Corbin Davenport

WhatDevice is out of beta!

Slightly over a year ago, I started working on a web app called WhatDevice. I’ve been developing it on and off since then, and at long last, it’s out of beta! The app has changed quite a bit since I first announced it, so let me explain what it is. There are plenty of instances where you may need to quickly find out information about your (or someone else’s) computer. But locating the information you need can be difficult, especially if you’re trying to diagnose an operating system you don’t normally use. If you usually work on a Mac, you might not know how to lookup the display resolution on Windows.

How I built my website

For the past two years, I’ve hosted my personal site (first corbin.cc, then later corbin.io) on Blogger. At the time, I was using my site as a blog I rarely posted to, so it didn’t seem like a good idea to pay for a host that supported WordPress. Even though Google rarely touches it these days, Blogger is still a decent platform, especially since it supports custom HTML/CSS/JS.

Last month, I wanted to try replacing it with a static site. My main goal was to highlight my social media accounts more promiently. I also wanted it to load quickly and not use any JS/CSS frameworks, like Bootstrap or Bulma. There’s nothing wrong with those projects, I just wanted to try writing my own solution from scratch.

Introducing WhatDevice

There are plenty of instances where you may need to quickly find out information about your computer. But trying to find the information you need can be difficult, especially if you’re trying to diagnose an operating system you don’t normally use. If you usually work on a Mac, you might not know how to lookup the GPU on Windows without doing some googling first.

That’s where WhatDevice comes in. It’s a web app, currently in beta, that aims to display everything about your device on one page.

NoPlugin 4.0 is now available!

NoPlugin is a browser extension that allows you to view some plugin content in your browser, without the need for actual browser plugins. I’ve been working on version 4.0 for a few weeks now, and I’m excited to finally release it.

Peek 2.2 has been released!

It’s been a while since I updated my Peek browser extension – eight months, in fact. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been working on a new update, and it has just been submitted to the Chrome Web Store and Opera add-ons site.

NoPlugin 3.1 is now available!

If you’re not familiar with it, NoPlugin (previously named QuickChrome) is a browser extension that allows you to play some plugin content on sites, without the need for plugins. If the content cannot be played in-browser, NoPlugin can download the file to your computer for playback with VLC Media Player (or another video/audio player).

Now I’m excited to release NoPlugin 3.1! This will be going live for Chrome users over the next day or so, and is waiting on approval for people using Opera.

Peek 2.0 is out!

Back in December, I released Peek – an extension for Google Chrome and Opera that allows you to preview links before you download them. After about two months of on-off work, I’m super excited to finally release Peek 2.0.

QuickChrome is now NoPlugin

Back in January, I released a new Chrome extension called QuickChrome. With Chrome 45 completely dropping support for plugins, and other browsers trying to do the same thing, I thought it would be a fun project to try and restore some functionality.

How to fix ‘SPOCJS’ memory leak on Windows 10

I recently solved a problem that seems to be plaguing Windows 10 users. After I updated my Surface Pro 2 to Windows 10 and attached my keyboard, a task called ‘SPOCJS’ (more specifically, the service ‘Jack Sensing Device for USB Audio’) would continually take up more and more RAM until Windows would crash.

Hacking Android Wear: Part Two

So now that you can install Android apps on your watch, what now? Well there’s tons of applications and games that work to some degree on Android Wear, but usually problems related to the OS make them hard to use. In this post, I’ll be going over a few tricks that will make using Android apps on Android Wear much easier.