Recently, I encountered a REALLY annoying issue with my Mac Magic Mouse disconnecting every time it was bumped.
Sometimes when I listen to music I like to tap my desk and without realising, I tap my mouse as well (the Apple purists are probably shrieking reading that). Recently I put some new batteries into the mouse because the other ones went flat and then found I kept getting disconnected.
The issue wasn’t the batteries coming out, because letting the mouse sit and then tapping it would reconnect it to my Mac. The issue is actually the type of batteries that you use in your mouse and a subtle design flaw in the Magic Mouse battery compartment.
An interesting topic I thought would be better served as a post. Are email confirmation fields still needed in modern web forms?
Recently I was tasked with building a registration form. This form had a lot of fields in it including an email and confirm email field. I made the case for removing it because I felt another field was just a barrier to entry and in the age of “Sign Up Using Facebook” buttons anyway, the tolerance people have for long forms has dwindled.
Even though I recently purchased a MacBook Pro, I still use a Windows PC at home running Windows 8.1. There are so many quirks and issues in Windows 8 I would love to see version 9 fix and a few new features to make things better.
Start Menu
Supposedly already featured thanks to leaks from Microsoft themselves, Windows 9 will see a return of the classic start menu. The jokes about Windows 9 being Windows 7 with a different skin aren’t actually that far from the truth.
Right in the nostalgia.
The source code for what was a good portion of my childhood for the game Commander Keen has been released. The source code is available on Github right here
I am going to compile this and relive my childhood once more, because I absolutely loved this game. For a 2D side scrolling platformer it was pretty advanced for its time, nowadays we take get better game graphics on our smartphones.
After the amount of backlash it received for spreading U2’s new album forcefully upon ALL iTunes users, Apple have created a tool to remove the U2 album, “Songs of Innocence” from your iTunes library permanently.
While it was a creative attempt at trying to break a record for largest album release ever recorded, it was basically a form of malware. I am sure some people liked the new album, but many didn’t because it was a steaming pile of shit.
Usually I write my blog posts in Sublime Text Editor using Markdown and then I copy and paste into a Markdown format convertor before publishing them, but it is tedious and feels a bit crappy.
I evaluated and read up on a lot of different options until I came across Byword 2 for Mac. Even though it costs $13 AUD in the Mac App Store and then another $6 AUD for activating the premium publishing features, I dived in and decided to buy it.
If you’re like me and you’ve just come to the Apple side or you have an external hard drive (client supplied or old drive lying about) formatted in NTFS, then you will have noticed that Mac OS does not support writing (delete, update or move) to the drive and only allows you to browse and read only.
There is a product out there by Paragon which is about $30 and I have used it before and it works incredibly well, but if you can’t justify the spend, there is a free alternative. Mac OS has a secret, it can support writing to an NTFS formatted drive with ease and it works quite well too.
I’ve officially gone to the dark side and bought a MacBook Pro 13" Retina Display model (the late 2014 variant). I will be travelling a bit in the next year or so and I needed a laptop that is easy to carry around, use on a flight and has the power for development.
This is my first Mac, I primarily use PC’s and Windows because I love to game occasionally and well, it’s what I grew up using.
Before I used Laravel, I used Codeigniter and I had the perfect workflow of being able to use WordPress as the administration panel, taxonomy system, authentication, users and post types.
I hate having to create administration panels from my previous experience working for a WordPress development agency, as the admin packages out there are complicated, don’t work correctly and are severely lacking in the features department.
In Laravel 4, the process for integrating WordPress is basically the same. You disable the theming functionality and include the WordPress blog-header bootstrapping file to include WordPress’ core functionality and features.
In what sounds like a crazed conspiracy theory, it actually might turn out that the Malaysian Government and authorities have been covering up the fate of missing flight MH370 the whole time.
General Sutarman the head of the Indonesian Police Force apparently made the claim during a meeting of senior police and airline officials.
Apparently he said:
“I spoke to the Malaysian Police Chief Tun Mohammed Hanif Omar. I actually know what had actually happened with MH370.”