Pandora cutting out using naviplay bluetooth stereo dock with iPhone
I have an iPhone 3G and recently bought a Naviplay bluetooth transmitter off of Amazon for $6 so that I could stream to my Sony S805 bluetooth headphones, since the bozo's at Apple decided to not make the bluetooth stereo protocol available directly from the iPHone. Yes both of these work with the iPhone, even though the Naviplay doesn't state that it will. Keep in mind even though the dock is designed to charge an iPod, it doesn't seem to charge the iPhone, minor problem. Anyhow I mostly listen to Pandora on my iPhone so that I can listen to a variety of music that I don't necessarily have on my iPhone, I noticed as soon as I started using the dock and the headphones that the sound kept cutting out in the headphones periodically. I tried a different dock, a different iPhone, removing apps, changing settings on the phone, same problem. Turns out something that Pandora does seems to be causing the intermittent sound problem, after trying just the iPod feature and a couple of other streaming applications, Pandora seems to be the only application that this happens with. So if you're having a similar problem with the dock, it's probably not the dock, your phone, or a rouge app just seems to be Pandora.
Firefox 3 released today
Today's the day all us developer types have been waiting for, Firefox 3 will be released and a world record for most downloads in a day will be set. If you're a web app developer and you're not using this browser, with at least Firebug, YSlow, and the Web Developer Toolbar, you might as well be coding with your eyes closed, quit your job and take a job in marketing. That's just how I feel about Firefox, it's literally changed the way I code, debug, and test. Join the good fight today and download Firefox 3.
Browser Hack: Speeding up Firefox and IE
Digging around today, I ran into this hack to allow Firefox to open more connections and to wait less time before rendering a page. It's been a common hack for IE over the years, but I wasn't aware there was something similar available for Firefox, it's a noticeable difference if your on broadband.
In firefox, the following settings will optimize your browser to utilize more simultaneous connections when pulling down a website and it will remove the default delay that firefox waits to paint the page:
- Open your browser and in the address bar type about:config and hit enter
- In the filter box type network.http.pipelining
- The results will filter, double click network.http.pipelining and change the value to true
- Double click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and change the value to 10
- Right click in the middle of the page and choose New -> String and name the String nglayout.initialpaint.delay
- Double click nglayout.initialpaint.delay and give it a value of 0
If you're lazy like me, just go and install the FasterFox add on, which basically does all this and more for you.
And here's the registry hack for IE:
- Click Start run and type regedit and click OK
- Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
- Right click the Internet Settings folder and click New -> DWORD
- Give the Key a name of MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server with a Decimal value of 10
- Create another DWORD with a key of MaxConnectionsPerServer and a Decimal value of 10
This hack was found on Metacafe in video format, which I had to watch like 5 times while switching back and forth between tabs, which made me think, hmm maybe I should write this down somewhere.
Windows Hack – Remote control your home computer from work
There's always that time when you need desperately to get into your home computer from work, be it to get financial or tax information or just to kick off a download of that great movie your buddy just told you about. Most of us bound behind the corporate firewall can't get to much of anything outside of 80 or 443 as far as ports go, besides that a lot of us don't even have rights to install new software on our computers. So we need a hack that doesn't require any installation on our work computer, but will allow most of us to terminal into our home computer.
The hack is to allow a remote desktop connection to your computer over port 443, which is the standard http ssl port, and is typically left open for internet browsing by the sys-admin. The hack should work on most Windows 2000/XP/Vista machines. This hack will not work if you're serving up an SSL website out of your house. Keep in mind this hack requires editing the registry and if you don't know what your doing or modify the wrong key it could severely trash your computer, please perform at your own risk.