Monthly Archives: May 2014

How to receive Stack Overflow notifications on your phone and smartwatch (v 2.0)

StackOveflow Pebble UpdateA while back I described how you can receive Stack Overflow notifications on your phone and smartwatch by reading RSS feed provided by StackOvedlow API (v1) and connecting it to PushOver push notification service (and their Android app and ultimately Pebble Smartwatch via awesome IFTTT.

Since then Stack Exchange retired version 1 of their API (and besides it didn’t provided all the information needed, e.g. total reputation points) so I was looking for an alternative. Fortunately StackOverflow API v2 provides very extensive set of functions. One call I was looking for is

api.stackexchange.com/2.2/users/[userid]?site=[site]

Where [userid] is your Stack Exchange User ID and [site] is the Stack Exchange site you’re interested in. For example for me call to

https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/users/961695?site=stackoverflow

provides a nice JSON output: Continue reading →

Microsoft Skype Doesn’t support IE11

Ever since I upgraded to IE11 my Skype is throwing error

Skype IE11 error

Digging deeper – the error is throwing while Skype is attempting to display an ad banner

Skype ad banner error

So not only when Skype came into Microsoft possession it stated to display banner ads – in doing so it relies on Internet Explorer and it’s not compatible with the latest version.

How stupid is that?

Canvas for Pebble: How to hide time in all-day events

If you wish to create a custom watchface for Pebble Smartwatch but want it to have some more advanced features than very cool Watchface Generator offers then amazing Android app Canvas for Pebble is definitely for you.

Using it you can have your Pebble watchface to display weather, location, temperature, of course date and time, etc. etc. in highly customizable formats.

One cool thing it allows you to show – next calendar events from your Google calendar. As with everything else it’s a highly customizable entry. For example three (out of much more) options are:

%a – abbreviated day of the week
%R – start time of the event in 24-hour-format
%ET – event title

So if you format the calendar field as "%a %R: %ET" your Pebble will display something like "Mon 12:30: Visit from Elvis". Unfortunately if calendar event is an all-day event (e.g. national holiday) – start time of the event (%R) always displays as “00:00” making your event look like "Tue 00:00: Day of the Tentacle". It would be really nice if we could hide the time for all-day events.

Fortunately one of the things Canvas allows you to do is conditional formatting. It does this in a form of {text1#condition#text2} where if condition is true – text1 is displayed, otherwise text2 is displayed (which is optional and can be omitted).

I noticed that for all-day events, event duration (represented in Canvas as %ED) is always 24 hours (duh). So I replaced the above format for calendar event with this one: %a{ %R#%ED<24}: %ET. The code in braces means “if event duration is less than 24 hours – show event start time, otherwise don’t show anything”. And the result is in images above.