Author: John McLear

XBMC, Transmission, Flexget, Youtube-DL.

Posted on by John McLear

With these pieces of software your torrents/TV shows and Youtube subscriptions automatically download to one easy to use interface(XBMC).

You can also use this interface to access streaming video services such as iPlayer and Radio services such as Radio 1 Extra.  Using the XBMC Remote app on your smart phone you can control your video streaming with the usual buttons (pause/play/skip etc.).

There are no Ads on your Youtube subscriptions and Ads can be skipped if they are embedded in the videos by the content uploader.

I’d recommend using a laptop instead of a Pi, the Pi just doesn’t have enough grunt for this type of setup.  Basically next time you have an old laptop lying around and you are thinking of a use for it, spend a few hours whacking linux and these tools on it and you wont look back.

Plastic Vs Metal phone bodies – HTC One M8

Posted on by John McLear

I recently found myself owning a HTC One M8, all of the reviews looked great.  However I have a huge gripe with the metal body.  While this phone looks great metal bodies fail for these 3 reasons:

1, Slippy.  Because the phone body is metal and because the edges are far too rounded the phone slides out of your hand far too easily.  It’s also way too big for an average sized hand but I kinda got used to this.

2. Cold to touch.  Admittedly I’m probably one of a handful of people that lives in an old, cold house.  This phone just becomes a horrible thing to touch when it’s been left out in a cold room over night when the heating is off.

3. NFC.  The NFC support on this phone only really works where the camera lens is, this is probably mostly due to the metal body, I can imagine the discussion went something along the lines of..  Engineer: Yea but it will affect phone signal and NFC performance..  Sales guy: “Yea but SHINY!”…  We need to grow up and use the right materials, not just the ones that are the most ascetically pleasing.  A phone is not a piece of jewellery.

Thankfully the Dot view case solves all 3 of these problems.  It’s disappointing but understandable that the LED output isn’t visible in direct sunlight conditions.  The case also serves as a nice little stand keeping the phone tilted to you in landscape mode when placed flat on a surface.

I also wish this phone came with less bloat-ware, ugh!

Video conferencing within Etherpad

Posted on by John McLear

If you are working with anything that requires and privacy or security it’s pretty clear doing this on a publicly facing web service is risky, everyone has been left shaken from Heartbleed.  We will get over this issue but until that point we wanted to remind people you can do local real time document editing sharing and video conferencing so we put up VEtherpad.  VEtherpad is Etherpad with a webrtc plugin installed.  The webrtc plugin introduces Video and Audio chat functionality to pad members.

Think to yourself next time you are using a Google/Microsoft service locally in your organization, do you really want to take the risk of your document/data being leaked?

VEtherpad empowers you and it’s free / open source and easy to deploy.  There is really no reason you wouldn’t have a bash!

A modern forum for a modern web

Posted on by John McLear

Screenshot from 2014-04-16 17:56:11

We recently migrated our NFC Ring forum over from ProPHPBB (Hosted PHPBB) to NodeBB. Let’s be clear, in this blog post I’m not comparing like for like. ProPHPBB is a free service, it is open source, built on PHP and it’s been the cornerstone of forums on the web for years. NodeBB is the young kid on the block.

Let’s get this out of the way, we paid the NodeBB team 300$ for our migration from PHPBB. Hosting and support is costing us ~70$ per month. With the support we’re getting we feel it’s value for money, we didn’t pay anything for the service from ProPHPBB, it was ad supported.

The guys at ProPHPBB were also great, we’d usually get our SQL export within 12 hours of asking. Obviously if we were paying them a monthly fee we’d expect a quicker response or even the ability to dump our own SQL but so is life.

The ads on the ProPHPBB forum hosting were just far too offensive and damaged our brand. It’s kinda obvious that PHPBB’s days really are numbered, the design and implementation is just too dated now for it to ever really become relevant again, I gotta thank it for it’s service though, truly great software has a shelf life like any other product and we should celebrate the circle of life. Thank you team PHPBB and the community around that project!

NodeBB presents some other significant advantages than providing value for money:

  • We can map our sub-domain
  • We can use our SSL certs
  • We can use our new Oauth2 Identity provider to provide a single unified sign on.
  • It has a great chat feature and notification system.
  • Posts can be up/downvoted and favorited
  • It is Beautiful, the UI is perfect for our Brand.
  • Responsive CSS provides a nice mobile experience

Migration wasn’t completely smooth, this wasn’t a huge surprise because we have all been crazy busy but what mattered is that pretty much any time I hit a problem I could jump onto IRC and Julian would sort it out within a few hours.
I have no regrets about using ProPHPBB initially as it gave us a very quick start with forums. Ultimately though, I’m happy with our new home and it’s onwards and upwards for the NFC Ring Forum!

All open issues on my github repositories

Posted on by John McLear

I wrote a quick little script that turns all my open github issues onto clickable links..

Copy paste the below into githubIssues.js:

// Edit me
var username = "YOURUSERNAME";
var password = "YOURPASSWORD";
// stop Editing!

var gittub = require("node-github");
var github = new gittub({version: "3.0.0"});

github.authenticate({
  type: "basic",
  username: username,
  password: password
});

github.issues.getAll({
  user: "JohnMcLear",
  filter: "subscribed",
  per_page: 100,
  sort: "created",
  direction: "asc"
}, function(err, res) {
  for(var issueKey in res){
    var issue = res[issueKey];
    var line = "<p class='issue'>";
    line += issue.created_at + " ";
    if(issue.repository) line += issue.repository.full_name + " ";
    line += "<a target='_blank' href='"+issue.html_url+"'>";
    line += issue.title+"</a>";
    line += "</p>";
    if(issue.title) console.log(line);
  }
});

Edit your username and password then type:

npm install node-github

then:

node githubIssues.js &gt; issues.html

Open issues.html in your web browser..

Limitations: Max 100 issues due to Github API limit.