I’ve used it a lot when driving and travelling. Even now that I’ve got a reasonably large collection of music on my phone, this blocky little media player still has a place – especially when it comes to longer trips away, giving me an extra 10 hours of playing time.

Last month I plugged it in to charge and there was a tiny popping sound and the screen went blank. The device would no longer charge. At first I investigated and thought a loose battery wire was causing the issue, but a quick solder proved that thought incorrect.

A quick search of the battery part number resulted in a replacement being ordered from fusionbattery.co.uk. Once this arrived it was just a matter of installing it.

Replacing the iAudio X5 battery

Step 1: Removing the back cover

Step 1: Remove the back cover

The screws are small, but they’re a standard Philips head, so it’s easy to get sorted.

Step 2: Removing the hard drive

Step 2: Removing the hard drive

Next up you need to take the hard drive out. There’s a small piece of tape at the top of the drive which you need to peel off, then you can pull up the top of the drive and slide it out from the base of the unit. There’s no need to unplug the drive cable.

Step 3: Reveal the battery

Step 3: Reveal the battery

Underneath the hard drive there’s a small rubbery moulded plastic separator. This is fairly easy to remove and you’ll see the battery with cables soldered to the motherboard.

Step 4: Un-solder the old battery

Step 4: Un-solder the old battery

Now you can just un-solder the old battery, re-solder the new battery (red wire bottom, black wire top), and put the device back together.

Step 5: Et voilà

Step 5: Et voilà

Once putting it all back together, I plugged it back into its charging dock and lo and behold she happily started charging again.

It might be old, somewhat clunky and not exactly head turning, but it works, and it continues just working. I’ve got Rockbox installed on it and lots of good music. It plays FLAC, OGG and other files types often not played by other digital media players. And it’s still going strong!

I knew that if I went with a system where I had to crop, export and upload each different image size, well, I’d never do it. So I decided to take advantage of the built-in featured image functions in WordPress. I have a feeling, looking back on this, that I could have done this a slightly simpler way (using the option to define image sizes on the fly, and not on export – but perhaps this is a slightly less intensive method as regards server load).

Set your image sizes

First up I’ve defined all the image sizes I want to offer for download. It’s important here to use a standard prefix on the wallpaper sizes if you’re using other pre-defined featured image sizes.

if ( function_exists( 'add_image_size' ) ) {
	add_image_size( 'wallpaper-1920x1200', 1920, 1200, true );
	add_image_size( 'wallpaper-1920x1080', 1920, 1080, true );
	add_image_size( 'wallpaper-1680x1050', 1680, 1050, true );
	add_image_size( 'wallpaper-1440x900', 1440, 900, true );
	add_image_size( 'wallpaper-1366x768', 1368, 768, true );
	add_image_size( 'wallpaper-1280x1024', 1280, 1024, true );
	add_image_size( 'wallpaper-1280x800', 1280, 800, true );
}

As you can see here, I’ve covered the most common desktop wallpaper sizes. I’m not covering things like smart phone screen sizes, and I’ve obviously had to set the crop setting to true on each of them. I have to make sure when I’m uploading a photo blog post that I’m uploading a larger size than my greatest desktop background size.

One other proviso: this is only going to really work on landscape aspect images. I’d have to do some extra work to make this system work for portrait aspect images – but portrait aspect doesn’t really work for desktop backgrounds. Potentially the easiest thing would be to have a custom field specifying that the image uploaded is portrait aspect; if that field is ticked, I would entirely skip the desktop background download option in the code.

Create the function

Next up we have our function, which you should add to functions.php in your WordPress template.

