PublicHD – My favourite public tracker is gone!

Another Monday and Game 0f thrones is available for download.I log in to publichd.se and nothing comes up. The continuously growing torrent site since 2013 just disappeared. Even their social accounts are gone. Yes I can find what I want elsewhere or stream straight from XBMC but I never risk an interruption to game of thrones!

Come back publicHD

Submitting forms using iFrames on iOS devices

Silent but deadly

Working on AtYourService.com.cy I have to submit a lot of forms using iframes since almost all forms have file attachments and a lot of feedback from our application before completing the process. A weird bug was eating my brain when all forms that returned html messages in the response object suddenly stopped working on iOS devices. I used a jQuery extension which submitted the form in an iframe and I returned json encoded data from the server. The script simply wrapped the response in a <pre> tag and fetched the contents to decode and pass them back on the client side handler. All works fine unless you have some numbers in an html json property and mr Apple decides to convert them to anchor links with a tel: prefix in the href to call phones directly. A handy little feature when it works correctly. But since the double slashes are not escaped you are left with an invalid json syntax. The quick solution is to just return the data and construct the html with javascript. it is indeed more efficient but when you are developing an mvp or just testing an experiment you simply dont’t have or want to waste time on making two templates.

XBMC on android TV Boxes

XBMC quarter of the screen

I always knew about X-Box Media Center but I am only a heavy user for 6 months or so. I tried it on everything, from the Xbox to the pc to the Raspberry Pi and I recently got my hands on a dual core android tv box.  Everything works like a charm. The occasional buffering is there but I can’t even get my self to investigate where is the lag. My ISP, my router, Karma? No one knows.

Trying to watch Tottenham Arsenal and when is switch to the android box XBMC shows only a quarter of the screen. And it is the first time I manage to debug a problem straight away. I just googled

my daughter was playing with the keyboard and now XBMC shows part of the screen

And there it was. Another guy was having the same problem. If you accidentally press the \  (backslash) key on the keyboard XBMC goes to window mode. Pressing it again goes to fullscreen.

Just thought I should share this since everybody is using an XBMC android tv box now days especially after the DreamBox guys seem to be getting busted everyday.