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!

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

BAM! It was only a matter of time before google stuck its hand in the phone markets and now, prepare to gawk! Google Voice is giving free calls to the USA and Canada at the moment, got relatives or friends over there? You’re sorted!

But what about everywhere else? Well you have to pay a tiny-weeny amount to call there, which varies on country and if its a mobile or landline. Heres a list of the rates: https://www.google.com/voice/rates

Now because Google loves Ireland (boy does it), here are the Irish rates:

its a mere freakin’ 2 cent to call a landline in Ireland! Even better, it seems Google give you a full free $0.10 to play with when you sign up or start using voice!

Now how do you use Google Voice and avail of this awesomeness? Hop over to gmail.com, login or sign up, once you’re logged in, on the left hand sidebar, there’ll be a section entitled “Chat”, click that mofo, a it will dropdown to reveal the voice option, you’ll have to install a plugin first and restart your browser, after that go back to the Chat option in gmail, click it again, click the Voice button and on the right hand side of the window the dial pad will pad will appear and HEY PRESTO, you’re prank calling businesses in the states for free! I tested it out and rang a GameStop in Torronto, froze and hung up when they actually picked up! So yeah it works! Also if you upgrade, you also get all neat features like sending texts or SMS’s to phones, a voicemail, a custom number so people can ring you and more!

This kind of technology is called VOIP or ‘Voice over Internet Protocol’, its for  transferring voice or audio over the internet, through a gateway and to a phone. For a long time Skype and other companies were doing this, so really its nothing new, but free calls to the USA and Canada is BIG!

Links:

• Gmail
• Google Voice
• Google Voice Rates

Right, so in my previous post I embedded the vid of my first backflip via twitvid.com, however what would I do if I wanted to download that? Heres a guide on how to download vids from twitvid!

1.

Goto the page of the video you wanna download, see the URL bit up top, well in this case its ” http://www.twitvid.com/A7C51 “, well just ” player/” after the “twitvid.com”, so it’d be “http://www.twitvid.com/player/A7C51″, hit enter an go it.

2.

righto, so you’ll be brought to this page, its basically a big screen flash player of the vid, the url will now be something ridonkcolously, pick out the http://www.twitvid.com/playVideo_A7C51/token_87c55b1e07b6647e6e7bf172b6585ef0

copy and paste it into the url bar and go to it!

3.

Right, so this is the movie file playing in your browser, its a .mp4 (MPEG4) file, so you can right click the page and save as, or goto the ‘edit’ tab and save page as, or what ever!

Now you can download and do whatever the hell you want!

Whoa Whoa Whoa, if you found this useful, give something back, follow me on Twitter for more awesomeness

To Celebrate the upcoming redesign of MechSoul Development ( http://mechsoul.com ), I am releasing a wallpaper (1600 x 1200 ) in the new style of the company enjoy…

Download