/**
 * Create an unordered list containing links to wallpaper sizes of featured image
 *
 * @param	string		optional $post ID
 * @return 	echo unordered link list
 */
function pa_the_post_thumbnail_wallpapers($postID = NULL) {
	// if $postID not specified, then get global post and assign ID
	if (!$postID) {
		global $post;
		$postID = $post->ID;
	}
	if (has_post_thumbnail()) {
		// get the meta data from the featured image
		$postThumbnailID = get_post_thumbnail_id( $postID );
		$photoMeta = wp_get_attachment_metadata( $postThumbnailID );
		// prepare our download links
		// if the sizes key is an array
		if (is_array($photoMeta['sizes'])) {
			// assign the sizes array to a variable
			$photoSizes = $photoMeta['sizes'];
			// loop through our photosizes array
			foreach ($photoSizes as $key => $value) {
				// if the key starts with wallpaper assign the key name to an array
				if ( substr($key, 0, 9) == 'wallpaper' ) {
					$downloadableWallpapers[] = $key;
				}
			}
		}
		// if there are any downloadable wallpapers
		if ($downloadableWallpapers) {
			// start our ul
			echo  '<ul>' . "\r\n\t";
			// loop through available wallpapers
			foreach ($downloadableWallpapers as $downloadableWallpaperSize) {
				// get the image source and assign to variable
				$dwInfo = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $postThumbnailID, $downloadableWallpaperSize );
				// create the title by removing the prefix
				$sizeTitle = str_replace('wallpaper-', '', $downloadableWallpaperSize);
				// expand SIZExSIZE to SIZE x SIZE
				$sizeTitle = str_replace('x', ' x ', $sizeTitle);
				// echo our download link
echo '
<ul>
	<li><a href="%27%20.%20$%3Cspan%20class=">dwInfo[0] . '">Wallpaper: ' . $sizeTitle . ' px</a></li>
</ul>
' . "\r\n";
			}
			// close our ul
			echo  '</ul>' . "\r\n";
			// echo some advice on how to download
echo '</pre>
<p class="wallpaper-download-advice"><em>Right-click/Cmd-click and select "Save link as" to download</em></p>
<pre>';
		// if no downloadable wallpapers, then echo error message
		} else {
			echo '<p>Wallpaper downloads not found.</p>';
		}
	// if no featured image, echo error message
	} else {
		echo '<p>Featured image not found, no downloads available.</p>';
	}
}

What’s happening here?

Essentially we’re grabbing our featured image sizes array and looking through it. If any of the array keys start with ‘wallpaper’ then we place that key into another array. This array will only contain our wallpaper sizes.

From there we start an unordered list and output the download link. I’m parsing out the image size for each one so I can use that as the link text, and grabbing the URL for the specific image by using wp_get_attachment_image_src().

Usage

In my case I will only be using this option on single posts in my photo blog category. So I’ve edited my single.php template file to include the following:

if ( in_category( 'cat-slug-or-id' ) ) { ?>
	<h4>Download as wallpaper</h4>
	<!--?<span class="hiddenSpellError" pre=""-->php pa_the_post_thumbnail_wallpapers(); ?>
<?php } ?>

That’s it! You will now have a nice outputted list of wallpaper sizes. If you’re doing this retrospectively, you might want to alter the function to generate the different sizes on the fly, or you can use a Thumbnail Regenerator plugin to recreate all your featured image sizes. There are a few available, but most recently I’ve used AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild.

Any questions or suggestions, please let me know in the comments.

It’s a solid little app and gives you some nice extra options for photo taking whilst out and about with your phone.

I’d been testing the free version of the app and just happened to look at the pro version today and was happy to see that it was selling super cheap for a limited time only (the princely sum of £0.63).

I’d suggest it’s well worth the price, for those situations where a normal Android camera app just won’t cut it.

HDR Camera+ features

• Full resolution
• Real HDR: exposure bracketing and tone mapping
• Simple: take a HDR image in one tap
• HDR images fused and tone mapped on device within seconds
• Hand shake compensation, no need to be rock-solid while shooting
• Correct handling of moving objects, de-ghosting
• You can control tone-mapping parameters: contrast, micro-contrast, color vividness, exposure
• Save original exposure bracketed images
• Location tagging
• Shutter sound can be muted (not on all models)
• Support for Flash on/off/auto

Visit the Android market to buy this app.

I know, I’m being slightly facetious. This post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Obviously this N9 ICS port is not something that you can use in everyday life, it’s more a proof of concept. However, one has to wonder – how long have Samsung had access to the code base for Android 4.0? How long can it take them to roll out upgrades to their users?

I haven’t been able to find out exactly what functionality is working on the N9 port of ICS. I’m guessing not a lot:

The project, which is still in its early stages, made significant progress after recently overcoming a framebuffer driver/HAL hurdle, allowing ICS to be displayed on the phone.

I really do think that the next device I get will likely be of the Nexus series. Knowing that I would have a stock version of Android and that I’d get updates when they upon release would be a comfort. None of this waiting around wondering when you might get an update.

