Dummy Dojo

How to Save Money on Your Cable Bill Part 2: Cut the Cord, Go Over the Air

Apr 22 2014

Part 2 - Cut the cord, go over the air - Average savings of $100 per month

Ask yourself one question, how often do I actually watch cable? If the answer is all day every day, stop reading. This post isn’t for you.

However, if you’re answer is sometimes, once in a while, or whenever I’m bored then read on. Surely there’s no way you can watch all 8,000 channels you’re paying $100+ per month for right? Could you deal with 15-20 channels? Could you get by with Netflix or Hulu Plus? What if I told you it was free? Here’s how to get with the program and throw Mr. Warner out to the curb.

How to Save Money on Your Cable Bill - Part 1: Buy Your Own Equipment

Apr 17 2014

Part 1 - Buy your own equipment - Average savings of $12.00 per month

I’d like you to have your cable bill in hand when reading this. Go ahead, dig it out. You should either get it in the mail or online every month. I want you to understand just how much you’re likely getting screwed over and what you can do about it.

Take that bill and read it over, I’m going to use Time Warner as the example but chances are any cable provider will have similar charges. Do you see line items for either “Home Wifi” or “Modem Lease”? If so, you’re likely paying about $6.00 per month for each. What Time Warner doesn’t tell you is that the “Home Wifi” charge is simply a wireless router lease. That said, buying your own equipment and getting off these leases will save you at least $12.00 per month. Here’s how you do it.

Quick Trick: How to Correct Mistakes on iPhone Calculator App

Apr 01 2014

If you’re using the iPhone calculator app and accidentally enter a wrong digit, you can correct the error without clearing the entire number or equation. Delete the last digit by swiping your finger to the left or right in the number display area.

How to Change Volume Increments on Xbox One Voice Control

Apr 01 2014

To skip the details and get back to playing head to the *

So I finally broke down and bought an Xbox One the other day. I love the thing but there are some tweaks I needed to make to get the experience I wanted working. I hooked up my DVR to the new Xbox and began using the voice controls to switch between games, apps and tv. It worked great except that when I used the “Xbox Volume Up/Down” control the volume only went up about 3 clicks. This led to an almost unnoticeable difference so as you can imagine I needed to start screaming “Xbox Volume Up” about 10 times to get to the volume I wanted. What a huge pain in the ass…

After a week or so of this I couldn’t take it any longer so I decided to cruise through the settings to find a solution. What I found and how you can tweak your own settings is below.

First say “Xbox Settings” to get over to that menu. Once there, you’ll want to go to the “TV and One Guide Settings” by clicking on that box. Now, as shown below click on the “Troubleshooting” button.

Xbox one troubleshooting

Then head down to “Audio” and click into there. The second option down should say “Volume Change”.

SQL Datalength vs. Len Functions

Mar 28 2014

The other day I had an SSAS cube process failure which stemmed from values padded with spaces in our database. To fix this issue I ended up having to use a new SQL function I hadn’t heard of called “DATALENGTH”. Most colleagues of mine use the traditional “LEN” function to return the length of a given string. This quick post is aimed at outlining the differences in the two functions and when you should be using them.

LEN – This function returns the number of characters, rather than the number of bytes, of the given string. LEN will exclude trailing blanks and spaces.

Example: select LEN(MYSTRING) from dbo.MYDB

DATALENGTH – This function returns the number of bytes used to represent any type of expression.

Example: select DATALENGTH(MYSTRING) from dbo.MYDB Read More

Shaken Not Stirred

Mar 28 2014

Even having an iPhone now for over 5 years I’m still amazed at the tricks and little known nuances that Apple’s devices contain. The following is a list of some of the tricks I’ve learned over the years and how they can help you have a better overall experience on your iPhone or iPad.

Shake to Undo - Ever find yourself writing an email or note and wanting to undo the last change you made? Simple “shake” the Apple device and go back in time. Just make sure you don’t drop your device in the process

The Double Tap - I’m sure you all know about multitasking and how easy it can be to switch between apps on iOS. But did you know that if you scroll to LEFT when multitasking you’ll find music and volume controls? There are also controls for locking your device into either portrait or landscape mode.

