Engineer at heart, found working on greenfield projects, APIs and micro-services in NodeJS, familiar with database, templating, unit testing, logging infrastructures, & devops roles.

jdrydn

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It's always been a little bit weird that Apple would sell both a 13-inch MacBook Air and a 13-inch MacBook Pro simultaneously, but perhaps never more than today - because Apple's new $999 and $1,299 laptops are nearly identical if you look beyond the differently curved frame.

The biggest difference between the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro is a fan

The National Mall was littered with vehicles left behind by Trump supporters who later stormed and entered the Capitol building in Washington, DC on January 6th, forcing an evacuation. It's the latest, and possibly most egregious, example of a concept called "petro-masculinity."

Trump supporters breach Capitol in worst display of "petro-masculinity" yet

James Dryden

Push Notifications are a great way to stay connected with your users and inform them about any events, be it a personalized offer or a received message. And luckily we can now use this powerful feature on the web as well.

Push Notifications ❄ PWAdvent

Plenty of services love to use the emoji shortcodes in plain-text markup, so this library aims to simplify that process for you, making 😎 become :sunglasses:, 💡 to :bulb:, etc. There's an amazing list of shortcodes here if you want to explore them.

emoji-shorts

Apple's big Mac event delivered three new computers - a new MacBook Air, a new entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro, and a new Mac mini. But really, it delivered one thing that those three computers have in common: the M1 chip.

Apple is astonishingly confident in its new M1 Mac processors

KentProjects was a final year project undertaken by James Dryden, Matthew House and Matthew Weeks over the course of our fourth year at the University Of Kent. KentProjects aims to build upon, and improve the current system that final year students use to choose their projects.

KentProjects

A number of popular apps including TikTok, Tinder, Spotify, and Pinterest are crashing on iOS devices. The cause of the problem is not yet known but early reports suggest it's because of an issue involving Facebook's SDK, which apps use to manage logins.

Spotify, Pinterest, Tinder, and other iOS apps were crashing again due to a Facebook issue

Just to give folks who aren't in the field an idea what we're talking about:- we must assume that foreign agents were among the rioters- snooping devices can be implanted into anything with a power cord- so every device in the capitol is now a potential foreign asset

Spotify Codes are QR-like codes that can be generated to easily share Spotify songs, artists, playlists, and users. I set out to figure out how they worked, which lead me on a winding journey through barcode history, patents, packet sniffing, error correction, and Gray tables. Spotify URIs Let's start with Spotify URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers).

How do Spotify Codes work?

Final year project for JD, MH, MW (UKC 2015). Kent Projects has 8 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

Kent Projects

After reading this excellent article from Netflix about scaling & versioning, and also from experience, it's safe to say that writing a versioned API is a pain. Supporting older "legacy" clients is tedious and often leads to unexpected behaviour.

Pro-Trump protesters have stormed the US Capitol building, effectively halting a vote to certify the results of the 2020 election. The Capitol is currently on lockdown, and multiple adjacent buildings have been evacuated. Vice President Pence and Senate president pro tempore Chuck Grassley have also been evacuated, and tear gas has reportedly been deployed in the rotunda in an effort to secure the building.

US Capitol enters lockdown as pro-Trump protesters storm building

Apple's new MacBook Pro 13 is one of the first three Macs with an Apple Silicon processor: the new Arm-based M1. It shares a lot in common with the lower-cost Air, and the few advantages it has don't quite justify its higher asking price.

Apple MacBook Pro with M1 review: flexing Arm

It's practically become a CES tradition at this point for Razer to show up with some sort of cool new prototype piece of hardware. And this year at CES 2018, the company is showing off Project Linda, a companion piece of hardware for the recently released Razer Phone that extends the smartphone into a full laptop.

Razer's Project Linda turns your Razer phone into a laptop

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Although it's not an officially approved method, you can run any iPhone or iPad app you've purchased or downloaded on an M1-based Mac. It's buggy, but we've successfully run Instagram, Dark Sky, Spotify, Netflix, and Gmail on a MacBook Air.

Here's how to run any iOS app you own on Apple's new M1 Macs

Apple has released a new MacBook Air with its own processor inside, the Arm-based M1 chip. It makes this laptop very fast and runs Intel apps without any significant problems. It also has very good battery life but a bad webcam.

Apple MacBook Air with M1 review: new chip, no problem

Apple has introduced the new M1 chip that will power its new generation of Arm-based Macs. It's a 5nm processor, just like the A14 Bionic powering its latest iPhones, but it's the first that Apple has designed specifically for the Mac.

Apple says new Arm-based M1 chip offers the 'longest battery life ever in a Mac'

WhatsApp went down for its 2 billion users earlier today, but service has now been restored. The issues started at around 4PM ET and prevented WhatsApp users from sending or receiving messages on the service for nearly an hour. The WhatsApp application would still open, but a connecting loop was displayed while the service experienced issues.

WhatsApp went down for nearly an hour

On Wednesday afternoon, a mob of pro-Trump protesters stormed the US Capitol, resulting in chambers being vandalized and at least one death. The attack came in the middle of an ongoing vote to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, and it sent both lawmakers and members of the press scrambling for safety.

In photos: the pro-Trump mob's invasion of Congress

So I've written - and spoken - about how we should all be blogging as we learn things. It's a good idea for many reasons, some selfish and some altruistic. But I've always said: you really should try and write as you learn something.