Onlinenerd24

Yesterday I released a big update to my iPhone App SpeedBox. Since over 6000 users updated to this new version, I guess this application is still kind of popular.
So I’d like to give away 10 promotion codes for a free version of SpeedBox. US-based users can redeem these codes in the AppStore and download SpeedBox for free. Unfortunately Apple only offers promo codes for US customers. I will be more then happy to give away some codes to international users, as soon as Apple allows, though.
So, without durther ado, here are the codes. Grab them while they are hot. If iTunes tells you that a code is not valid anymore, someone else was faster.

4RYHP9TWW7NK
HFRK3HY6HLKY
ML7KEARW9X3W
HWFKP94KT4WP
9X3MEEXWNF47
JNTEKWEA3YAP
7P6X7WR6JLAP
3WYTF9763PTK
FJE6A7ETHXPH
LLPKLRHTPXKY

1. Copy a code
2. Open iTunes, go to AppStore
3. Click “Redeem” on top right
4. Try another code when yours is not working
5. Tell me if you liked the app via the contact form

SpeedBox displays the current speed you and your iphone are traveling with. With the latest update it will show you an anlog speedometer, both for mph and km/h mode. You also get a handy graph that shows you how fast you where going in the last minutes.
While this may look quite silly at first, it can be really entertaining to track your speed. Probably not while walking to your neighbor shop, but in trains or airplanes for example.

Just a short tipp for iPhone developers. Maybe you’ve got several stacked (by CALayer addsubview) CALayers and want to get touch events for some sublayers, but need to make other CALayer see-through for hit-testing with the CALayer hittest method.
All you need to do is implement the containsPoint method to your CALayer subclass and return FALSE. This will make hittest look farther down the Layer stack for touchable layers.

- (BOOL)containsPoint:(CGPoint)p
{
return FALSE;
}

Make a CALAyer transparent for hittest.

The british BBC not only produces am excellent TV program (Top Gear anyone?) but also a very good radio lineup. So, if you’re fed up with utterly crappy local radio stations, just like me (rant about the total shitty radio stations in Munich coming up soon, probably), you might want to listen to the BBC’s online radio streams.
Unfortunately, and most probably due to stupid music industry license problems, the BBS does not “broadcast” their programming to the “whole internet”. Yeah, I know, I know, this sounds funny… Of course again the internet shows it’s nicer sides, because it lets you listen to good radio programs nevertheless. Here’s how:

BBC offers it’s radio programs in various streaming formats. One is unfortunately Realmedia, which is, as we all know a total shitty company, whose “player” (aka. crappy malware) will never get on my computers. VLC implements Realmedia, but at least at my place the playback stops after a while and then comes back sounding like rubbish. Making the playback buffer larger helps a little but after a while the problem comes back…
The good thing is, that the Realmedia stream seems to be available from outside the UK. So, if you are insane and have the scrappy Real Player on your computer, you might just use one of the streams from this list: http://support.bbc.co.uk/multicast/streams.html

But of course we want to listen to BBC using VLC, because we want to record the brilliant saturday night’s Essential Mix. So when crappy Real crap (I really hate this stuff) doesn’t work correctly, we need to look at the other streams offered by the BBC. One is a WMV Windows Media Stream, which has also a higher bitrate. These streams can only be accessed from within the UK.
What you got to do is use a Proxy server located in the UK, when opening this stream. You can use this list to discover free proxy servers in the UK: http://www.xroxy.com/proxylist.php. Just enter one of these proxys into the the “Input&Codecs” tab of VLC’s preferences. Don’t forget to set the port number as well. Then, just open the stream’s URL (should end with .asx) from the “Open Network” menu entry and after a while the program should begin playing.

You can also start VLC with the correct proxy and stream URL from the command line:
VLC mms://wmlive-acl.bbc.co.uk/wms/bbc_ami/radio1/radio1_bb_live_ep1_sl0?BBC-UID=242934ec303114dd438f3944e0e064f950d2343050209104644fd6af1214acab&SSO2-UID= --http-proxy=217.10.144.155:3128