John Large – Technology & life Blog | The technical Musings of an I.T. Enthusiast & MSc busy running online businesses for a living

Problems posting comments on blogger from iOS iPad safari and chrome

Posted on January 26, 2013 by John Large

My wife is just getting to grips with her new iPad mini. We bought the mini so she could carry it around in her handbag or backpack for blogging. She is a beauty blogger and is always replying to comments, blogging, tweeting and generally interacting with her peers.

After setting up the ipad mini with all her apps we hit a snag. As soon as she tried to leave a comment on blogger blogs she was unable to, due to some seriously bad CSS/JavaScript. A login box pops up on screen but the on load function is knackered. Poor show blogger.

The problem is that the box loads but iOS doesn’t recognise it as a text entry box so you can’t actually enter any credentials. I tried a few workarounds in both chrome and safari for iOS and the same problem kept occurring. No matter what we tried it was impossible to enter text into the box.

I then grabbed my own iPad and fired up opera. As a web developer I have as many browsers as possible installed on all devices in order to test my own code, something blogger seem to have failed miserably in doing. Sure enough opera rendered the login box correctly and allowed us to enters login credentials and leave a comment on blogger blogs.

This kind of workaround is good for those involved in the blogger community as it will allow you to leave comments on your favourite blogs via iOS.

I cannot believe blogger are still having these issues. The majority of traffic I get to my self hosted wordpress blog is mobile browser users so it would be foolish for me to alienate the majority of my readership.

It would be such a simple fix for them to implement, simply have the login box as static content below the comment box on mobile style sheets. Would take me 2 mins to implement and would make commenting accessible to millions of iOS users. I wonder if this affects android users also. Would love to hear.

So if you like to comment on blogger blogs head over to the App Store & download opera. It’s actually a good browser, an old favourite amongst my geeky friends.

Finally folks. If you are serious about blogging it may be time to go down the self hosted route. Your blog can never be deleted, you can have good backups and you never lose all your hard work. There is no service level agreement on these free things and it can be taken down at any time meaning you lose everything. Take back control.

Opera in the app store

See screenshots below for rendering issues.

chrome – semi transparent login box with text box behind still the focus of text input.

safari – same issue with a semi transparent half rendered login box and the comment box still the focus of text entry

Opera – fully formed solid login box.

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Posted in Web Development | 12 Comments

iPad 2 Celluar Data Problems – O2 PAYG

Posted on January 22, 2013 by John Large

I’ve had my iPad 2 since it was first released in the UK, thats a couple of years now and since the beginning I’ve been with O2 for my cellular data. this worked really well up until a couple of months ago. Firstly there was a bug with IOS/O2 carrier settings and it was constantly bugging me to update my carrier settings. This finally went away when upgrading to IOS 6.0.1 but since then my O2 data coverage has been shocking.

The ipad would constantly say it was searching for signal, even though my wife’s iPhone on the same network sat next to me had full signal. When I could get signal I was pretty much limited to GPRS. it seems that I’m not the only one with these issues, the O2 forums are awash with those complaining about this exact same issue. I tried downgrading to IOS 5 but still the same problem, which leads me to believe that it’s either a baseband issue (unlikely) or an issue again with O2 carrier settings. Due to the problems I had earlier in the year I would go with it being an O2 issue.

I’ve tweeted them and they where very helpful, I then dealt with them via customer service and they where less than helpful. They gave all the usual advice, reset network settings, restore ipad, fresh restore. None of these things work. They then said it could be the sim, but they wouldn’t just send me a new sim out, I would have to go to a store. This contradicted what customer service had said on Twitter and to be honest i was sick of speaking to them at this point (they even had me polishing the sim contacts!!).

Finally I decided that I would get a pay monthly sim on EE (formerly Orange). My iphone is on contract with Orange and since the Orange-T Mobile merger into EE coverage has been tremendous. A quick visit to the Orange website and my Sim was linked to my iPhone account & being dispatched.

It arrived today, i popped it into the iPad but no data, plenty of cellular signal but no data. I went onto the Orange website to activate the sim & was told the sim is activated already (worrying).

I decided to give Customer Service a call, something I hate doing with orange as the customer service agents are overseas and the line quality & delay are awful. After some jumping though hoops I was told that the sim is now in the process of being activated and should be operational within 4 hours.

