Tech

by Michael Taylor - Customer Solutions Engineer @GoogleUK. ScrumMaster Certified. Trying to be as lean as possible! Build, Measure, Learn (repeat).

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[SOLVED] Chromecast, Google Play Music & BT Broadband Issue

I got a Google Chromecast this week on the back of the UK launch. I'm a bit of a Google Play Music power user, so after setting up my device music was one of the first things I tried to cast. To my sadness it wasn't working out of the box. When I tried to cast music to the TV my Chromecast would refuse to stream anything! I also had the same problem with the BBC iPlayer.

I discovered that the issue lies within the default setup of my BT Broadband router (Home Hub). The BT SmartHub comes with a built in feature called Smart Setup. Smart Setup is used when you connect a device to your BT WiFi network for the first time. When you try browsing the web you get prompted with a parental controls choice. It turns out that this feature prevents the Chromecast from loading the content it wants to.

The solution! You'll need to log into your Home Hub's admin page. Mine was found at http://192.168.1.254. Your admin password is located on the same insert that had your original wireless password. 

Once you're logged in follow these steps:

Click "Advanced Settings" in the top navigation

Click "Continue to Advanced Settings" on the next screen

Click "Home Network" from a new sub navigation that appears below the top navigation

Click "Smart Setup" from another new sub navigation

Disable Smart Setup on the next screen by clicking the "No" radio button and then clicking "Apply"

Finally, restart your Chromecast

You should now have no problems casting any kind of media to your Chromecast

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HOWTO: Disable the Dashboard in Max OS X

Ever wondered how to get rid of the annoying Dashboard workspace inside your Macbook? To do this simply run the command below in a Terminal window!

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES && killall Dock

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AngularJS Fundamentals in 60-ish Minutes! Anyone looking to get started with AngularJS, this is a great starting point. Thanks @danwahlin

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Server Attention Span

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2 tactical, 2 strategic..

Cloud Strategy » “To have a framework which is reusable and positions the enterprise to make sound choices. If the strategy is too tactical (implementation focused) you run the risk of adopting solutions that temporarily add value with a rate of diminished returns faster than you are able to offset. If the approach is too strategic, it runs the risk of a strategy that is too high level, one that is difficult to relate and might not get executed as you intended or becomes shelved.”…..

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Here is a great webinar from Optimizely and Mixpanel on how to combine to two tools to track funnels through A/B testing.

I thoroughly learnt a lot from this video. I had no idea that integration between the two tools was that simple.

Optimizely Presents: Analytics in A/B Testing (Part I, Mixpanel) (by Optimizely)

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An interesting launcher from Facebook. Looking forward to giving this a try. Looks to have a lot of room for improvement straight off the bat.

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"When trying to set up SSL on an AWS EC2 instance, always remember to open up port 443 on your SG!"

Mike’s Tech Rule #2

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Getting Started with AWS OpsWorks (by AmazonWebServices)

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HOW TO: Make git ignore file mode changes

I had a problem recently where my git status was tracking all files that had their file modes modified. I didn't want to track these changes as they were Operating System enforced modifications, not intended by myself.

To get your git repository to ignore these types of file mode changes run the following command:

git config core.filemode false

This is taken from git-config(1):

core.fileMode If false, the executable bit differences between the index and the working copy are ignored; useful on broken filesystems like FAT. See git-update-index(1). True by default.

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Webinar: Deploying a Django Application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk (by AmazonWebServices)

[m1ket]

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Here’s an amazing story of how one man, with one S3 bucket, one Google Spreadsheet, and a bunch of images, racked up 8.8 Terabytes of outgoing traffic from S3 and over $1000 of AWS charges.

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A successful Git branching model

I have recently been trying to learn how to manage a Git repo successfully amongst a team of developers. While our repos have to be worked on by a number of people, we also need to be able to deploy from our repo to a number of environments.

While I know this problem will not be a new one to a lot of people, my largest experience in this field comes from an SVN back ground.

In my research I found the following article defining a working process for a successful Git branching model. I intend to implement this in my team going forwards as a first step. Hopefully this will lead to us having Git repos that can be deployed to multiple environments pain free.

Find the article here: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Personal thanks to Vincent Driessen (@nvie) for conceptualising this branching model and describing it so well.

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I recently started this blog on a new subdomain called tech.bonuslevel.co.uk. This meant that I had to start tracking traffic across two subdomains for my bonuslevel.co.uk digital asset inside of Analytics.

Unfortunately, Google doesn't provide amazing documentation for this scenario inside Analytics. But! Have no fear! Google does provide a search engine with which I found the answer I was looking for.

A blog post at bigdaylight.com explained all in very handy fashion. Click the title above or alternatively RIGHT HERE to learn how to do this yourself.

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Realtime Framework Webinar - Starter Edition (by xRTMLDev)

This is a great introductory video into xRTML - "The extensible multiplatform language used to transform the world wide web into the Realtime Web"

You can use xRTML (which utilises technologues such as Web Sockets) to discard page refreshes and provide bidirectional communication between your web application and your backend.

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No deployments to Production environments allowed on a Friday.

Mike's Tech Rule #1

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Managing your Cloud Assets with Elastic Beanstalk & CloudFormation (by AmazonWebServices)

This is a very interesting webinar about how to manage your web application stack using AWS Beanstalk and CloudFormation. Using these two products you can live the dream of one click deployments!