• What: Cork Pub Summit
• When: 7pm – 9pm, Wednesday the 11th of July, 2012
• Where: Electric, 41, South Mall, Cork. (Map below)

So Pat Phelan and myself are bringing the Pub Summit to Cork next Wednesday. Entrepreneurs, tech folk, investors and such people coming together, having a few beers and the craic, a great gathering of the Cork tech scene. The widely popular Pub Summit series has been all over Europe and even to New York. We have 3 awesome speakers from the real capital:

1. Peter Coppinger of Teamwork PM
2. Sabrina Dent on “How not to be a wanker online”
3. John Dennehy of Zartis

Its free, but places are limited so register here.

View Larger Map

So I caved and got Diablo III, it was pretty amazing and potentially the most meaningful relationship in my life to date until I tried to sign in after taking a break and had this thrown in my face, followed by it promptly crashing:

Heartbroken by error 3007, I used Little Snitch to find out where it was connecting to and ran a traceroute, long story short, the route of error lies in your DNS, switch it to Google’s and happy days.

Google’s DNS IPs to point to:

• 8.8.8.8
• 8.8.4.4

See more here on Google’s Public DNS.

So I’m a 3 Ireland prepay customer, €20 a month for all you can eat data. Pretty sweet huh? Recently I needed to log into 3 online to send a webtext and check some stuff, but I forgot my password. Grand job so, clicked ‘forgotten password‘ and was prompted to input my number and the last 6 digits of my sim. Hadn’t see this before, so I clicked the more info button to be shown instructions to take out my sim and check the digits and input them. I have an iPhone 4S (ooh shiney), so I rummaged around, found a pin and got out my sim. There was a problem, obviously a micro-sim differs from a regular sim, but there were no digits as illustrated, the only 6 digits were on the reverse and they were incorrect seemingly.

What they want is called the ICCID (“Integrated Circuit Card Identification”), how you find it on the iPhone (if you’re like me, you probably can’t find the original sim packaging), just go into the Settings app, then into General and then About and you’ll see it.

Grand job so boss.

How I envisage myself with the CoderDojoMobile

I travel a fair bit around Ireland now, CoderDojos are springing up around the country (~20 in Ireland and more worldwide), I goto new Dojos opening, recently opened CoderDojos, meet and talk to people who want to start a Dojo or visit various Dojos every week, plus I often goto meetings or events relating to CoderDojo. Trains are expensive (Cork – Dublin return €79 [Student card expired ]) and buses suck (crazy long and uncomfortable), plus that can be only half the battle for more remote places (It was an array of transport when we set up on Arranmore). I also get given swag to give to Dojos and I’m looking into create kits of resources to give to Dojos for special sessions. Driving in many cases would make me get places faster, get to more places, be cheaper (with car pooling), be easier to transport stuff and generally make life easier. So TL;DR travelling a lot in Ireland, a car would rock!

I want to make the CoderDojoMobile (think BatMobile, but awesomer). I have a couple of ideas for it to make it awesome, obviously the core of it is the actual car itself. Everything else is extra, but why ‘sup up a car’? Make the it look cool and be awesome, make it recognisable, have some memorable hacks and features.

• Body kit - http://www.stxstyling.co.uk/StxStyling/Cars/showit.php?pnum=3876
• Alloys - http://www.performancealloys.com/wheel-details.aspx?ID=64
• Carbon fiber hood – http://www.carpromods.com/product/Vis-Racing-Black-Carbon-Fiber-Hood/Default.aspx?dr=1&make=28&model=4540&year=2006
• White car respray
• Steering wheel – black and red
• Seats covers akin to http://www.modworld.co.uk/universal-mesh-car-seat-cover-set—blackred-7093-p.asp
• CoderDojo decal sides, rear window
• ‘</car>’ rear decal
• QR on code on back linking to car info page
• KITT Knight Rider Style light display on front (As suggested by Eamon Leonard)
• car url and twitter rear decal
• fake grass floor (idea from: @omgtbh) see: http://instagr.am/p/IpXmAdi-tt/
• fake ninja sword inside rear window

Tech – Hardware

• EEE PC Seahell – Onboard Computer – http://usa.asus.com/Eee/Eee_PC/Eee_PC_1015PE_Seashell/ (gut it and reinstall into console)
• Touch screen for EEE PC – http://www.fidohub.com/product.php?prod_id=54&sort3=
• 3G dongle
• gps dongle (realtime trip info, track car incase of theft)
• sound system
• Arudino to hook gauge usage
• Assorted electrical parts to wire everything up
• iPhone holder

Tech – Software

• Ubuntu for onboard computer (control sound, see info, get notifications, push realtime info to site, etc)
• GitHub repo – keep car info, progress, set up and hacks here; Flag issues in, well, issues
• Use Avego for ride sharing
• Website with usage data, ride share info, contributes page, check ins and more

