I clicked on the “You are receiving Jobs Alert emails. Unsubscribe.” which brought up a modal window with “Job Alert email frequency” (set to weekly digest).

I set it to “No email” and then went to the email preferences section of my settings which I had visited last week after getting sick and tired of spammy crap coming from LinkedIn.

There is no setting for ‘jobs alerts’ emails, so LinkedIn have basically obfuscated email settings somewhere so that they can continue to spam me with worthless shit in which I have no interest.

Fuck. Off.

I am considering closing my account.

Related posts:

1. Facepork Email Accounts?
2. Google Reader gets a small but useful tweak
3. Sent from my [blank]

Anyway, my favourite bikes were the ones driven there by a lucky few who’d come to the bike show. An awful lot of BMW R1200GS bikes there, which I was drooling over recently..

Here’s some photos.

The very beautiful BMW R1200GS

A Harley Davidson that Ada took a shine to

A row of very large bikes with my Baja snuck in there (2nd from right)

Ada by a Harley

Another awesome BMW R1200GS. Sweet.

Another BMW R1200GS – man there were a lot of them.

I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the bikes we saw, I guess I’ll just have to save for about ten years before I can have something like this..!

Related posts:

1. A fun night in Phnom Penh
2. Beloved parakeet missing in Phnom Penh
3. Happy Christmas to you all

Adobe from now on will only offer a subscription model for their products. This means that you cannot buy and own their products, you must pay and pay and continue paying for as long as you want to use their product. Stop paying, stop having access to their software.

So, after 10 years you might have paid Adobe $6,000 when you decide to stop paying. Bang, no more software for you.

Clearly Adobe were tired of customer purchasing the full suite and then putting off upgrading for as long as possible due to the excessive cost of upgrading.

Still F’ing non-US customers in the A

Have you seen this video where a journalist continually asks the Adobe CEO what justification there was to charge nearly double for their software in Australia? The Adobe CEO constantly rebuts with “Well with Creative Cloud we see massively increased value, blah blah blah”. It’s the most amazing piece of question avoidance (and makes me completely angry – he basically just says ‘Creative Cloud’ over and over again).

So Adobe CEO, how does the new pricing model work?

In the USA the price is set at $600 a year.

• United Kingdom: £562.56 a year (approximately $870) – that’s 145% more expensive.
• Ireland: the price is €737.88 a year (approximately $966) – that’s 161% more expensive.

So, yeah, thanks Adobe for continuing to F us in the A.

And of course, those pricings are based on you making a yearly commitment – if you want to have some flexibility in when you’re paying for it – perhaps you work in bursts and don’t require access to the software year round – well you’re going to pay handsomely for that privilege. In the US it will be $900 a year paying month by month, in Ireland it works out at $1,449.12 a year (still 161% more expensive).

Related posts:

1. The disparity of US and EU software pricing models
2. Why oh why does Creative Suite not auto-save
3. Suggestions Wanted: PDF Reader software for Windows

He bought the keyboard for work, used it from Wednesday last week and now it’s Monday and it has stopped working. I know this friend is careful with his electronics.

He brought it back to PTC Computer in Phnom Penh who informed him that the warranty for all accessories was 48 hours. Can you believe that?

Not only this but my friend purchases all their work equipment there – they spend a ruddy fortune with PTC Computer and there was absolutely no leeway. Device dies after 120 hours and you can’t replace it.

So be very careful!

Related posts:

1. Buying a HP Laptop in Cambodia
2. It’s a half and half sort of day
3. A fun night in Phnom Penh

This morning I was asked to login, yet again, to my personal blog.

No one else has login access to this website. I only login from my personal computer. I’m pretty security conscious (laptop encrypted, randomly generated passwords for all websites, always logout if I use a public computer).

The default behaviour when logging in and checking “Remember me” is that WordPress will ask you to login again after only a few days (not sure of the exact length).

No more!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/always-remember-me/

This plugin will change it so that your “Remember me” login cookie expires after one year.

Obviously use with caution – if you enable it on one of your sites, make sure to logout if you’re ever accessing your site from a public computer.

