Showing posts with label hack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hack. Show all posts

Sunday, January 22, 2012

How To Make Your Own Automatic Baby Rocker From A Baby Bjorn Bouncer And A Maxi-Cosi Car Seat



There are no decent automatic baby rockers on the market. For example, the Robopax Baby Rocker that we tried out is functional in principle, but in practice, did not deliver enough of a rocking motion to soothe our 2-month old baby Benjamin.

The Baby Bjorn Balance Bouncer was sold to us as a way for a baby to self soothe themselves. It requires tiny amounts of force to create a large bouncing motion which babies love. However, young babies tend not to be able to propel themselves and so young baby Benjamin always seems to need an extra push. Unfortunately for me, it's meant that for many sleepless nights, I've been reduced to a glorified baby rocker, gently nudging the Baby Bjorn Bouncer and rocking him at all hours of the night whilst slowly losing my sanity. (Other sleep depriving attachment parenting techniques include holding him in a sling and sleeping on my tummy).

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Play HD MKV 720p Smoothly on iPhone and iPad (iOS) Natively Using XBMC


Playing high quality video on your iPhone/iPad like MKVs in 720p format has never been possible using standard App Store apps. This is because Apple have not allowed App Store apps to access hardware acceleration on their devices unless the video being played is in an MP4 format. This is despite the fact that most MKV files these days simply contain muxed MP4 files. Apps with decent performance like AVPlayer can only produce a slideshow with desynced audio, something I've written about in a previous article.

However, the fact remains that high quality videos are most commonly shared through the internet in the MKV format, especially high definition video. However, a solution has come through Jailbreaking the iPhone/iPad, which allows video playing applications like XBMC to access hardware acceleration. XBMC on the iPhone/iPad plays high bit-rate MKVs in 720p perfectly smoothly. Not only this, but there is an elegant solution to load files onto the iPhone/iPad through iTunes which does NOT require the fiddly operation of OpenSSH.

Video is of an iPad 1 running 720p MKV files on both AVPlayerHD and XBMC.

Jailbreak is required for this hack, here is a a way of searching for the latest guide to Jailbreaking.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Guide To GPS Stalking Using iPhone, BlackBerry and Android


For whatever reason, you might want to keep tabs on exactly where your wife/husand/girlfriend/boyfriend/teenage daughter, etc. have been all night (for their own "safety"). In the past, you had to rely on them to telling you the "truth" about where really were.

Thankfully we can bypass all of this guesswork if they happen to own either an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android device, which all contain GPS chips. These devices are capable of pinpointing and broadcasting exact locations at all times over the air. It's actually very simple process to view a smartphone's location just by configuring a few free apps.

Remember, always consult the owner before you make any changes to their device. And as always, with great power comes great responsibility.

WWSD
What would Spider-man do?