What a hassle for cellular data on my iPad 3G. I don’t understand why you can’t just put a 3G sim in the iPad and it will work, why does it have to be a data only, ipad specific sim from your carrier. I even tested this with my contract sim from the iphone. Nothing, doesn’t work at all. It would be so much easier if we had control of our sims again.

So now I wait and hope that after months & months of shaky 3G I’ll have my 3G back. I like to have 3G access, sometimes I want to use it where wifi is unavailable, sometimes the wifi offered in bars & coffee shops is too slow or suffering a fault which cripples productivity.

I’ll update you with the progress of the Orange sim, but anyone with O2 on the iPad suffering from no service, i can assure it it’s the sim. With my new sim I already get full bars, where before I was lucky (very lucky) to get a single bar. It’s an obvious O2 fault as I’m in a great coverage area & couldn’t get signal even in my garden.

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Posted in Apple Hardware, iPhone | Leave a comment

Carmageddon for IOS.

Posted on November 26, 2012 by John Large

I’ve been meaning to review carmageddon for a long time but haven’t been able to find the time to write it up. I’ve been a fan of carmageddon for years. Since the first release on the PC I can remember my 3DFX graphics card clicking into gear and the game starting up in glorious 3DFX graphics. All crisp and smooth. Friends would watch on in awe, as on their pc the game looked blocky and rubbish and we had super fast frame rates and insane graphics.

Of course we had the version with blood & pedestrians, not the post public outcry version with green blood & zombies. We played this game relentlessly. Unlocking all the cars but never knowing just how to unlock them. You play it enough and it just happens.

I must have committed hours and hours of my life to this game as a youngster and year after year I’ve come back to play it. Most recently, without access to a PC capable of playing the game I’ve resorted to running it virtually on the Mac with various patches and fixes to just run it.

Then, on twitter, I saw that the original team where running a kickstarter campaign to bring this game to modern hardware. So a donation and a little while later I had the game on my iPad. Wow, I’m impressed. The hardware I used to require to run this game was, at the time, cutting edge. This game now runs on my iPad with no fuss & mega frame rates. At first I thought the on screen controls would be cumbersome but you quickly get to grips with them and it’s mega.

This game is like the best trip down memory lane, and unlike most nostalgia, it lives upto your memory. I got the game for free on release day and instantly paid to gain access to the complete set of maps. You can complete a level in this game in two ways. Firstly, you can race a traditional race. Complete all the checkpoints before your opponents and win the race. Alternatively, and always my chosen method, you can hunt down each of your opponents and destroy their cars. I became a master at this as a teen and I’m glad to see I still have the knack.

You earn credits for killing pedestrians, wasting opponents and collecting power ups. These can be redeemed in return for more armour, power and offensive parts in the garage. Get your car upto full bars for each and you are going to storm the opposition.

The game provides a load of maps to play and each race always pans out differently so it’s really hard to tire of. I love it and the iOS port is genius.

I do hope they bring out a mac version as I would love to return to a keyboard layout, but the iOS version means I can sit in starbucks wasting opponents and sipping a latte. Not bad.

The physics in this game are excellent. The power ups are a lot of fun and with infinite possibilities I’m sure you will be hooked too.

One criticism would be the lack of vocabulary for max damage, but this port stays true to the original so I wouldn’t have expected them to add extra vocab.

Buy this game and get playing.

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Posted in gaming | Tagged carma, Carmageddon, gaming, iOS, max damage | Leave a comment

Unrestrict premium 2

Posted on October 31, 2012 by John Large

Just a quick post to say I started using Unrestrict premium to enable AirPlay on all apps and to allow streaming of audio & video from apps which normally only allow audio streaming. Many apps including tv catchup & live Streaming apps restrict AirPlay streaming to audio only but this will allow you to stream audio & video to your apple tv 2 or 3 via AirPlay.

The main reason I wanted to get this hack working is so I can stream sky sports f1 from my iPad to the apple tv via sky go. I can now do that allowing me to watch on the tv in the kitchen or bedroom as I don’t have multiroom.

A really good app and well worth the $2 cydia store price tag. I’ve not upgraded to ios 6, not much point on the iPad 2 so I’m not missing that. This is only available on ios5 as far as I’m aware.

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Posted in Apple Hardware | Tagged Cydia jailbreak iPad tv out AirPlay | 4 Comments

Apple TV 1 – CrystalBuntu – OpenELEC

Posted on October 11, 2012 by John Large

It’s been a busy week. With the lack of ability to jailbreak the Apple TV 3 and the rising prices of the ATV2 due to it’s jailbreak friendliness I was torn between spending a lot of money on another Apple TV 2 or going down a different media centre route.