Additional info

• Post upcoming trips and ride share opportunities through twitter
• twitter/github sign in for people who ride share
• Get someone who knows car electronics and such to triple check everything
• Mobile hotspot (CoderDojo Galtee mountains?!?)
• Do cool projects like visual wifi networks on routes I drive (based on idea by @MarcosEQ)

So these are just a few ideas I have. I realise the cost and work that is required, to pull this off, its gonna cost around €10,000, I’ll hustle and try get that down and try get help for fittings, spraying etc. Also that some of the things in here are nice and may be deemed extravagant for their nature of not being a core requirement, plus that and my income is currently not enough to make this a tangible idea and I don’t look like a idiot for going out, spending money and making up a nice car, but these are my thoughts and ramblings and this is something I’m going to look into further. I am open and considering any person/company wanting to help making this a reality, having their info up on the site and having a decal of their logo on the car side, if their brand is associated with connecting people and reaching, given the distance and places I’ll be racking up, it’d be a perfect match. Anyway this was what was in my head tonight and hey look, I made a blog post!

Update: Thinking of nailing down all the metrics (cost, build time, etc), doing some sweet ass visualisations, a video and throwing it up on Kickstarter, with pledges:

1.  €10+ getting their name on the site
2. €100+ getting their name or logo written on the interior of the car (door panel?) + no.1
3. €500+ getting their logo on the rear bumper + no.1 & no.2 (10 of these spots?)
4. €1000+ getting their logo on the side of the car (foot sized) + above (5 of these spots)
5. €2500+ getting their logo on side of car (large) + above (3 of these spots)

So I’ve been listen to Kerrang’s radio station online recently while working and when an epic song comes on that I don’t have and want, I built this little Chrome Extension you click and it’ll open the current song in the iTunes Store for me to buy then and there. This is useful as not all songs have the buy icon next to them, or if they, iTunes is not listed!

Download here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32558029/Kerrang%20to%20iTunes.crx

Source code here: https://github.com/jwhelton/Kerrang-to-iTunes

Hello fellow avid internet goers,

found on my travels on Reddit.

Troll face [[171108522930776]]
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME [[143220739082110]]
Not bad Obama [[169919399735055]]
Me Gusta [[211782832186415]]
Mother of God [[142670085793927]]
Cereal Guy [[170815706323196]]
LOL Face [[168456309878025]]
NO Guy [[167359756658519]]
Yao Ming [[218595638164996]]
Derp [[224812970902314]]
Derpina [[192644604154319]]
Forever Alone [[177903015598419]]
Not Bad [[NotBaad]]
Fuck yeah [[105387672833401]]
Challange accepted: [[100002727365206]]
Okay face [[100002752520227]]
Dumb bitch [[218595638164996]]
Poker face [[129627277060203]]
Socially awkward penguin [[98438140742]]
Rage face [[FUUUOFFICIAL]]
Lamp [[100001256102462]]
Feel like a sir [[168040846586189]]
Forever alone christmas [[125038607580286]]

Update:

As pointed out by @Kudoz and @ebygum these aren’t actually similes, rather it grabs the whatever profile picture corresponding to the  page id, try using your facebook page’s id or another pages id, eg [[jwhelton]] 

So I’m currently a couple thousand feet up in the air on a Virgin America flight to San Francisco from Boston and Google are doing this cool thing where they loan you a Chrome Book for the flight, apart of this, you get free wifi on the Chrome Book, whilst on any other device you need to pay like $12.95. I figured out by faking the User Agent to be that of the Chrome Book, you can get free wifi.

TL;DR : Set your browser User Agent to this:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS i686 1193.117.0) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.66 Safari/535.7

On Safari do it like so, make sure the Develop menu bar item is enabled (Do this in the Advance tab in Safari Preferences), then click on the Develop menu, then into User Agent, click other and copy and paste in the above browser agent string.

This tricks whatever is handling the wifi into thinking your computer is a Chrome Book and gives you free wifi as apart of the programme they’re running with Google!

Enjoy my friends!

Someones been doing nice work with the facebook API.

If your (or a friend’s) facebook account is spamming someone over chat or posting comments like this:

this is because they let a facebook app access their profile and it now has control over it. This is then used in turn to trick others into doing the aforementioned and sending people to links with ads and scams to make the creator of this money. Heres what you do to stop the app having permission of your account and thus stop spam.

1. Login into facebook and click on  Account on the top right and click on the Privacy Settings option!

2.This will bring you to the Account Privacy settings page, on the bottom left click edit your settings under Apps and Websites

3. Now under the list of apps click the Remove unwanted or spammy apps option

4.You’ll now see a list of apps that have access to your facebook account, not all are bad, but remove anyone that looks dodgy, if paranoid, remove all. To remove a app, click the ‘x‘ icon to the extreme right of it. The apps are listed in order of how recently they accessed your account, from this you can determine the spam ones.

