So for whatever reason Google has chosen to hide the developer settings in the latest version of Jelly Bean. Here’s how to get them back.

There’s a pretty easy way to re-enable developer setttings and here’s how to do it.

1. Go to the settings menu, and scroll down to "About phone." Tap it.
2. Scroll down to the bottom again, where you see "Build number." (Your build number may vary from ours here.)
3. Tap it seven (7) times. After the third tap, you’ll see a dialog that says you’re four taps away from being a developer. Keep on tapping, and eventually, you’ve got the developer settings back.

In a blog post coming later today or at the very latest on Monday I’ll be writing about displaying content and custom characters on a LCD Panel/LCD Keypad Shield.

As part of that upcoming blog post I’m announcing a Custom Character Generator for LCD Panels.

You can play around with it here.

Introduction

Today I’d like to introduce you to Kandan an Open Source alternative to HipChat.

What is Kandan? Kandan is a private chat service for your company or team. You can invite colleagues to share ideas and files in a persistent group chat room or rooms.

Unlike HipChat or other alternatives, Kandan is completely Open Source and can be hosted internally or externally by your organization or by a third party.

Background

First of all, what exactly is a Contributor License Agreement (hereafter referred to as CLA)?

Most of us that have been employed as Software Engineers by corporations are already intimately familiar with CLAs although in the corporate world they are generally called a “Intellectual Property Assignment Agreement”. In many ways a CLA is nothing more than that but specifically geared towards Open Source projects.

A CLA is a legal document in which you state you are entitled to contribute the code/documentation/translation to the project you’re contributing to and are willing to have it used in distributions and derivative works. This means that should there be any kind of legal issue in the future as to the origins and ownership of any particular piece of code, then that project has the necessary forms on file from the contributor(s) saying they were permitted to make this contribution.

Last night I Open Sourced an iOS application called Legendary. Legendary displays catchphrases and memorable quotes from the character Barney Stinson from the hit show How I Met Your Mother.

This application was originally developed using the Appcelerator Titanium framework and will build for iOS only at the moment but I’d love to see it ported over to Android and other mobile platforms.

As an aside this is only the mobile client side of the application. There’s a server side component as well that will also be open sourced later this week.

In my old blog framework I’ve used a lot of InfoBoxes that were heavily influenced by a series of Macros provided in Confluence.

These InfoBoxes were used to display notes, warnings and the like whenever it seemed appropriate. Here are links to the original macros from Confluence.

• Info Macro
• Tip Macro
• Note Macro
• Warning Macro

If you’re a software developer interested in web technologies then you should really consider participating in Firefox OS App Days, a worldwide set of 20+ hack days organized by Mozilla to help you get started developing apps for the all new and shiny Firefox OS.

I’ll be attending the Silicon Valley Event on Saturday, January 19, 2013 being held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

This should be a really good opportunity to start creating applications for the Firefox Marketplace and the upcoming Firefox OS phone.

Thanks to a blog post from Adnan Abdulhussein, I can now auto-tweet new blog posts on my Octopress blog.

I used his original blog post as a guideline but his method was a bit dated and here’s the process I used to get this functionality working.

This is a test of Octopress & Twitter integration. If this works then a longer blog post will follow on how to setup Octopress to tweet new blog posts.