First and foremost, a thanks is in order for Spotify service is awesome! Yes, some of us would like to find more things that are less mainstream and the quality of the ads (for those who don't pay the premium membership) is really bad. Still, it's a fabulous service for a very good price.
You see, I've seen people asking for a remote control application for their phones so they can control spotify running on the computer while they move around (or lie down somewhere they can't be bothered to walk to the computer) but I think right now I'd like the converse of that. Let me explain, I've just paid for Spotify, essentially to be able to use it on the iPhone. As I'm working from my sofa with my laptop and it's not handy at all to plug it into the HiFi while I'm working, so I plugged my iPhone instead. The problem is that I can't control the playlist from here. The laptop is a much better interface to manage playlists and play queues, plus, it's right in front of me while the iPhone is a bit further away. Since both laptop and iPhone are connected on the same account, fairly enough, only one of them is allowed to play at the same time so one pauses whenever the other starts. Now, instead of creating remote controls to every pair of devices around, a more interesting option could perhaps be that multiple devices can control the same play queue without necessarily changing the audio source. You see? If I check the play queue on the laptop I'll be able to see what's ahead and change it, the iPhone will react to this without switching the audio source. With no additional implementation, whenever the computer is the audio source the phone can play the role of remote control. This way remote control is handled for all the combinatory explosion of device pairs without any extra effort to produce remote control applications. Life in the cloud, the true way!Comments [5]
Setting up calendars on the iPhone is not as easy as we all would like it to be, there are lots of options and if your iPhone sycs calendars with iCal as well, you may have experienced that the iPhone will only read but not write on those calendars. Also, unless you're a Mobile Me user, your calendars won't update until the next sync. Now, I'm not a Mobile Me user and I don't have plans to become because by now these services should be commodities and they are available for free by the plentiful.
The answer is that you don't want to sync your google calendars through iCal, what you want is your iPhone to fech info from google (or any other calendar using CalDav you may have) independently. In fact, if you don't want to use iCal at all then the more reason to sync directly. First things first, go to Google Calendar, on the list of calendars on the left sidebar click on "settings", select the appropriate calendar and copy the Calendar Id, it should look similar to this 23893278923hdaa98uiq3eqwhd@group.calendar.google.com Using the calendar Id, build the calendar URL, for the above (ficticious) calendar, the URL should look like this: https://www.google.com:443/calendar/dav/23893278923hdaa98uiq3eqwhd@group.calendar.google.com/user Then go to your iPhone settings





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I've always enjoyed astrophotography but it was only after this Christmas, when my wife gave my a beautiful telescope that was able to think of actually doing something on the field so, while London is completely overcast and nothing can be seen on the outer world, I'm trying to catch up with reading, here are some entry level links that I've read over the last few days, I hope they are useful to you and if you have reading suggestions, please leave them in the comments.
The first thing that will come to mind to most people would be DLSR photography, that was my first thought too and I came into this DSLR Astrophotography tutorial.Comments [0]
At the risk of stating the obvious, there are some interesting web advent calendars around and I, though I should have done this earlier in December or even November, I though I'd share 3 interesting ones:
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If you're anything like me, you're now bored of Firefox opening a new window when you request to see source code.
Here are two bookmarklets that will come in handy for you, the first one displays the source code on the same tab, whereas the second will create a new tab and open the source there, hence preserving the page in the state it was when you requested to view the source. To install them, just drag them to your bookmarks toolbar.
Update: apparently I can't post bookmarklets to posterous, so you need to create your one bookmark on the bookmark toolbar and copy and paste the code below on the location field
To open on same window:
javascript:s=window.location.href;window.location=s.replace('http','view-source:http');
To open on a new window:
javascript:s=window.location.href;u=s.replace('http','view-source:http');z=window.open(u,'_blank');z.focus();
Technically speaking the second bookmarklet will open a new window, but behaviour depends on Firefox configuration and by default it will open a new tab, rather than a new window for new open requests. You can use this with other browsers, although I haven't tested and it's useless in Opera since this is Opera's default behaviour anyway.
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(Hover the image to get a link to the full-res image of the original poster, courtesy of the nice chaps at at Dingwalls)
A couple of months ago it striked me I hadn't heard anything about drusgtore in quite a while. Probably not since the early 2000s when I was a big fan and now, living in London, it would be a shame if I'd been missing their shows.
When I found out, after a friend pointed me to their facebook profile, they weren't active for 7 years but planning a return show I knew that would be a show worth klling for. Why? Well, when you see comeback shows, more often than not is about trying to bring the popularity of the past, decadent artists that were once good and can't get past it, but I had a very different feeling about this one and probably the reason was the humble approach of the band through the web, talking to fans and making them feel as important as the band is for the fans.
I felt really lucky to have attended to a historical show like that, also very happy they did that gig after 7 years of inactivity because if you like Drugstore by their recorded songs, wait until you see them live.
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