Personally I’d love to see the plugin expand a little to provide a setting option on each user’s “edit profile” screen where length of expiration could be set, but for now this will keep me happy.

I have no idea why I didn’t search for this before..

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3. WordPress get it right (again)

This is a simple matter of bad UI design – if you are forcing a certain view upon application launch, you better be 100% certain that it works or has some sort of fallback that doesn’t make your application look like it’s broken.

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2. Microsoft Bing Apps for Office 365 Home Premium (with extra Windows Live Hotmail Outlook)
3. Press – A new feed reader application for Android

$interests = RegistrationForm::get('interests');
$user->interests()->sync($interests);

How beautifully simple and yet it hides such wonderful functionality.

What’s going on?

I’m building a registration form where users can select multiple checkboxes to indicate their interest in multiple items.

This requires a few tables and some incredibly simple models.

The Interests table migration

class Create_Interests_Table {
	public function up()
    {
		Schema::create('interests', function($table) {
			$table->increments('id')->unsigned();
			$table->integer('category_id')->unsigned();
			$table->string('name');
			$table->string('slug')->unique();
		});
	}
}

We can ignore the category_id here as I’m using it for something else, the other columns are nice and simple though. We have our incrementing id, the name of our interest, and a slug for the interest (which is going to be used later on for SEO friendly filtering URLs).

The Interest_user table migration

class Create_Interest_User_Table {
	public function up()
    {
		Schema::create('interest_user', function($table) {
			$table->increments('id')->unsigned();
			$table->integer('user_id')->unsigned();
			$table->integer('interest_id')->unsigned();
			$table->timestamps();
		});
	}
}

This is all pretty straight forward as well. An id, and then the relational user_id and interest_id.

The user model

This is a small excerpt of my User model.

public function interests()
{
	return $this->has_many_and_belongs_to('Interest');
}

Yes, it’s that beautiful.

My form (a little excerpt)

I can build the checkboxes nice and easily with:

foreach ($interest_category['interests'] as $interest_id => $interest_name) {
	echo Form::checkbox('interests[]', $interest_id, in_array($interest_id, (array) RegistrationForm::old('interests'))) . ' ' . __('interests.' . $interest_id);
}

There is a little bit of other stuff going on before this, but ultimately I’m grabbing an array of interests from the database and feeding them out to checkboxes. I still have to arrange the label, but I’m just testing this out at the moment. I’m building a multilingual site so I’m having to do some interesting things to ensure correctly localised labels are returned.

The registration controller

So I have my users table, my interests table and my interest_user table. The user has been created with:

// Save the User
$user = new User($user_data);
$user->save();

So I now have a user object and I can so easily sync the interests to the user and Laravel takes care of the rest. It populates the relational table with the user id and each interest id.

// Save the interests
$interests = RegistrationForm::get('interests');
$user->interests()->sync($interests);

Isn’t that just fantastic! If you’d like more information on building many-to-many relationships in Laravel check out the official documentation. What’s that RegistrationForm class? Check out the form-base-model bundle on github.

Related posts:

1. Laravel: user “display name”, or first + last name
2. An Post: Making no sense is our business
3. Making waves

Design

Some attention has been given to the design – mostly subtle tweaks, but all of them appreciated.

The core design patterns are the same with the different note views acting as “panes” which you can swipe away. Although it seems that they’ve removed the old stacked mentality which required swiping back through the Notebook to get to the Home screen

The snippets view looks much nicer and Evernote updated the fonts to a crisp and modern serif which looks quite classy.

Page Scanner/Camera

Interestingly Evernote have brought out a new page scanning mode. I have done some quick tests on it and it does a reasonable job, but doesn’t reach the capabilities found in a dedicated app like CamScanner. With Evernote page scanning you just line it up and take a picture. I think they apply some high contrast and maybe some sharpening, but you don’t have any control over this stuff.

With something like CamScanner it will automatically pick out the page edges but you can adjust them with fine-grained control. You can also adjust the scan’s contrast settings manually.

I’ll have to wait and see whether I find myself using the new page scanning functionality – likely due to the convenience of one less step..

Another tweak I appreciated is that you can now add multiple images to a single note with ease – just snap image after image and each one is appended to the note.

