Tag-Archive for » HOWTO «

Sunday, July 18th, 2010 | Author: pluc | Views:

This week was very interesting in the mobile world. Both David and Goliath were too busy dealing with their own bad press to worry about smacking each other in the face.

On Friday, Internet erupted with pretty serious accusations against Motorola and how they allegedly booby-trapped their Droid X, their flagship Android-powered superstar, so that no ROM hacking could be done whatsoever.. otherwise the device would pretty much self-destruct.

On the same day, Mark Milian from the LA Times wrote a piece on the inclusion of useless applications by carriers and the reasons behind it.

Absolutely Android put up an article titled “Why Motorola should be asked to  leave the Open Handset Alliance“, which maybe was a bit of an overreaction that we all shared at that point, but ended up somewhat appeased when Motorola “clarified” the situation. Yes, it’s arguable.

Around the same time, Apple was in damage control mode with the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco leading up to the press conference on Friday, where Steve Jobs openly admitted he actually is considering refunds and is giving shit away to avoid a mutiny among his unholy horde. Apple. Giving back money and free shit. Because they fucked up.

It was definitely a very interesting week in the mobile world. more…

Category: Mobile  | Tags: , , , ,  | 2 Comments
Friday, April 23rd, 2010 | Author: pluc | Views:

I was wondering, last night, if I’d really have to wait for everyone to implement the new Facebook Social Plugins, more specifically, the new embeddable “Like Button”. I think it’s a pretty cool alternative to replace everyone’s “Share on Facebook” annoying popup link. That being said, I decided I’d throw a little JavaScript together, actually inspired by Damon Cortesi’s DM Deleter for Twitter, I put together a bookmarklet to insert a “Like” button virtually anywhere (and by that, I mean on any site/page you visit).

First, for those who want the result before the explanation, drag this link to your browser’s bookmark toolbar: Like This

Alright, now for the smart people, here’s a breakdown of what this puppy does:


javascript:(function(){
var h=document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
var m1=document.createElement('meta');
m1.setAttribute('property','og:title');
m1.content=document.title;
h.appendChild(m1);

var m2=document.createElement('meta');
m2.setAttribute('property','og:site_name');
m2.content=window.location.hostname;
h.appendChild(m2);

var m3=document.createElement('meta');
m3.setAttribute('property','og:url');
m3.content=window.location;
h.appendChild(m3);

var s=document.createElement('iframe');
s.scrolling='no';
s.frameborder='0';
s.allowTransparency='true';
s.style.border='none';
s.style.overflow='hidden';
s.style.position='absolute';
s.style.zIndex='100';
s.src='http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href='+encodeURIComponent(window.location)+'&layout=standard&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light';
var a=document.body.firstChild;
document.body.insertBefore(s,a);
})();void(0);

What that is gonna do is relatively simple and most of you will be able to guess it just by looking at the code above. It creates three META tags, one for og:title, one for og:site_name, and one for og:url which are all required by Facebook to display the data that you actually like.
Once that’s done, it creates an iframe, exactly the same as just getting the Like Button code from Facebook and puts it as the first element of the body tag, making it the first thing you see on the page, technically.

This is mostly a little toy, but feel free to use it if you’d like! I’m not too sure why, but when I tried this at home, it would pop up a Facebook login window instead of just “Liking” whatever I was supposed to be Liking… this morning, it doesn’t. So let me know what you experience if you try it out.

Edit: ReadWriteWeb is also saying they’ve got a “Safe” bookmarklet. But theirs don’t add meta tags :)

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 | Author: pluc | Views:

This is the single most important thing that’s happened to the iPhone alternative market since the jailbreak came out.  David “planetbeing” Wong somehow managed to run Android on an iPhone, dual booting with OpenIBoot. Check out the video below, then check out planetbeing’s post about this, and get the files for what he calls iDroid! It’s not clear yet whether this works on anything but iPhone 2G (as used in the video) – I wouldn’t try this on a 3G or 3GS just yet. But still, this is pretty big!

Friday, October 02nd, 2009 | Author: pluc | Views:

Apple SkullIf you’ve ever jailbroken your iPhone in the last months, you know how much of a necessity the freedom of an independent third-party alternative can be. The guys involved in cracking Apple’s continous efforts to fortify the box their customers agree to be locked in have been doing excessively great. Whenever Apple released a new firmware version in beta, they were on the case trying to get around the various protections to allow users the freedom to choose. They would do so impressively fast, too. Now, with iPhoneOS 3.1, Apple decided to up the ante.

Should you decide to update your pre-3.1 device to 3.1, Apple will make it so that not only does it wipe your jailbreak data, but make it nearly impossible for the user to manipulate the device in the future. As it is a highly technical subject, I’ll simply direct you to Jay “saurik” Freeman’s article which covers everything you need to know about this particular topic.

That being said, there’s a hard reality out there. 3.1 is out, and iPhone owners want their devices — may they be jailbroken or vanilla — to run the latest firmware. It’s absolutely normal, and even encouraged. Nowadays, you need to stay on top of software updates for security purposes, if anything. To that reality, you can add the current problem those people have: you can’t jailbreak 3.1. Today, I’m going to enumerate the possibilities that lay before you as a jailbroken iPhone owner who wants to update to 3.1. more…

Category: Mobile  | Tags: , , ,  | Leave a Comment
Sunday, May 24th, 2009 | Author: pluc | Views:

Lots has changed since the last article I made about WP-prettyPhoto usage, and so it is time to revamp the instructions, explain new features and hopefully be a bit more thorough. First off, let me first mention the following thing:  prettyPhoto is written by Stéphane Caron. Here are some related links to avoid repeating them throughout this article: Stéphane’s blog, prettyPhoto’s project page, prettyPhoto on GitHub, Stéphane on Twitter, WP-prettyPhoto at WordPress Extend, WP-prettyPhoto Support Forum.

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Revision History: This article is intended to document the current WP-prettyPhoto (1.5.1) & prettyPhoto (2.5.2) versions.
more…

Category: WP-prettyPhoto  | Tags: , , , ,  | 140 Comments
Friday, April 03rd, 2009 | Author: pluc | Views:

I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 (“Jaunty Jackalope”) from 8.10 (“Intrepid Ibex”) about a week ago and was surprised how smooth it went. Jaunty’s still in its alpha stage (Alpha 3 as of now) yet it’s surprisingly stable. One thing that Jaunty, once officially released, will add to the regular Ubuntu is ext4 support. Ext4 is an upgrade from (wait for it…. you’ll never guess!) ext3, which is starting to show its age in the filesystem world. Ext4 provides better performance than ext3, mostly due to its delayed allocation and more file support (like you’ll ever have files bigger than 2 or 16 Terabytes?). Anyway, I felt like risking an in-place conversion of my two ext3 partitions for the sake of performance… and it went relatively smooth. I’ll explain how I’ve done it so you can give it a whirl as well. One thing worth noting though is that once a filesystem is converted to ext4, there’s no going back. You can’t convert it in-place to ext3, you must format the whole thing and start over. So obviously, back your shit up.

more…

Category: Linux  | Tags: , , ,  | 11 Comments