Projects - Stephen Radford

Tutorial: Sync Put.io and Other Cloud Services with Plex Using Rclone

I've been a Put.io subscriber for almost 10 years now and after my app Fetch got blacklisted by the App Store I soon looked for another way to add metadata such as posters and subscriptions to media stored on Put.io. Not long after Fetch's demise, Firecore's fantastic Infuse

HomeKit

Controlling Homebridge with Alexa

I've written a fair few posts about HomeKit and Homebridge but there was one piece of that whole puzzle that I was never really happy with—Siri. While Siri does a job to some extent I think it's hard to say that it does it well. Constantly mishearing or misunderstanding

HomeKit

HomeKit IR Blaster: Controlling My TV with HomeKit

If you've read any of my previous posts then you probably already realise I'm on a mission to automate my entire house and control it using Apple's HomeKit protocol. I'm pretty satisfied with the lights in my house now but there's plenty more I would still love to be able

project

Building An Arcade Cabinet: The Hardware

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

HomeKit

Controlling HomeKit with an Amazon Dash Button

Since hooking up Homebridge and controlling lights and LED strips in my living room I've been looking for a physical switch to control it. The only HomeKit enabled switch I've found is the Elgato Eve Light Switch which is pretty reasonable at $50 but is only available in the US

HomeKit

Cheap HomeKit LED Strips

After my success with Homebridge and LIFX I wanted to get some more HomeKit compatible lights for my house. LED strips provide an easy way to hide versatile and flexible lights away and make the perfect mood lighting. Philips Hue already offer LED strips with LIFX's "Z" strip

Projects

HomeKit ❤️ LIFX

Every three months or so I found myself looking at Philips Hue and since iOS 10 came around with its deep HomeKit integration the desire for home automation has be higher. One thing that always put me off about the Hue system is the price. To buy into the system

Projects

Restoring an Apple Extended Keyboard II

I've been looking to foray into the realm of mechanical keyboards for well over a year but never took the plunge. I'd been looking at either a modern keyboard such as a Pok3r or something vintage like an IBM Model M. Something I didn't realise was Apple also used to

Projects

What's going on with Fetch?

Last Wednesday evening we received a notification from Apple that Fetch had been removed from the App Store. They cited the following rule and sent some screenshots accompanying the notice of the transfers screen. 22.4 Your app falls into a category of apps that are often used for illegal

OS X

QBlocker

A few months ago I switched from Chrome to Safari as my main browser. I enjoy using Safari to Chrome in almost every way but there was one feature of Chrome that I missed. There's an option you can enable in Chrome that will force you to hold CMD + Q

iOS

Fetch 2

Last year I started working on my first iOS app as a way to learn Swift. What I built turned out to be a fairly popular client for Put.io. With the release of the Apple TV, porting the app was a no brainer and with it came additional features

Programming

Peach.cool — API, PeachKit & Peach for Mac

So Peach stumbled onto the scene Friday. If you haven't heard of it, it's this cool new social network that lets you post cool stuff using "magic" words. Currently it's only available on iOS which, while great means that I can't really check it while I'm in work.

iOS

Setting Fetch Free

Fetch was the first iOS project I ever made and has been the most successful both on iPhone and on Apple TV. Today, I'm dropping the £2.99 price tag and am pleased to say Fetch is now free for both iOS and tvOS. If you've not used Fetch before,

Apps

Fetch for  tv

Since building Fetch, the thing I wanted most was improved AirPlay support. Apple did even better than that though an enabled developers to natively build apps using TVML or UIKit for the new Apple TV. From iOS → tvOS Fetch was a pre-existing app for both iPhone and iPad so moving

Swift

Poolside FM

I fucking love Poolside FM. It's like the perfect playlist for summer. The only problem is I always had to keep it open in a tab on my browser. I was constantly accidentally closing the thing and because it's a website, it's not controllable through the media keys on your

Swift

Content blockers are easy. Content blockers are hard.

So today, Mr. Crumble — Cocoon's latest app — is out. It's a content blocker for iOS 9 but unlike other content blockers it's not bothered about ads but instead it targets those annoying EU cookie banners. Building a content blocker is both easy and hard at the same time. Wait what?