#“TP-Link TL-WA830RE Wifi Extender - A pile of junk until you install DD-WRT”
I use a lot of TP-Link gear for home stuff. It’s as cheap as chips and the hardware is usually totally reliable. But the software, dear god the software. I cannot understand why Chinese manufacturers of cheap networking gear don’t take a leaf out of the book of Chinese manufacturers of cheap phones. The latter all use Android now, so why don’t the former all use DD-WRT or OpenWRT? »
#“The state of Open Source projects in Ireland vs other countries, based on GitHub activity”
Last weekend I was working away on a personal side-project of mine and I suddenly realised I follow almost no Irish projects or developers on GitHub. I then started writing this post which was going to be an attack on our lack of people who work on OSS projects outside of work.
But rather than go with gut, I decided to see if I could back it up with data. »
#“Avoid Google+ lock-in by using Picasa with Dropbox”
We all know that Picasa Web Albums will be shut down in 2013. Or given a lobotomy and renamed to Google+ Photos.
But desktop Picasa is a decent enough photo management tool that you can use without any reference to Picasa Web or Google+. And Dropbox is fab. However I find the Dropbox photo import mechanism both unreliable and crude. Everything gets dumped into one folder, and that’s when it works at all. »
#“Adam Savage’s home office cabinet - Wow.”
I’m having a fantastic time watching Adam and the gang on tested.com. The older kids are enjoying some of them too. The omelette episode caused 11yo Oisn to make his first ever omelette and I fully expect Adam to announce Dishbusters soon.
But this cabinet. I kept saying “no way” throughout. Just watch it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I0rX7t1J0Q
p.s. And I am so getting a Success Kid model. »
#“Amazon "Send to Kindle" should be built on RSS to replace Google Reader”
I’ve seen a few mentions today of a new “Send to Kindle” button that you can add to your site/blog. It means people can send clips of your web content to their fave e-reader.
It just struck me that Amazon is missing a serious trick with the Kindle here. An RSS-based reader which works on E-ink, Fire, Android and Cloud Reader could be something awesome. »
#“My Second Spring Cleaning”
Were living in a new kind of computing environment. Everyone has a device, sometimes multiple devices. Its been a long time since we have had this rate of changeit probably hasnt happened since the birth of personal computing 40 years ago.
To make the most of these opportunities, I need to focus otherwise I spread myself too thin and lack impact. So today I’m announcing some more closures, bringing the total to 70 Google features or services closed since my spring cleaning began in 2011: »
#“Replacing Google Reader with a $25 Raspberry Pi in the immortal words of Jesse Pinkman”
That’s right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQSceJJ1Clc
Tiny Tiny RSSnow running beautifully on my Raspberry Pi (using NGINX, PHP-FPM, MySQL): »
#“My \u00a31.37 Shrimp Computer”
I heard about the Shrimping It project a few months ago and loved it immediately. Based in Morecambe in the UK (hence the name), it’s an initiative to get Arduino compatible boards in the hands of anyone for less than 2.
I couldn’t resist and ordered the necessary ATMega chip plus Xtal from Farnell in Ireland along with the usual cheapo bits from DX in China. »
#“A simple tool to bulk import your RunKeeper data into Endomondo”
UPDATE 17th Aug 2013: The tool should now be able to import Sports Tracker files into Endomondo too.
TL;DR - Download the Windows RunKeeper to Endomondo tool.
I’ve been using RunKeeper as my main mobile running app since January of last year. I liked it so much, I moved to the paid “Elite” tier pretty quickly. For almost a year, I really couldn’t fault it and liked the social interactions with other Irish users along with its rock solid stability. »
#“OpenVPN on Windows 8”
I’m two months using Windows 8 64-bit on my desktop and I’m still ok with it. The only real weirdness is a lot of disk churning even when nothing is happening. I turned off indexing but to no avail.
The only major annoyance has been OpenVPN. Whilst it works fine when it’s on, the problem arises when I disconnect or shut it down. The routing gets all messed up and I cannot connect to any external site. »