project - Stephen Radford

Downgrading iOS 9.3.5 to iOS 6

04 October 2017 by Stephen Radford

Contents Introduction Jailbreak with Phoenix OpenSSH Downgrade to iOS 6 Introduction I may be one of the only people left still rocking an iPad 2. The only purpose it has in my life is to consume video through YouTube, Netflix, and Put.io and for that it mostly works fine but at times it is painfully slow on the latest version of iOS it will run — 9.3.5. It wasn't always slow though. I remember when I first got it and was amazed at how fast it was. Around iOS 7 when transparency, blurring, and all that crud was…

The Mac Podcast App You Can't Have

16 July 2017 by Stephen Radford

I wasn't going to write this post because I've already said most of what I wanted to on Twitter. Yesterday though, I changed my mind when I saw this Tweet from Product Hunt. The Best Podcast Apps for Mac 🎙️🖥️Add your favorite 👉 https://t.co/S9X18oklTF pic.twitter.com/fGVNgRsYDH— Product Hunt (@ProductHunt) July 15, 2017 It's a link to a question posted on Product Hunt over three months ago asking for a decent Mac podcast app because iTunes is dreadful. The recommendations are what really angered me: Downcast - The is the only remotely sensible suggestion as it's…

Building An Arcade Cabinet: The Hardware

03 May 2017 by Stephen Radford

It must have been around 8 years ago that my Dad and I had the idea of building an arcade cabinet. This was before the Raspberry Pi even existed and there was nothing like Arcade World here. After a bit of research we imported everything we needed for the control board from the US and knocked together a MAME box on an old Windows XP computer. And that's where the project stopped until I decided to have another go in December 2016. The Cabinet After I'd decided that I definitely wanted to have another go at this I started shopping.…

Cheap HomeKit Light Bulbs

03 November 2016 by Stephen Radford

Following on from my previous posts about using HomeKit with LIFX and creating HomeKit LED Strips I wanted to see if I could add some more bulbs into the mix. I wanted RGB bulbs so I could colour match with the LED strip I made so I looked at the LIFX Color 1000. It looks like a fantastic bulb and the only problem I have with it really is the price — at £60 on Amazon. Having built the Homebridge plugin for Magic Home WiFi devices I looked for some other devices running on same protocol. I found a fair few…

Hacking macOS Sierra's PIP

10 September 2016 by Stephen Radford

One of the headline features in macOS Sierra is Picture in Picture. Unfortunately Apple decided to restrict this to Safari and iTunes which means the majority of users will never get to use it. Digging into the Sierra GM PrivateFrameworks directory revealed a very helpfully named framework called PIP.framework. As with any framework it can be included in a project and used like any other. However Apple remove the headers from their private frameworks which stops us from using them freely. I ran the framework through Steve Nygard's excellent class-dump spitting out a number of helpful header files in…