’ve been using the food diary software for the iPhone from Lose It, but felt that I needed more data. You see most of these food diary programs use standard equations to calculate your daily caloric amount. And if you don’t fit into the equation, you don’t lose weight. Now all hope is not lost. Most of these many tools can have more data input into them, input it into the equation, and it will be more accurate.
So here are the tools I’ve acquired for this experiment.

FitBit Ultra Pedometer
FitBit Ultra Pedometer – Courtesy of FitBit

FitBit – www.fitbit.com

I first wanted something to measure how active I am on a daily basis. You wear the tiny little device on your waist and it will track how many steps you have taken, how sedentary you are, even monitor your sleep patterns.
There is also a companion website that automatically tracks all of your data and real time updates it for you. The biggest plus to the FitBit site, is that is links with so many other products such as Microsoft HealthVault, Endomondo, and Lose It!, which are also being used in this trial. Continue reading FitBit and My Newfound Fitness Craze

Mountain Lion Available

After repeatedly clicking the buy button and seeing every Mac AppStore error available the Mountain Lion download has begun. Its saturating my connection completely so no problems there.

All apps have been updated thus far, and a Carbon Copy Clone made of my system disk.

Hopefully this is as uneventful as the Lion upgrade. Now just to remember to copy the installer to a thumb drive so I don’t have to download it a second time from my MacBook Air.

More to come!

UPDATE: After about 45 to 50 minutes, my iMac rebooted (albeit slowly) and everything is good to go. One thing I did notice is that my default brightness on the screen was maxed out and with a 27 inch iMac one could get sunburn. Otherwise so far everything seems to work just fine, and actually feels a tad bit snappier and looks just a bit crisper. Maybe its just me.

One thing I’m not too fond of if the new look of the dock. The less translucent frosted glass doesn’t really bother me, but the almost disappearance of the running application “lights” looks like someone could measure pixels right and cut off the screen.

UPDATE 2: Been a good portion of the afternoon and no noticeable problems thus far. Wasn’t at home for a bit, Mac went to sleep and woke right back up. A bit disappointing that no programs I have are iCloud saving enabled, but that does give me a reason to finally purchase Pages.

UPDATE 3: It seems that Apple has fixed a bug that was driving me nuts. In Lion, a Safari child process, WebProcess, would end up eating up memory. My RSS reader which used a web view also would do the same eating up a gigabyte or more of memory. Now both will increase memory as tabs are opened and reduce it as the close. Well done!