Speed up the Alexa app on Android – no more sluggishness

You know how it is: you open the Alexa app on your Android smartphone, click through the menus—and every “click” feels like it’s in slow motion. Whether you’re controlling smart home devices or looking for a simple setting, instead of a quick response, using the app becomes a test of patience.
I had exactly this problem. And the solution is as simple as it is curious.

The culprit: Contacts permission

In most cases, the cause of performance issues is not your smartphone or your internet connection, but rather an app permission. More specifically: access to your contacts.
In my case, the app apparently tried to scan through my 1,000+ contacts every time I changed pages. On a second smartphone with fewer contacts, it worked much faster. The fact is, as long as the permission was active, the app became a test of patience.

The solution: revoke authorization

Here’s how it works:

Open the settings on your Android […]

AJAX, jQuery & how to bypass the same-origin policy

AJAX und Cross-DomainToday’s post is intended to give a brief introduction to the topic of AJAX with jQuery, as well as to cover the topic of cross domain (policy) and to show how you can use small tricks to send AJAX requests across multiple domains. Before we start, however, we will give you a quick introduction to the topic. If you are already familiar with the topic and are only interested in the AJAX cross-domain workaround, you can safely skip the first part of the article.
What is AJAX and how does it work in jQuery?
AJAX is an abbreviation and stands for “Asynchronous JavaScript And XML”. Contrary to the opinion of some people on the Internet, it is not a programming language, but rather a pattern, i.e. a way of programming something. By means of AJAX web content can be retrieved via Javascript, […]

Steganography with PHP – Hide files in images

Steganographie mit PHPIn this article we want to deal with the topic of steganography and implement a small example in PHP. Because PHP is not “only” used to create web pages or to implement forms, as any experienced PHP programmer of larger web agencies will surely confirm.
Besides functions for text processing, PHP also provides methods for image processing as well as for manipulation on bit and byte level. And these are the ones we want to use today. But before we start coding, we will have a short introduction to the topic of steganography.
Steganography is not shorthand
As the title already announced, today’s topic is steganography, the art of hiding information or knowledge in a carrier medium. Wikipedia defines steganography as follows:
Steganography (/ˌstɛɡəˈnɒɡrəfi/) is the practice of concealing a message within another message or a physical object. In computing/electronic contexts, a computer file, […]

Basics: Secure password hashing with salts

Passwörter in Plaintext speichernAnyone who develops software and especially if he/she does so in the web environment, has certainly already written one or the other login system or at least had points of contact in this area. Besides the logic of a secure login or user management system, the secure storage of passwords is one of the most important points during implementation.
Even if the actual login code is 100 percent error-free and secure (which should never be assumed in practice), security vulnerabilities in the server software can still lead to intrusions or hacks. There is always a variable that is out of one’s control and thus websites are hacked, compromised and complete databases with usernames and passwords are read every day.
In order to protect users in the best possible way in the event of such a […]

Wildcards in Google Suggest nutzen

google-suggest-theme-pictureRegular users of my blog should already be familiar with “Google Suggest”. Those can skip ahead to the section “Wildcard operator in Google Suggest”, for all others here is the quick start. Google Suggest is the name of the Google functionality that is responsible for suggesting possible search queries while you are typing your search query. For example, if you type “What are the most popular”, Google will suggest “What are the most popular sports in Australia”. The suggestions, in turn, are based on the one hand on the user’s own Google search profile and on the other hand on the most frequent search queries currently sent to Google by other users.
For webmasters, SEOs (search engine optimizers) and Internet marketers, however, the Google Suggest feature has a completely different benefit than […]