I’ve always used XBMC since it’s birth, even before when it was Xbox Media Player & my family have become accustomed to how everything works. It works wonderfully for our needs & we now don’t have any subscription TV services (granted we download TV episodes but we have a TV license & could watch them for free on our set top box so hardly a crime). We also convert all our DVD’s into .mp4/.m4v/.mkv files so we can watch them without going to find the disk.

I really love the XBMC on the jailbroken ATV2 and it’s served me well for almost 2 years, but I have a few gripes with it. Firstly it’s reliant on a jailbreak, which isn’t ideal. Secondly, whilst videos play perfectly due to hardware acceleration available in the ATV2, the menus are certainly not as snappy or responsive as they are on XBMC on our macs. This is understandable as the ATV2 is essentially an ipod touch without the screen. Also it tends to lock up using addons such as streaming video addons & can’t handle 720p Xvid or Divx files. So I went on the hunt for an alternative. It came in the form of an original 1st Generation Apple TV.

This box is a low powered computer with a 1ghz mobile intel processor, 256mb ram and a 40GB hard drive (it is available with a 160GB drive but as my stuff is all stored on a NAS it’s not required). It includes a Nvidia graphics chip and a wide array of I/O ports.

As standard the Apple TV is really showing it’s age. It’s slow & can just about display some types of 720p files using XBMC. As such it is not an ideal candidate for a modern 1080p media centre. However, if you head over to eBay and purchase a Broadcom BCM970012 Hardware HD Video Decoder Card this low powered computer becomes a media powerhouse. I purchased the following card for £14 and it’s a worthy purchase .

To fit the card you open up the case (4 torx screws) and remove the pre-installed wifi card. This will leave your Apple TV with Ethernet only, unless you add a USB wifi dongle which is possible, but for 1080p content I would really recommend an ethernet setup. You then install the Broadcom card in the wifi cards place & you are good to go.

Now there are drivers available for the standard Apple TV software. You will need to use Firecore’s ATV Flash software to create a patchstick. You can then install XBMC and the CrystalHD drivers from the new maintenance menu. As I said before the Apple TV is showing it’s age & the native menus are very clunky & slow. This is where 3rd party Linux distros come into place.

You have 2 options, Crystalbuntu by Sam Nazarko or Openelec. I used Crystalbuntu for a good few days & it is flawless, however the installation procedure is a little harder & Sam (the developer) seems to be concentrating support more on Crystalbuntu for Raspberry Pi. I have since switched to OpenELEC 2.0 (RC 1) – 1.99.1 ATV i386 and I’m really impressed.

To install openelec is a breeze. You will need a USB flash drive, I used a Sandisk Cruzer 16GB drive.

Installation instructions for Apple TV are available here.

Installation is a breeze. Just make sure you have the Apple TV connected via Ethernet. The Patchstick will partition the internal HDD and you will lose the native Apple TV OS – no big deal. It will then automatically download the latest available version and install openelec XBMC. This is essentially a highly customised version of Linux with only the required files to boot on Apple TV, and only the required drivers for the hardware. Footprint is a couple of hundred Meg.

Post installation you will have a fast booting & extremely responsive XBMC installation. The Broadcom CrystalHD drivers will be installed automatically & selected for Hardware Acceleration in XBMC.

Now simply add your media sources & build your library. This is a really fast media centre & will play anything I throw at it. I can watch my 1080p blu ray rips with ease & stutter free. Truly a wonderful addition to our media centre collection.

The Openelec install also has various options in settings so you can configure wifi (either built in if you opt not to install a broadcom card, or USB dongle wifi if you so wish).

The openelec install is self updating (set to auto update in openelec settings) & comes with Samba setup so you can access the Media Centre from any machine on your network, making it easy to copy files, access logs, change keymaps or mess with advancedsettings.xml

This truly is a great media centre setup & I cant beleive all in it cost less than an ATV3 for so much more than that box is capable of.

The next mod maybe is to install a larger HDD or even an SSD. I’m also tempted to get a few more Apple TV’s to mod as media centres to replace the ATV2′s I have. The connectivity & openness of the system is brilliant, as is the tiny footprint & speed of the media centre. It’s so far proved to be rock solid. Boot time from power on is around 15 seconds & power consumption under full load is around 23 Watts, measured with a Kill-a-watt. It’s not relaint on Jailbreaks & the Openelec project is constantly improving with each beta & release candidate.

