Breyten Ernsting

How to get more free space on your HTC Desire phone

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:35:16 +0100

The HTC Desire is a great phone, but it has one glaring shortcoming: the internal phone storage is only 150MB. This means that your phone will start complaining about insufficient space very quickly. It was bugging me for a really long time, but only actually worked on it now. Basically there are two things you need to do.

The easiest way to get more free space is to uninstall the Flash updates. Let’s face it: you don’t need Flash on your mobile anyway and at 12MB it’s ridiculously large. If you’re like me, do the same with the Facebook app. This saves you another 6MB.

This gets you actually pretty far, but I wanted more. After some searching I found that there is a way to make your apps install on the SD card by default. The nice thing is that it’ll even install apps on the SD card which you can’t move otherwise.

"So be proud, Internet: we not only took back the democratic process, we dragged it into the 21st..."

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:49:33 +0100

“So be proud, Internet: we not only took back the democratic process, we dragged it into the 21st century and stopped the United States from embracing a new, unconstitutional censorship regime. Well done.”

- The Internet Spoke and, Finally, Congress Listened! | Electronic Frontier Foundation

When life imitates your Twitter Bio

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:43:43 +0100

About 1.5 years ago it was time to renew my mobile plan, and as a result I got a shiny new HTC Desire, instead of the iPhone 3g I was using in the two years before that. The result was that my iPhone was basically doing nothing. I jokingly said that it was now my alarm clock, which led to the line on my Twitter bio: “I’m so hip, I use my iPhone only as an alarm clock”.

Of course I sometimes used it for other things as well. However, a couple of months ago the home button broke down, which is quite a pain in the ass as the iPhone pretty much has only one button with which you can do anything useful (read: go to the home screen). As I can no longer go to the home screen and switch apps easily (Doing so would require a restart of the iPhone)), I must admit that my Twitter bio is now finally correct.

My Year in Cities, 2011

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:03:10 +0100

Like I did in 2008 and 2009:

Amsterdam* (I live here)
Eindhoven
Riga, Latvia*
Trakai, Lithuania
Manchester, England
Warsaw, Poland

Pubquizzing

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:47:33 +0100

Pubquizzing

Using separate tables in Rails with model inheritance

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:09:21 +0100

Suppose there is a situation where you have two separate tables with the exact same structure, and you want to use separate models in Rails. Obviously, you want shared functionality from the models (order, scopes etc.), so the most logical way to go about it seems to be:

class Vehicle < ActiveRecord::Base
end

class Car < Vehicle
end

The problem however, is that is triggers Single Table Inheritance, even when you don’t have a type column in your table. So, in the example above Rails will always use the vehicles table. Luckily, there is a way to override Rails’s method of inferring the table name from the class name. It works like this:

class Vehicle < ActiveRecord::Base
end

class Car < Vehicle
  set_table_name 'cars'
end

Now your models will behave as expected.

"I salute the women who said, “Hey, wait a minute. Maybe having a vagina doesn’t determine what I..."

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:30:00 +0100

“I salute the women who said, “Hey, wait a minute. Maybe having a vagina doesn’t determine what I have to want from life! Just because a lot of women want something, doesn’t mean that I have to want the exact same thing!””

- Users Know: STFU About What Women Want

"The idea is to write simple, yet machine parseable documentation such that you can automatically..."

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 20:21:23 +0100

“The idea is to write simple, yet machine parseable documentation such that you can automatically create a living styleguide”

- Knyle Style Sheets — Warpspire

Code Camping

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:27:54 +0100

Code Camping

De shell toren: Taken with picplz.

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 14:00:10 +0100

De shell toren:

Taken with picplz.

Kryžių kalnas (Hill of Crosses)

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 05:14:13 +0100

Kryžių kalnas (Hill of Crosses)

Riga 2011

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 03:25:08 +0100

Riga 2011

The inhabitants of our office building: Taken with picplz at...

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:26:30 +0200

The inhabitants of our office building:

Taken with picplz at Open Coop in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Bezoekje aan de Noord-Zuidlijn: Met mijn collega’s van...

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:55:38 +0200

Bezoekje aan de Noord-Zuidlijn:

Met mijn collega’s van Springest

10 Skills to Become a Frontend Developer worth Millions

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:24:34 +0200

10 Skills to Become a Frontend Developer worth Millions

Monitor and restart Apache or lighttpd webserver when daemon is killed

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 19:45:31 +0200

Monitor and restart Apache or lighttpd webserver when daemon is killed

d3.js

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:45:48 +0200

d3.js

Blind testing chocolate sprinkles: Taken with picplz.

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 20:40:19 +0200

Blind testing chocolate sprinkles:

Taken with picplz.

Deja vu: Taken with picplz.

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 23:20:07 +0200

Deja vu:

Taken with picplz.

"The breakthrough is a different type of sensor that captures what are known as light fields,..."

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:03:45 +0200

“The breakthrough is a different type of sensor that captures what are known as light fields, basically all the light that is moving in all directions in the view of the camera. That offers several advantages over traditional photography, the most revolutionary of which is that photos no longer need to be focused before they are taken.”

- Start-up Lytro Aims to Sharpen Focus of Entire Camera Industry - Ina Fried - News - AllThingsD