A Story of Startupreneurs

Mar 28 2014

Back in November 2011 we were fresh out of college and had come up with an idea; an app that would allow fans at sporting events to order and pay for concessions on their phones, and then have them delivered to their seats. We called it “Snag”, and began writing a business plan, forming an LLC and doing all that administrative stuff we all love so much (sarcasm). After tirelessly working for a couple months, the problem was that Snag was only an idea and we had little development experience. We needed to find guidance, mentorship and above all…a partner who was a developer.

It just so happened that Startup Weekend Tech Valley was right around the corner, and what better place to find a team? We set out that weekend with absolutely no intention of actually joining a team, the only goal was to network. But, then during the pitches, we heard about Go Menu Go.

The Go Menu Go app was essentially like Urban Spoon but gave the restaurant manager the ability to run real time deals through the app and push them to users. So we thought…menus? On a phone?! Perfect. We joined the Go Menu Go team and to our surprise, not only met the Co-Founder and CTO Jim Connell, but had a great time and learned a ton throughout the weekend!

I can honestly say that if you told me a year before (while in college and drinking “occasionally”) that I would be staying up until 3 am working FOR FUN, I would have called you crazy. But wow, what a memorable weekend. In the end Go Menu Go created a fully working prototype, took second place that Sunday and went home with $2,000. But, our nascent Snag Mobile team went home with a lot more.

Set Up Mail Notifications on iPhone

Mar 28 2014

Let’s face it. Email has become one of the most critical forms of communication in our lives. On a daily basis you probably get bombarded with hundreds of emails. Everything from urgent business dealings to Mom’s corny e-cards are sent your way and you’re expected to keep up. The following is a method to be instantly alerted when an email comes in, giving you the ability to respond or delete very quickly and get back to what you were doing.

In iOS 6 you can set up notifications that will pop up just like text messages when an email is received. Let’s start off by adding notifications to our most important account. Head over to the Notification Center by going to Settings > Notifications > Email.

You’ll now see a list of all your email accounts and you can turn on and off notifications on a per account basis. At the top choose how many emails you’d like to see notifications for, I’ve limited mine to 5 only. There’s also an option at the bottom to set notification settings for VIPs.

How to Use the Gmail Undo Send Feature

Mar 28 2014

Ever send an email and immediately after say to yourself any of the following?

“Well now I have to send another email WITH the attachment”
“That should’ve went to my girlfriend…not my mother.”
“Shit…did I really just misspell the word Genius?”
Well the great news is that there’s now a solution to each and every one of those problems. In Gmail it’s very easy to turn on the “Undo Send” feature to grab back those embarrassing emails before they get too far. Below I’ll step you through the process of turning it on, and using it in practice.

First open up your Gmail account and head over to the settings (hint: press the gear (hint: see below for obvious example))

Once into your settings find the “Labs” tab and give it a click. Now scroll down until you come across the “Undo Send” feature and move the radio button to “Enable”. (By the way if you didn’t know by now, there are a ton of other features in here. Try some out!)

SQL Formatter for SQL Server Management Studio

Mar 28 2014

Poor Man’s T-SQL Formatter is an open source plug-in for SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Once installed this add-in gives you a lot of functionality and flexibility to keep your code clean while database programming. I’ll run through the steps to get the program installed and then get into some customization you can do within the formatter.

Install

First, head out to Architect Shack and grab the SSMS and Visual Studio Add-In. Open up the install, make sure that SSMS isn’t running and follow the straightforward instructions to install the add-in.

Caution – As far as I know, this add-in is NOT supported by SSMS 2012

Usage

Once the add-in is installed open up SSMS, connect to your favorite data source and navigate to the “Tools” menu on the top bar. You should now see two options “Format T-SQL Code” and “T-SQL Formatting Options”.

If we write some simple SQL like the following we can illustrate the flexibility you now have with this add-in.