Speaking of updates

According to Android Spin, the Samsung Galaxy S2 and Galaxy Note are looking likely for an update on March 1st.

 Not from an official channel, but from Eldar Murtazin. Who, coincidentally enough, seems to know what is going on most of the time. According to him, the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S2 should be picking up an Ice Cream Sandwich update on March 1st.

Of course there’s the issue of carriers doing things in their own sweet time, but I’m hoping I’ll at least be immune to that as I bought my SGS2 off contract in Cambodia.

This is no doubt going to be aimed at the international unlock versions first as usual. Don’t expect your stateside version to see it for a while after March.

All that said, this release date hint is not from an official channel, so it might not happen then. I don’t see why Samsung won’t just give us an official statement as to their expected release dates. Granted, the masses probably don’t care, but the early adopters and tech nerds do. And those tech nerds are the ones asked by family members and friends for advice as to which phone they should buy. The long, long delays in any sort of official updates for the Motorola Milestone left me unlikely to recommend anyone to get a Motorola device. So Samsung, listen up, keep the tech nerds happy and you’ll definitely get an knock-on effect.

In my own personal case, my ownership of a Samsung Galaxy S2 has resulted in at least 3 other people purchasing from Samsung, one of whom was a long-time Nokia die-hard.

The scale of this is impressive and it’s wonderful to see so many people motivated to protect their rights and stand up to this highly suspicious piece of legislation. Check out the map below of all the protests going on. If there’s one near you, get along and be counted.

View ACTA Protests Worldwide – Brought to you by stoppacta-protest.info in a larger map

What is ACTA?

The oppressively strict regulations could mean people everywhere are punished for simple acts such as sharing a newspaper article or uploading a video of a party where copyrighted music is played. Sold as a trade agreement to protect copyrights, ACTA could also ban lifesaving generic drugs and threaten local farmers’ access to the seeds they need. And, amazingly, the ACTA committee will have carte blanche to change its own rules and sanctions with no democratic scrutiny.

Big corporate interests are pushing hard for this, but the EU Parliament stands in the way. Let’s send a loud call to Parliamentarians to face down the lobbies and stand firm for Internet freedom.

How can I get involved?

1. There is an on-line petition which Avaaz will deliver to parliamentarians in Europe. It has already received over 2.1 million signatures. Add your name to that list.
2. Join the day of action at one of the protests shown in the map above. Visit this page for a full list of events.
3. Contact your elected representative. There’s detailed advice on how to go about this over on laquadrature.net.
4. Visit the ACTA Day of Action Hub on Avaaz.org and add your voice, or spread the word to your friends.

Is this protest effective?

Yes! The amount of voices raised against this legislation is already having an effect. A mass turnout at today’s protests will only further strengthen the message that the European voters do not want this legislation to be passed.

From an Avaaz.org newsletter:

Four Eastern European governments and now Germany have just said they’ll stall their decision on the treaty. Now, if hundreds of thousands of people attend thousands of rallies all across Europe tomorrow, we can ensure that all politicians across the 27 EU countries are put on notice that people don’t want ACTA and will continue to take action until the treaty is buried.

Still, when it hits the mainstream it will be a nice addition to the Android platform and, most importantly, will save you having to do strange workarounds to get bookmarks in sync and so on.

There’s a good review of Chrome for Android on The Verge and they do point out some minor flaws that exist in the beta.

Of course, Google’s clear that this is a beta product right now, and it’s not without its flaws. As we mentioned earlier, we saw the occasional “hiccup” while zooming and scrolling pages — not normal stutter, just a seemingly random pause here and there.

However, the overall impression is positive.

We’d go so far to say that it’s good enough in its present beta form to be used as your only mobile browser, though — it’s solid, fast, and already head and shoulders above the aging app it replaces.

It certainly looks good, sporting a nice browser tabs view, and I think it will make a lot of sense on a tablet as well.

Below you can find the announcement video from Google.

New! Custom styles

I opened Google Docs this morning to work on a client specification and I was delighted to see that they’ve finally implemented custom heading styles.

It’s relatively simple to use. You can style selected text in the way you like, and then go to the heading style you want to change, click the fly out arrow and select “Update heading x to match selection”.

There’s some more information on Google Docs help.

