Category Archives: Tip

Disabling the iOS Cellular Data Plan Popup

iOS Cellular Data Plan DialogDisabling the iOS Cellular Data Plan popup that asks if you would like to sign up for a data plan can be disabled by turning on Airplane Mode. Just remember to turn your Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth back on.

Story

My wife and I both have iPad Mini 3s. Since we are usually connected to Wi-Fi, we share a T-Mobile SIM that we keep in the iPad is traveling and likely to utilize the cellular data. I got fed up with iOS constantly asking about a cellular data plan, so I figured out that Airplane Mode stops this.

Customizing Pebble Time Notifications on iOS

This was tested on Pebble Time HW 8.12 (snowy22), Pebble Time FW v3.2, Pebble Time app v3.1, iOS 8.4, and an iPhone 6.

The latest Pebble guide I could fine for setting up notifications on iOS (May 13, 2015) is not accurate, making it a trial and error exercise to customize notifications that get pushed to the watch.

Notifications are not dependent on the "Show on Lock Screen" setting or the "Alert Style" settings stated in the article. Alerts on the Pebble Time are actually tied to what appears in the Notification Center.

To disable notifications from a particular app, go to Settings → Notifications → <app> → Show in Notification Center → No Recent Items. When this is set to 1, 5, or 10, notifications will show up on your Pebble.

Security Note: If you’ve turned off the "Show Previews" option so text messages an email contents are not displayed on the Lock Screen, the message contents will still be displayed on the Pebble Time since it pulls content directly from the Notification Center.

Revisited: Eliminating Mixed Content warnings with Amazon Associates

Links & Banners

I verified that adding internal=1 parameter and removing http: from an iframe banner URL will cause it to load securely. I also verified that the clicks are counted (show up in the link Earnings and Link-Type reports.
Important: This does not work for all banner ads. While reviewing the banner ads, this trick will work on any ad that displays without mixed content warnings on the amazon page.

<iframe src="http://rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?t=tidgubi-20&o=1&p=12&l=ur1&category=mp3&f=ifr&linkID=4ZPJJS7R4IXD5OGO&internal=1" width="300" height="250" scrolling="no" border="0" marginwidth="0" style="border:none;" frameborder="0"></iframe>

I have not been able to figure out a way to make the javascript based Banners load all parts securely.

Secure Widgets

Search


Contextual Recommendations


Omakase

This widget can be secured with some work.

Amazon doesn’t sanitize the amazon_ad_tag parameter, so the &internal=1 trick works for this widget.
Remove "http:" from the script src attribute and update the widget script with:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
amazon_ad_tag = "tidgubi-20&internal=1"; amazon_ad_width = "728"; amazon_ad_height = "90";//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/s/ads.js"></script>

Partially Secure Widgets

These widgets will load securely; however, they load insecure content if the user hovers over a product and causes a popup to load.

Insecure Widgets

Some quick testing showed the non-mobile friendly widgets use flash. While the flash code is loaded securely, it loads insecure content when executed. Using any of these results in mixed content warnings.

Hotel Coffee Making

Fill Tea Bag

Fill Tea Bag

Just put two tablespoons of coffee in the a tea bag, 12ozs. of water in the coffee maker, and brew.

Story

Single Serve Coffee Maker

Single Serve Coffee Maker

I’m travel regularly for work and always try the coffee in provided in the hotel rooms even though it’s always really bad. I finally decided to do something about this and decided to find a convenient way to make quality coffee in my hotel room.

I started by figuring out that most hotels have a single serve coffee maker that takes special pre-packaged bags of coffee. These filter bags measure approximately 2.75 inches by 3.5 inches. A quick search on Amazon.com showed that No.1 Small Tea Bags measure 3.5 by 2.5 inches. In practice it turnes out that the interior width of the tea bag is only about one inch, and therefore too small to fit two tablespoons of coffee in. The Large Tea Bags appear to be the next size up. Their width is just a little over 3 inches and the height is adjustable based on how the bag is folded. These also have a 2.5 inch interior width, so it isn’t too hard to fill them with coffee.

I took two of these bags, each filled with two tablespoons of coffee on my latest trip only to find my room had a full size coffee maker. Since the coffee maker had a flat bottom, I gave it a try anyway, setting the brew strength to the strongest and putting 12ozs. of water through. It turned out to produce a pretty good cup of coffee.

Original Coffee Filter

Original Coffee Filter

Filled Tea Bag

Filled Tea Bag

Coffee Filter Comparison

Coffee Filter Comparison

New Bag in Tray

New Bag in Tray

Browse the Pebble App Store from a Computer

Quick Solution

Go to https://apps.getpebble.com/?access_token=0. Click "Cancel" when prompted "Request failed. Try again?"

Search by going to https://apps.getpebble.com/?access_token=0#/search/watchapps to search the app store.

Explanation

I’m not currently a Pebble Smartwatch owner, but I decided I wanted to start exploring smartwatches and backed the Pebble Time Kickstarter. While I’m waiting for my watch, I decided I wanted to look at the apps that are available. A quick Google search and Pebble Forum Post brought me to a reddit post which indicates that you can access the Pebble App store from a computer, but it requires a Pebble.

Looking at the link in the reddit post: https://apps.getpebble.com/?access_token=[MY_TOKEN]&platform=android∓uid=, I wondered if there was a workaround to the access token.

I tried:

  • https://apps.getpebble.com/ resulted in "Not Found"
  • https://apps.getpebble.com/?access_token=&platform=&uid= resulted in an expanding orange circle
  • https://apps.getpebble.com/?access_token=0&platform=&uid= resulted in a dialog indicating the request failed.
    • Clicking OK, just kept bringing up the same dialog.
    • Clicking Cancel, initially brought up the expanding circle I’d seen previously, but suddenly the app store appeared.

Playing with the URL more, I removed the platform and uid parameters and it still worked. access_token appears to be required, but it can be set to any non-null value.

I found the search link by blindly guessing https://apps.getpebble.com/?access_token=0#/search/ the URL after seeing the format of the category URL (https://apps.getpebble.com/?access_token=0#/categories/5261a8fb3b773043d500000c). The search URL I entered automatically redirects to https://apps.getpebble.com/?access_token=0#/search/watchapps