Webonaut

Firefox’s announcement of Hello video chat built into the browser itself this week showed me  V+VoIP is becoming a commodity service - you can communicate directly via message or phone or video from whatever community you both share ; which makes sense in a world of divergent social networks. I talk to my friends via iMessage, my family via Skype, my work colleagues via Hangouts, my virtual geek friends via G+, Teachers via Pattr, people I used to know/need to get in touch with for some reason via FB, music lovers via Rdio messenger, etc. The web is fracturing away from the visions of Zuckerberg & Brin, their mistake being that individuals are singular societal atoms (also a flaw with Smithian economic models, you might note) when in reality we are developing multiple facets of our personalities with different groups, and interacting with those using different sites/tools - as if we are  multiple people.

OSX Terminal runs a different version of PHP to Apache by default, so smashing "php blah.php" into the command line can have different results to the same script run via browser. You might notice this if you get an error such as "Call to undefined function mcrypt_decrypt()". Frustrating. Edit your .profile file (or maybe .bash_profile) and add the betterer  php binary folder to your path: export PATH=.:/usr/local/php5/bin:$PATH

In their esteemed wisdom, Google have changed the process for adding an alias. It used to be SO SIMPLE: Just click the: then smash your new shiny domain specific e-mail address in. Gmail emailed you to make sure you actually had things at your registrar forwarding mail to you, then when you entered their verification code it was all good. 3 minutes tops. For some reason they are now requiring that email address is ALREADY set-up with an SMTP server etc. BUM. You can get around it though, by filling in gmail itself as your mail send server: Set the SMTP server to smtp.gmail.com Username gmail is your full email address (e.g. spannerboy@gmail.com) Password is your gmail password Port = 465 TLS/SSL required = yes Ta! Don't forget about gmailtable.com - that invaluable complementary gmail tool.

Future Wi-fi standards should have the concept of a ½ connection; a way to distinguish "open" gatekeeper connections. This would prevent a) constantly connecting to fake "open" networks as you walk about any city (effectively destroying your connectivity) b) your crappy BT Home Hub "open" version connecting in favour of your real one. ALSO Android / iOS  please only connect to known secure networks, ASSUMING for now that any open connection is a gatekeeper. OK? Thanks.

Clicking to either show or hide something gets coded all the time, and it's a nause, so here is a one line jQuery extension to toggle show/hide. 1. Smash this piece of javascript in your header or somewhere useful: $.fn.extend({ showHide: function() { if ($(this).is(':visible')) $(this).hide('slow'); else $(this).show('slow'); }}); 2. ...it extends jQuery so that you can do: onClick='$("#someDivOrSimilar").showHide();'

...was skimping on dev resource for the Mac Flash player. If that decision - which probably saved a developer (or at most two) had not been made, the memory leaks that caused most crashes on Macs could have been avoided, deflecting Steve Job's ire and the subsequent exclusion of Flash from the mobile web (and further down the line the whole web as it unifies)