Here’s a sample screen shot showing some custom headings I’ve applied to a basic document.

You can also, via the options fly out menu, save your current settings as the default style on all your Google Docs documents.

This is a really important update as the lack of styles definition was one of the reasons I wouldn’t use Google Docs to create work documents – it’s so important to have consistent styling across your work files, and I wasn’t going to settle with redefining heading styles every time I worked on a document.

That said, it’s not perfect though – we’re still missing style rules for lists, and there’s only 3 heading rules available (although I guess you could say that ‘Title” and “Subtitle” make up for this and really give you 5 heading styles). Also, the choice of available fonts is still somewhat limited, but the real-time collaborative editing functionality makes up for this in many ways.

I would be interested to see how these headings translate into PDF bookmarks for proper document structuring.

Today the EU signed on to ACTA, but, crucially, it still has to be ratified by the EU Parliament.

The rapporteur for ACTA in the European Parliament, Kader Arif, quit yesterday and issued the following statement:

“I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.

“As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens’ legitimate demands.

“Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is problematic, whether it is its impact on civil liberties, the way it makes Internet access providers liable, its consequences on generic drugs manufacturing, or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications.

“This agreement might have major consequences on citizens’ lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.”

I think it’s important that people register their disagreement to ACTA as soon as possible. This is a similar moment to the SOPA/PIPA situation that arose in the US last week and we need to make sure our voices are heard so that has been drafted through a fundamentally undemocratic process can be stalled by democratically elected representatives.

Make your voice heard and contact your EU representative.

How to act against ACTA

1. You can sign the following petition to register your disagreement with ACTA.

   http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_save_the_internet_spread/?cRVpFcb

2. You can read about more ways to act against ACTA here:

   http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/How_to_act_against_ACTA

3. Share the video shown below:

Part of this section was to make sure that there was a bit of additional information about the image. Fortunately, as long as you’re not minimising your embedded metadata on the image, WordPress collects all of this information.

The inspiration for this functionality came from Walkernews.net’s post “Turn On WordPress Feature To Display Photo EXIF Data and IPTC Information“. I wouldn’t have had a clue how to get display the correct shutter speed information otherwise!

That post focused on editing your image.php template file to display EXIF data. I’m using a lightbox which precludes the need for the image attachment template file, and I wanted to output a definition list showing the important EXIF information pertaining to the featured image of each photoblog post.

The Function

/**
 * Create a definition list containing EXIF data of featured image (if exists)
 *
 * @param	string		$post ID
 * @return 	echo definition list
 */
function pa_the_post_thumbnail_exif_data($postID = NULL) {
	// if $postID not specified, then get global post and assign ID
	if (!$postID) {
		global $post;
		$postID = $post->ID;
	}
	if (has_post_thumbnail($postID)) {
		// get the meta data from the featured image
		$postThumbnailID = get_post_thumbnail_id( $postID );
		$photoMeta = wp_get_attachment_metadata( $postThumbnailID );
		// if the shutter speed is not equal to 0
		if ($photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed'] != 0) {
			// Convert the shutter speed to a fraction
			if ((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']) > 1) {
				if ((number_format((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1)) == 1.3
				or number_format((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 1.5
				or number_format((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 1.6
				or number_format((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 2.5) {
					$photoShutterSpeed = "1/" . number_format((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1, '.', '') . " second";
				} else {
					$photoShutterSpeed = "1/" . number_format((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 0, '.', '') . " second";
				}
			} else {
				$photoShutterSpeed = $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed'] . " seconds";
			}
			// print our definition list
		?>
			<dl>
				<dt>Date Taken</dt>
				<dd><?php echo date("d M Y, H:i:s", $photoMeta['image_meta']['created_timestamp']); ?></dd>
				<dt>Camera</dt>
				<dd><?php echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['camera']; ?></dd>
				<dt>Focal Length</dt>
				<dd><?php echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['focal_length']; ?>mm</dd>
				<dt>Aperture</dt>
				<dd>f/<?php echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['aperture']; ?></dd>
				<dt>ISO</dt>
				<dd><?php echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['iso']; ?></dd>
				<dt>Shutter Speed</dt>
				<dd><?php echo $photoShutterSpeed; ?></dd>
			</dl>
		<?php
		// if shutter speed exif is 0 then echo error message
		} else {
			echo '<p>EXIF data not found</p>';
		}
	// if no featured image, echo error message
	} else {
		echo '<p>Featured image not found</p>';
	}
}

Please note

I’m working off the assumption that if there’s no shutter speed meta EXIF information, then the image probably doesn’t have any of the EXIF information and so we just display an error message. Conversely, I’m also assuming that if the shutter speed is listed, then all the other relevant EXIF data will be there. Feel free to add more checks!

