Category Archives: Technology

Electronics and releated stuff

Google Maps For iOS Is Amazing

Software, , ,

The new Google Maps app is simply amazing, by far the best mobile map app that I’ve used even if you take accuracy off the table. I used it this morning and its vocal driving directions are actually better than Apple’s app. They give more detail in road names and things like that and honestly I think the voice is better and more natural too. If you have an iPhone and haven’t tried it out, you really need to. The Verge has a good write-up about what’s new.

Current iPhone Screen

Technology,

Inspired by Daniel’s and Andrew’s posts showing their current iPhone homepages, here’s mine:

And before you say that’s a lot of apps, I have a jailbreak mod installed that allows more than 12 items to be placed into a folder. It allows you to scroll down to see more apps in the folder. iTunes says I have 119 apps installed. :?

Calling iPhone App “Gas Cubby” Users — I Need Your Help!

Automotive, Software, , ,

Do you use Gas Cubby on your iPhone? If so, would you mind helping me out by sending me an export of your data?

I’m writing a new WordPress plugin that will allow you display data similar to Gas Cubby’s data on your website. You’ll have the option to manually enter gas fillups and such, but you’ll also be able to import from the Gas Cubby app. I’ve been using my data as a test and it’s working great but I’d appreciate being able to use a larger sample size.

If you’d like to help me out, here’s how:

  1. Open up Gas Cubby and press the left arrow until you get to “All Vehicles” shown at the bottom.
  2. Tab the magnifying glass in the upper-left so that it says “Search” at the top.
  3. An “Export” button will now be shown in the upper-right. Press it.
  4. An e-mail prompt will show up. Send the e-mail to “gascubby” at this domain (viper007bond.com).

While there isn’t really any personal data in the export file other than perhaps your gas station location if you fill that in, I still promise not to share this information with anyone. I’ll only be using it for testing in my local machine’s WordPress installation.

Thanks!

Canon G11 vs. Canon S100: Big Brother Meets His New Little Brother

Photography, Technology, , ,

As much as I love my Canon PowerShot G11, it’s just too big. It technically fits in my pocket but it’s uncomfortable to walk around with it in my pocket. So after seeing my co-worker Daniel Bachhuber’s Canon PowerShot S100 a few weeks back, I just had to have one for myself. Besides shooting just about as good of quality images (if not better) than my G11, it also shoots full 1080p video (compared to 640×480!!) and has built-in GPS tagging of photos. Awesome!

Sublime 2: Open New Tabs On The Right

Coding, Software, , ,

One of the few things that bugged me about my favorite text editor, Sublime 2, is that new tabs would open up next to the current tab instead on the far right. Since I usually have about a half-dozen tabs open at once, this made keeping them in a sane order frustrating.

Thankfully Stylishmedia has written a simple little Sublime 2 plugin that makes new tabs open on the right side. Perfect. :)

New SSD Drives

Technology, , ,

Two Intel 320 series 160GB SSD drives that will be going into my PC this weekend in RAID 0 to replace my two existing Western Digital 640GB Black series drives in RAID 0. Should be quite the speed improvement!

I got them on sale for $155 each instead of the regular price of $285 each. Gotta love Cyber Monday weekend deals.

UPDATE: These things are amazingly fast!

My new SSD RAID:

For comparison, here is my old RAID:

Lastly, a normal Western Digital 2TB Green (energy saving) drive that is very commonly used for cheap (not fast) storage:

Crazy, huh?

Two Handy Sublime Text 2 Plugins

Coding, Software

After using EditPlus for the better part of a decade, I made the switch to the totally awesome Sublime Text 2 text editor a few weeks back. One of the great things about Sublime is it’s support for plugins.

Two such plugins I’d like to recommend are SublimeBrackets and SublimeTagmatcher. Both improve how the highlighting of opening and closing items are handled.

By default, Sublime just underlines paired brackets. When you have a ton of code, this can be really hard to see. SublimeBrackets changes this to something more apparent:

Much better, right? I personally use the solid background green style.

SublimeTagmatcher does something similar but for HTML tags. When you have your cursor inside of an HTML tag, it will highlight both the current tag and it’s opening or closing counterpart. This is helpful for making sure you have the correct number of opening and closing tags.

Restoring “http://” To Your Firefox Address Bar

Software

Lifehacker has a great article on how to stop Firefox from greying out everything but the domain name in your address bar. While I personally don’t mind it and infact think it’s a great anti-phishing feature for the average user, one thing I don’t like is the removal of the protocol, i.e. http://, from the beginning of the address bar. I know they’re trying to conserve space, but screen real estate is not something that I am lacking.

So here’s how to once again show the protocol in your Firefox address bar:

  1. Type about:config into your address bar to access a list of Firefox configuration options that are not exposed through a normal settings panel.
  2. Paste browser.urlbar.trimURLs into the search box to find the parameter we’re going to change.
  3. Right-click the row and select “Toggle” to change the value from true to false.
  4. Close the tab and go back to a normal tab, such as this blog post. You should now see the protocol in your address bar once again.