With www.jailbreakme.com jail breaking an iPhone suddenly became too easy not to do. I’ve jail broken iPhones before with ultrasn0w but this is too simple. Just go to that site on your pre-4.0.1 iPhone, slide your finger across the screen and you’re done. Simple! But what next? Your new app installer is called “Cydia”. It’ll… Read More »
I was asked a question about shuffling yesterday which got me thinking. How do you write an algorithm to truly shuffle a deck of cards without any bias? There are a couple of well-known algorithms to do this, both popularized by Donald Knuth. At a very abstract high-level they are: generate a random number for… Read More »
Location based services have been around for a number of years in the research community. They were always fun to build and excellent research vehicles but needed something to change before hitting the streets. Well, now we’re beginning to carry GPS enabled devices these services have hit the mainstream. I regularly use Yelp and Around… Read More »
So I cheaped out and bought a refurbished Linksys WRT160N from Amazon for $28. Great price for a 802.11n enabled router (most are in the $100 range) but it kept dropping wifi connections, slowing up and refusing to respond. Wired connections were fine so I suspected a dodgy radio. Linksys support couldn’t fix the wifi… Read More »
I’ve been talking with faculty staff at CU CSCI about the kind of work they’re doing and to see if there is any projects that we might collaborate on. After a chat with Katie Siek we decided that the most efficient way to introduce my research from UCD and Glasgow was to drop by and… Read More »
I’m a note writer. I’ve got Google docs full of notes, dropbox notes, iPhone notes, plain text files for GTD, and inked back-of-envelopes everywhere. Or at least, I did. After a pointer from a friend and colleague I decided to consolidate and digitize my notes using TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki is a personal wiki wrapped up in… Read More »
So I’ve been playing with Google Wave for the last couple of days and I’m still not sold on it. Perhaps because of all the hype, and hyperbole descriptions that say things like Wave is what we’d have “if email was created today”. When you first log in to Wave you’re presented with a set… Read More »
BBC tech News is reporting on mobile phone handsets with augmented reality. The article says that this is the first time AR has been available on handsets which is not strictly true. In CIS at Strathclyde University we had MSc students developing prototype map assistants on handsets with AR back in 2003, and I’m sure… Read More »
We’ve got a bunch of USB hard disks at home that are used for backup and media storage. I’m fairly good about plugging them in and running backup utilities (rsync and SyncToy, mostly) but it is a bit of a pain. So I spent an hour looking at options for network addressable storage. You can… Read More »
I’ve just figured out how to post from my shared items in Google Reader (and this blog) to my Facebook profile. Log in to Facebook and click on the profile tab. Under the “share” button is a “settings” link. Click on that link and you should see the Google Reader option there (and Digg, Pandora,… Read More »