Shortcuts

A new feature (at least for Android users) is the Shortcuts screen. Swiping in from the right-side when viewing notes, notebooks or tags reveals this new shortcut list, and you can create shortcuts to a note, notebook, or tag.

My _todo ¹ tag is probably my most frequently accessed tag whilst on mobile and it’s certainly nice to quickly access my notes tagged as to-dos.

Other changes

• Search functionality has been spruced up to include the ability to search inside office documents such as Microsoft Office and OpenOffice word documents etc.
• Speed and reliability improvements.
• Some Evernote for Business features added.
• Page Scanner functionality better integrated with Moleskine Smart Notebooks (completely sold out on Moleskine Asia).

Related posts:

1. Evernote for Android gets an overhaul
2. Can someone recommend an Evernote alternative?
3. Posting from Android

Back in 2011 we recorded these tracks over two days in Bodhi Villa Studios in Kampot with the awesome help of Hugh. After that it took me basically a year to mix the tracks down and master them (I know, lame, but it’s here now!).

You can download it for free or if you’d like you can make a donation which goes to Empowering Youth Cambodia (EYC). EYC is a great organization that fosters the growth and development of the next generation of leaders in Cambodia. Learn more at www.eycambodia.org

Related posts:

1. Getting comfortable – Grass Snake Union in Kampot
2. Down low – The Grass Snake Union
3. Grass Snake Union get some lovely words on Leng Pleng

We arrived in Phnom Penh after an interesting trip. Took off early from Dublin Airport and when we got to London we had a weird experience. We were told that we couldn’t get on our plane because we only had a one-way ticket. As time passed and it got closer to the time for the flight to take off, a frazzled check in agent brought us and another couple of Irish guys to the boarding gate where we were told our bags had been disembarked and we weren’t on the flight. After more confusion and me consistently explaining that it didn’t matter whether we had a one-way flight, Cambodia would be happy to welcome us in, the flight staff relented and re-embarked our bags and let us on the plane.

Airbus A380-800 Taking Off

The flight itself was great; I was like a child filled with awe. We were flying on an Airbus A380-800. It’s absolutely huge! Comfortable seats (also we had two seats each as the flight was half full), a webcam view of the plane from its tail as we took off, lots of movies to choose from. Happy out.

In Kuala Lumpur we had a bit more time, which we really needed as we were told again that we couldn’t catch our flight to Phnom Penh due to a one-way ticket. The check-in clerks were suggesting that we’d have to buy a return ticket. Eventually, after I spoke to a manager we were allowed to check in if we signed a form disavowing the airline of any responsibility if we got turned away from Cambodia.

The flight to Phnom Penh wasn’t quite so luxurious but I was so sleepy it didn’t matter. At some point I vaguely recall being woken up for my vegetarian breakfast. I ate it but have literally no recollection of what it was I ate.

Adrianna at Phnom Penh Airport

So after all the hullabaloo about one-way tickets, our arrival in Phnom Penh was totally fine (as I knew it would be). No one cared about our travel arrangements. The usual quick visa processing and we were through.

After getting settled in we ended up going out three nights in a row with our wonderful hosts Warren and Dina

Me and the Baja heading to Bokkor

Our first week entailed a lot more work than I expected sadly, but once I got a few things cleared we headed down to Kampot for 4 nights. What’s more, I got to drive down on Jared’s Honda XR250 – the Baja! Kampot was blissful, staying in Marco’s excellent Green House by Kampot river. We had a trip up Bokkor mountain and a gig at Bodhi Villa where I was overjoyed to be re-united with the Grass Snake Union and I got to get up on stage with the old crew and sing some songs. Fantastic!

Since then I’ve been back in Phnom Penh working away back at Hackerspace.

So many familiar faces and friendly people, and I’ve even been surprised at how much Khmer I’ve been speaking – seems like more of it stuck than I thought.

It’s great to be back in Cambodia.

View from the top of Bokkor

Related posts:

1. Google Maps vs Bing Maps in Cambodia
2. Happy Christmas to you all
3. Arrived in Kuala Lumpur