In my case I didn’t need copyright, title, caption, or credit information, but you can easily add these in by calling the following.

echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['copyright'];
echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['title'];
echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['caption'];
echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['credit'];

Usage

I’m using this in single.php, within the loop. You can use it outside the loop if you specify the $post->ID. As it’s in my single.php but I only want it to show up in my photoblog category I’m using a conditional query before any output.

<?php if (in_category(3)) {    ?>
<h3>EXIF Data</h3>
<?php pa_the_post_thumbnail_exif_data(); ?>
<?php } // end if in_category(3); ?>

Conclusion

Hopefully this offers a fairly solid option for including EXIF data in your posts. You can check it out over in my photoblog section.

If you can think of a better option, please let me know in the comments below. If it worked for your site, drop me a comment so I can see it in action!

It took a lot longer than planned and changed from being just a new WordPress theme to being a much more fundamental re-structuring of the whole site.

I’d been thinking about this for quite a while and knew that I didn’t just want a new look, but wanted to break the website down into three main sections to allow people to follow areas individually if they so wanted.

Subscribe as you like

The first thing I’d noticed is that my posts tended to be split, broadly, into Journal posts and Technology posts.  I know for example that my family, and probably a lot of my friends, aren’t too interested in the technology stuff and so I wanted to make it easy for someone to subscribe to just one or the other.

So the important thing was to make it easy for people to follow the site how they wanted, and catching the news they wanted. These two main categories have been joined by a third “Photoblog” category as I’m being far more proactive with my photo-taking this year.

You can now subscribe to these categories through RSS feeds (such as Google Reader), or via email. New posts from the category you wish to follow will be delivered to your inbox.

I plan to follow this up with some updates for following posts via Twitter, Facebook or Google+, but let’s take it one step at a time. You can get email subscriptions for my Journal, Technology posts, Photoblog, or the whole lot.

Categories vs Tags

I also noticed that I was using categories in what felt to me the wrong way. Essentially I was using categories in a way I could use tags. I had so many categories on the site and many of them only had one or two posts in them – not a useful way to browse the site at all.

On top of that, my usage of tags to group similar posts was all over the place. I had over 1,500 tags in use on the site, the majority of which only applied to one post – again not very useful for browsing posts on a similar topic.

I used the WordPress plugin “Categories to Tags convertor” to first make sure that all my posts were tagged with the old categories to which they belonged. Then began a painfully slow process of going through my tags and consolidating. A few tools helped me speed this up, mainly Term Management Tools, although at the end of the day it was still quite laborious.

By the end of it, I reduced the number of tags from the aforementioned 1,500+ to 63! The intention is now that these tags will provide a common grouping for posts on a similar topic. Tags are shown at the top of each post and if you’d like to see more posts about a particular tag, just click to view those posts.

It’s all fairly basic stuff, but I’d let it slip over the years, and it needed to be reined in.

Issues

Sadly I also encountered a major issue, one which I never resolved either. For some reason in the movement from live site -> development site -> live site, all my images got messed up. It’s a long and complicated story and has something to do with my serialised data in my MySQL database getting messed up. I think.

If you’re interested in reading more about this, there are two threads over on the WordPress support forums: Image Sizes Lost and Major issue with image sizes being lost, only full size images being shown. It’s scintillating reading I promise you.

In the end, sadly, I couldn’t work out a way to fix it. Just couldn’t get my head around the issue. So I just got a list of all posts containing featured images and galleries and manually went through the list and re-uploaded the images. It’s all working now and no longer are featured images showing up as their full resolution (which looks very very bad). I had to edit over 100 posts. That was not fun.

Anywaaaay..

That’s a quick round-up of the new website. I hope you like it. Feedback welcomed in the comments. Also note that if you like the post you can share it out on Google+, Twitter or Facebook, or add it to Evernote using the toolbar at the top of the page.