If you’re expecting some kind of long winded tutorial about optmising, caching and super-charging your site, sorry to disappoint. The advice is:
Ok, if you’re not a flickr user you’ve probably stopped reading already, but if not you might be rewarded by one or two nuggets of useful information.
AR (Augmented Reality), thanks to the iPhone Application called “Sekai Kamera” which allows you to see virtual tags users attach to real world views through iPhone camera, is attracting a lot of attention in Japan. It is starting to be used for sales promotions and marketing purposes all over the world.
If we imagine the “Scouter” in DragonBall or “AR glasses” in Dennō Coil, it seems like a technology set in the future, but how is it like in the real world? Here I examine 5 cases of AR as used in business in the present moment.
This is one of the most famous AR examples and has caught the imagination of many bloggers. You print out what they call “markers” prepared for each item of clothing and show it to the web camera, fitting it to your body. The marker will then change itself to the clothing you picked up. Once it is set, you don’t have to keep holding it. The feature of this service is that it allows you to control with motion-capture in addition to AR. You can change the color or design and purchase the clothes using the scroll button that appears in the window, just like “Minority Report”. It isn’t a finished product and not commercialized yet as you only can try on 2D catalog pictures, but it may well be that it becomes the prototype of future online shopping experiences.
Showing how cool the finished model is, will capture the attention and imagination of kids. Here is Lego Digitalbox which is developed by Metaio, a leading AR company in Germany. So what is Lego Digitalbox? Lego Digitalbox is a special box on which the completed model will show up when you show it to the special monitor which is set up in a Lego shop . Some people joke that it is so cool that kids will be satisfied with seeing the “Virtual Lego” and won’t buy an actual one.
If you’ve ever had problems with WordPress automatic updates on a local install of XAMPP this should fix it (note that I’ve tested it on OSX but it should work for Windows/Linux but the details will be different). For a long time I just did the updates/installs by manually installing because the automatic upgrades never worked or it would ask for my ftp details. And no matter what ftp details I entered it would never connect. Same for plugin installs or updates.
Turns out that it has nothing to do with ftp settings, it was a simple file permissions conflict. XAMPP was running its local Apache as user ‘nobody’ while the files on my hard disk were owned by my local user ‘ian’. When WordPress came across this conflict it fell back to ftp mode but since it is a local install, that didn’t work.
So what to do? The easiest thing to do is to edit the XAMPP apache config file to run it as your local user. To find out your local user name, just launch terminal and in your home directory run:
ls -al
then edit the config file.
sudo vi /Applications/XAMPP/etc/httpd.conf
look for these lines:
User nobody Group admin
and change them to:
User yourusername Group staff
You’ll have to restart XAMPP’s Apache and if you attempted automatic updates before and failed, you’ll have to delete the upgrades folder inside wp-content.
Hope this helps other WordPress designers and developers using XAMPP. Please leave a comment or have a look at messa.tv if it did :)
Dual screen iMac
Spotted in the offices of messaliberty. Hope we don’t get sued by Apple for showing this. :p
So the iPad will be delivered to lucky Americans in a few days. Cue the mass of unboxing videos and delirious first reviews.
We in Japan are not so lucky, we’ll be lucky to get them in late April but early May is also likely. This is opposite to what you know who claimed in his announcement in January. Oh well…
Anyway when it does arrive, these are the 5 apps I am most looking forward to using with the iPad and why. *Click on the images to go to the iTunes Preview page
Dropbox
Dropbox
If you’ve ever used Dropbox, I probably don’t need to explain but for some of you who haven’t it provides effortless and free syncing between computers and computers or computers and iPhones/iPod touches/iPads (paid plans are also available). As someone who doesn’t do the full USB sync often it is a lifesaver. Just drop a PDF or some pictures in the dropbox on your computer and seconds later you can access it on your iPad. If you mark files as favourites, it will store them locally. But talking of pdfs… Read the rest of this entry »
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