Category Archives: New Stuff

News about site and in general

Pebble Steel: DIY (some assembly required)

Pebble Steel: DIY

Pebble Steel is a new flagship smartwatch of a widely successful kickstarter Pebble. It’s the latest craze and everybody wants one. Unfortunately the demand far outweighs the supply – it’s a well known problem. Pebble can’t manufacture enough new Steels in time, there’re many backorders, missed deadlines, a lot of frustrated, complaining customers.

But Pebble is not called genius for nothing. They found a brilliant solution, one they borrowed directly from the Apple, when the company was at its very humble beginning and was struggling as well. If you recall – original Apple 1 computer was sold as an electronic kit, that users had to put together themselves. This approach solved many problems for Apple back then and it will be very helpful for Pebble today.

Enter “Pebble Steel: Do it yourself” kit. The new Steel will ship as a collection of parts with detailed instructions on how to put them together. Since Pebble Steel doesn’t have to come fully assembled – that will seriously cut down manufacturing time and the product will ship to users much sooner. Cost saved on assembly labor will also be passed directly to customers – expect to see cheaper Steels soon. And since majority of Pebble users are computer/electronics geeks anyway, crowd that loves tinkering with their gadgets – assembling your very own Pebble Steel will come as an interesting and a welcome challenge and will make a proud owner even more proud.

How to receive Stack Overflow notifications on your phone and smartwatch

If this then that

As you may have gathered I am a frequent participant of Stack Overflow Q&A board for coders. On that site everytime somebody responds to your question or comments – a notification is displayed in the status bar. Ditto when your reputation points change.

I became curious whether I could receive these modifications on my phone. Stack Exchange released their own application on Google Play store that does send push notifications when a reply is received, but no notifications on reputation changes. Also it’s still a little rough around the edges and besides I realized I didn’t want a full blown Stack Overflow application (when I do use SO for questions/answers I prefer the full site on my laptop). There should be another way. Continue reading →

Have you tried DotNet Fiddle?

You might be familiar with JS fiddle – an awesome tool that allows you to interactively test and share your JavaScript code along with gazillion of libraries and CSS classes.

You may even know non less awesome SQL Fiddle using which you can build custom schemas, tables, views and run and share your SQL queries in various RDBMS.

But have you heard about .NET Fiddle? This is a great interactive compiler, using IDE familiar to other fiddlers users it allows you to run and share your .NET code in both C# and VB.NET.

From the developers of .NET Fiddle:

We are a group of .NET developers who are sick and tired of starting Visual Studio, creating a new project and running it, just to test simple code or try out samples from other developers.

Give it try!

Locket: Get paid just for unlocking your screen

Get Locket

This is actually very cool, the company called Locket had a very novel idea: What do million of Android users do most often with their phones? Play games? Browse the Web? No! Unlock the phone.

That Lock screen is a prime real estate and they decided – why not display beautiful ads there? And the ads are very good indeed, a lot better than most wallpapers I’ve seen. And for every unlock swipe you get 1 cent. You’re doing it dozens times a day anyway – why not get paid for it?

Locket is an Android app that replaces your lock screen.

From the site:

Here’s How Locket Works:

Open your phone, and you’ll see an ad.

Swipe Left
to engage with an ad, claim a deal or watch a trailer.

or

Swipe Right
to go straight to your phone like you always do.

Either way, you get paid. Because the lock screen is the most valuable space in advertising. And you own it.

Join the club! Get Locket.

Solution for IE10 error: SCRIPT5022: Sys.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Value must be an integer

If you’re testing your ASP.NET project in Internet Explorer 10, you may encounter following error:

SCRIPT5022: Sys.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Value must be an integer.
Parameter name: (x or y)
Actual value was (some floating point value)
ScriptResource.axd, line … character …

Often it come up when you use some 3rd party libraries, Telerik or Infragistics (in my case it happened in WebDataMenu control).

Here why it happens. Continue reading →

FusionCharts.RenderChart and ASP.NET UpdatePanel

Fusion Charts

FusionCharts is a very cool cross-platform charting library – it offers huge variety of chart types and mind-blowing special effects. It also offers wide variety of chart rendering options both client- and server-side.

One such option is to render chart in an ASP.NET application. FusionCharts.dll that you get with the package offers handy FusionCharts.RenderChart method that generates all the client-side code you need to display a beautiful chart. Usually it is used something like this:

xLabel1.text = FusionCharts.RenderChart("FusionCharts/Pie2D.swf", "", sChartXmlData, sChartID, iChartWidth, iChartHeight, False, True)

where xLabel1 is a Label or Literal control in your ASPX page and FusionCharts.RenderChart is a function that accepts number of parameters, like chart type, chart XML data, dimensions etc.

It works very well until you want to render the chart inside of Microsoft Ajax UpdatePanel – then nothing works. This happens because FusionCharts.RenderChart function emits some HTML along with JavaScript that do not work during partial postback. FusionCharts suggest hooking up to UpdatePanel life-cycle events, but it’s seems like an overkill, and often doesn’t work (especially if you have a complex project, which this hookup can interfere with). But there’s an alternative solution.
Continue reading →

Sync NEW files from external folders to Skydrive

Skydrive
If you use Microsoft Skydrive cloud storage, you know it has a neat desktop client that automatically syncs content of a desktop folder to the cloud. It uses its own dedicated folder, but if you have existing folders that accumulated photos and music for decades – there’s an easy way to add them as well.

The problem with this approach – Skydrive client will happily sync existing files, but will pass on any new ones added after initial sync. This happens because it cannot detect changes in symlinked folders. If you regularly shutdown/startup your machine – it’s not a problem, when client is restarted it rescans entire content for the changes – and follows symlinks as well.

But if your machine is “always on” e.g. a server there is an easy way as well. Just create an empty folder inside of a “real” Skydrive folder and delete it right away. This, similar to restart, will force Skydrive client to rescan entire content and sync with the cloud. Folder creation can be automated (a batch run on schedule for example) so you will always be in sync.

Jelly Bean: Android 4.1 on Kindle Fire

And the saga continues. Tired of Ice Cream Sandwich I decided to step up. Turning my Kindle Fire into a Jelly Bean device (same Android version run by Google’s Nexus 7) is a snap. Just go to this XDA thread and download bright shiny new CyanogenMod 10.

Jelly Bean on Kindle Fire

It runs much smoother than ICS, seems a lot faster and more streamlined. There’re a lot of small things (like lockscreen trailing your finger) that make everyday tablet use a lot more enjoyable.

Jelly Bean on Kindle Fire Got a few new features as well, Google Now being one of the coolest one. As you continue to use your tablet, it learns your ways and begins supply you with useful array of information – from weather and traffic of your commute, to appointments and your favorite sports teams.

It doesn’t support Flash anymore, but with the advance of HTML5 Flash becomes more and more irrelevant in such areas as gaming and video. Major apps (Google Chrome, ROM Manager, Titanium Backup etc.) love Jelly Bean and runs perfect under Android 4.1.

Even new Optimum app released exclusively for Kindle Fire runs fine under Jelly Bean (yes sometimes I get so lazy so even finding a TV remote seems as too much of an effort and on Kindle I can watch my cable without getting up).

So, if you haven’t already done so – do yourself a favor and turn your Kindle fire from nothing more than an Amazon shopping cart into a full blown Android tablet, capable of many amazing things.

Disclaimer: Do it at your own risk. I am speaking from personal experience, but I am not responsible if you brick your device.

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