My advice to any XBMC fans it to test this route out. It’s a handsome box, the optical audio out & connectivity is a real bonus & the UI responsiveness makes this one of the most frugal Media Centres I’ve ever built. I intend to build a Raspberry PI XBMC but I’m told the UI is still a little clunky so I’ll be sure to make a few more ATV XBMC’s.

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Posted in Technical | 22 Comments

Air parrot for osx – AirPlay mirroring to atv2 & atv3

Posted on July 3, 2012 by John Large

Although AirPlay mirroring is slated for release in OSX mountain lion next month, I’ve always found air parrot to be a great way of AirPlay mirroring & want to share this review with you before Apple steal a lot of their custom.

Air parrot allows you to mirror what’s on your mac screen over the network to your apple TV. It will mirror in 1080p if you have the latest apple TV and it also mirrors the audio from your mac. Surprisingly it keeps everything in sync audio wise and is a great way of watching silverlight content such as SkyGo on your TV via apple TV.

Air Parrot allows me to stream legally my content from Sky Go to any room by mirroring what I see on my desktop display. Essentially I can watch all catch up content and some live stations such as sky sports f1 on any tv in the house.

Air parrot is also useful for full screen presentations via the apple TV. You can demo things on a massive screen, or run full screen presentations including video & audio. I’m really impressed with the software, so much so that I bought licenses for each of our machines.

If you have a need to mirror content from your mac, or would rather not jailbreak your atv this is a good way of watching everything from BBC iplayer, ITV player, 4Od and Demand 5 on your apple tv 2 & big screen TV.

I can’t recommend it enough, I love it when a bunch of developers come up with functionality before the big boys, that really makes a day to day impact on your life. I can’t help thinking that Apple have ripped off Air parrot in mountain lion. Let’s just see how good their implementation is.

Until then, be sure to grab a copy of Air Parrot. You can run it in trial mode for 20 mins, and buy a single license for $10. What a bargain. Check it out at Air Parrot

I leave you with some screenshots & a shot of it mirroring of wifi to the TV.

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Posted in Apple Hardware, Technical | Leave a comment

Google Chrome for IOS.

Posted on July 2, 2012 by John Large

I can’t believe it has taken such a long time for chrome to appear on the app store for ios. I switched to chrome on all the desktops & laptops a while ago as safari was buggy & a memory hog & Firefox started crashing a lot since they tried to update too much of it.

Chrome on the desktop is great. It syncs all our passwords and bookmarks on all machines, which is a great help when you share hardware like we do. It means that no matter what machine we are using we have all our bookmarks & passwords ready to go.

Now chrome is on ios we share all the same features. You can look at the tabs open on all your machines essentially picking up where you left off, and you can browse all your bookmarks. Granted As of right now Apple does not allow it’s users to specify a custom browser and they don’t allow use of the Turbo Javascript engine that mobile Safari has. But chrome performs very well and if you have Jailbroken (like I have) you can install browser changer from cydia and set chrome as your default. How nice.

To chrome itself, one of the biggest selling points for me is the syncing between my desktop versions and iPad/iPhone versions. It finally gives me a consistent browsing experience across all devices. Saying that, for a first release this is an epic app. They only thing so far I’ve managed to break is a frozen tab, but closing & reopening the tab cleared it right up and the app remained stable.

One of the best features so far is voice search on iPad. Click the microphone icon and speak your search term. As if by magic your search appears in google. Last night I searched for “a list of the best hotels in Amsterdam on trip advisor” and it found the right page with no typos in the search string. I then tested it by saying “how do you get from Manchester to Amsterdam in a car via hull” to which I was presented with a map of the route and a link for P&O ferries for the car crossing from Hull to Rotterdam. I’m impressed. This is a killer addition for me.

Tabbed browsing is snappy & I’ve yet to actually break the browser. Rendering of pages is flawless and overall speeds are good.

By installing browser changer from cydia, and specifying chrome as your default browser (for maps and YouTube also) you receive a seamless integration of chrome into IOS. I’m really excited for the future of this app.

Today it was announced that Google Chrome for IOS is the top app on the app store. It might finally give apple a kick up the arse to develop mobile safari.

Anyway I leave you with a few screenshots of chrome on the iPad. Any questions, fire me a comment, email or tweet me.