5.You’ll now be prompted to remove it, which you can do so.

This will stop the app from being able to use your account, report the app to facebook. You may also want to consider changing your password or security question as the app may have pulled some of your basic info. You should also reexamine your privacy settings on the privacy page and adjust them fittingly (props Ben).

Any more issues, get onto Zuckerburg and friends: http://www.facebook.com/help/ and if you need a had gimme a shout on Twitter: @jwhelton

If you havn’t updated the official Twitter iPhone app on your iPhone/iPod recently, you may want to do so as I’ve found something in the app version (3.3.0) previous to the current one (3.3.1). If you’ve updated to the latest version since the 9th or so, you’re fine. This affects only the official Twitter app for iPhone/iPod, not Twitterrific or others.

I found a security hole in the 3.3.0 Twitter iPhone app! You can inject your own HTML, CSS and JavaScript into the iPhone client, this hack leaves users wide open to phishing scams and the sort.

I haven’t tested the full possibilities of this but I imagine there are loads here! The hack I’m demoing adds JavaScript remotely (in this case ‘tweet.js’) to the view, it executes, spoofs a warning pop up, tapping either ‘Ok’ or ‘Cancel’ brings you to a new page regardless, this page can be anything, in this case I’ve set it to look like a Twitter login page, which upon entering a users details, could, via a form, be emailed back to someone.

Heres the screenshots and a walkthrough:

1. Tweet containing the JavaScript to inject (the ‘<script>‘ bit)

2.Intial view with scrolling warning text

3.’Warning’ pop up, (appears after 3.5 secs), pressing either button sends you to our phishing site, no way out (*wimper*)

4.Fake Twitter account protect page

5.Upon press of ‘Protect Account’ button, sends you to my site (or any site with nastier stuff or could email entered details)

What you do?

UPDATE your Twitter app via the AppStore, should you be unable to do so, stay the hell away from any tweets that contain any tags like ‘<html>‘ or ‘<script>‘, you’ll notice the weird link. You can see if a tweet contains this from your main timeline view in the app.

So I’m starting to learning PHP, but as a student whose’s bag is already crammed with (uselessly oversized) textbooks, I want to store the eBook/PDF of a PHP book I bought online, on my iPhone. Imagine all the PDF’s you’ve ever downloaded or torrented right on your iDevice (iPad would be savage for this)! Its extremely fastand easy to do! What we need is:

• iDevice: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad (obviously)
• Mac (more obviously)
• eBook or PDF file (more more obliviously)
• WiFi network that both iDevice and Mac are on

If you’re stuck for a wireless network, you can create one on the Mac and let the iDevice join it.

Right lets rock(paper)(scissors)…

First off we want the iDevice to be able to access the eBook/PDF on your Mac. Open the ‘System Preferences‘ application and click on ‘Sharing‘.

In ‘Sharing‘ click on ‘Web Sharing‘ in the left column.

Now click on the checkbox of ‘Web Sharing‘ so it turns blue and has a tick in it. You’ll see the green light is now on and its says “Web Sharing: On“, you will also see a web address in blue, make note of it as we’ll be going to it on the iDevice. In my case it said “http://192.168.1.4/~jw”, it could also say the computer name, like “http://spartan.local/~jw”.

Next, in Finder, goto your home folder (mine is ‘jw’) and then into the ‘Sites‘ folder. Basically anything you put in here you can access on your iDevice (or computer) by going to the web address we took note of earlier. So in this ‘Sites‘ folder, copy/place/drag the desired PDF/eBook into.

Now on the iDevice, first get the iBooks app from the AppStore (if you hav’nt already), now in the Safari app goto the web address we took note of earlier, in my case it was http://192.168.1.4/~jw.

You’ll see a list of files, touch/click on the PDF/eBook you put in. It will open and on the top right, you’ll see an option “Open in iBooks”

Press that option and it’ll open in iBooks and will be saved

Well done! You’ve done it, the eBook/PDF is now in iBooks Library

You can do this to add all your eBooks and PDFs into the iBooks app so you can enjoy them on the go!

Note: When you enable ‘Web Sharing’ everyone can access what you have in your ‘Sites’ folder, now its mega-super-highely unlikely that some will know where or go into your ‘Sites’ folder while you’re doing this, but if you’re adding some explicit content, I’d just removed the evidence from your ‘Sites’ folder when your done. Also in every case, for piece of mind, just turn off ‘Web Sharing’ in ‘System Preferences’ when you’re done.

Like this tutorial? Thank me on Twitter: @jwhelton