Add a CISS to your Printer for Cheap Ink
If you are sick of spending a lot of money replacing ink cartridges, you might consider retrofitting your printer to use a CISS (Continuous Ink Supply System). Once installed, a CISS has large tanks of generic ink held outside of the printer and has supply lines feeding into a special cartridge in the printer. Your overall cost [...]
IOS8 Swift Base64 Conversion on Xcode 6.2
If you google search you will find many articles that have swift code to create Base64 encoded text. However Swift keeps changing and if you copy and paste the code, it just won’t run. “my plain data” >>> “bXkgcGxhaW4gZGF0YQ==” (base64) let plainString = "my plain data" let plainData = [...]
Convert a UITableviewController to a UIViewController
If you add a new Navigation Controller to an IOS Swift project you will find it adds a new TableViewController. But what if you want a UIViewController instead? There is no good way through interface builder to convert a UITableviewController to a UIViewController so you will have to dive into the XML source code that is your storyboard [...]
IOS 8 Swift Detecting Lost Bluetooth Connection
Once your IOS app has paired to a Bluetooth device, there is no delegate call to let you know the device is no longer connected. You have a few different approaches for polling if the device is still around. Check RSSI signal strength Query the Bluetooth device and wait for a reply Check the peripheral.state (recommended) [...]
Which iPads have real GPS chips?
If you develop apps for iPads and want to use GPS location, you will find that you actually need a wifi or cellular connection because most iPads don’t actually have a real GPS chip in them anymore. A few years ago (~2012), most phones switched over to A-GPS (assisted GPS) which many people incorrectly believe is still an [...]
IOS Swift Direction Lock Enabled in ScrollView
In xcode, there is an option for UIScrollViews called Direction Lock Enabled. But the explanation is less than useful – “a boolean value that determines if scrolling is disabled in a particular direction“. What it really does is disabled multiple direction scrolling. Once you start scrolling in one direction, say [...]
ATT U-Verse NVG589 and Amazon Fire won’t find Smartphone Remote
If you got a new Amazon Fire TV and want to use your smartphone as a remote through the Amazon Fire App, you will find that if you use the uverse router NVG589, your phone won’t find the Fire TV. Its because ATT’s router doesn’t support multicast (or UPNP or alot of other great and common wifi features). Which [...]