Archive for the 'Geeky' Category

On Motion Pictures

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

I have a fairly sizeable collection of video clips from our trip to New Zealand, which one day I hope to assemble into something which might be worthy of the term film.
My first observation is that while holiday photographs need a nominal amount of sorting and post-processing before being displayed, video is much more demanding [...]

Ubuntu Upgrade: 8.04 to 9.04

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

Yesterday I upgraded my Ubuntu machine directly from Hardy Heron to Jaunty Jackalope (release candidate 1), in defiance of the release notes. I could not find any specific problems indicating what would happen if I broke the rules so I went ahead anyway and it worked fine—fortunately there is no Change Management Board in this flat!
Upon [...]

Blogs: Conversation or Monologue?

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

This weblog now allows for commenting via Facebook. Read on for the reasons why social networks will make blogs are proper conversation.

Internet document sharing done right?

Friday, November 28th, 2008

Glowing review of a “make my files available everywhere” service called Dropbox. (Via Ranchero.com.)

One to watch…

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

…for the wrong reasons. It Died is a site which tracks the shutdown of web sites offering “Software-as-a-Service”. (Via Daring Fireball.)

Using a Netgear DG834Gv3 as an ADSL modem

Sunday, September 7th, 2008

Last week I treated myself to a new NAS device (cost: £££; good backups: priceless) which also has a built-in 802.11N wireless access point. Consequently I needed to find a way to make my Netgear DG834Gv3 act as a pure ADSL modem to avoid the headache of two layers of NAT.
While not documented/officially supported, the [...]

The Future of Film

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Wired has a fascinating article about the technology that could replace 35mm film [via Daring Fireball].

iPhone Voicemail Setup Problems (& Solution)

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

The first time you select the voicemail button your an iPhone, in typical Apple fashion, it offers to help you configure your voicemail. This was much nicer than the traditional voice prompts one normally has to navigate, but the final step (talking to the network) repeatedly failed for me. Google indicated that it might be [...]

So is the iPhone any good?

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

As revealed in my previous post, I recently purchased an iPhone. The reason for this is that the Internet stopped working on my old phone, and since I needed a new portable Internet device anyway and the web being the iPhone’s forté, it seemed like the best choice for my requirements.
But is it any [...]

Debugging an iPhone

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

While a Mac usually “Just Works”, when it does encounter an error situation, OS X often emits a a very vague message that can make debugging a long-winded process. For example, suppose you have recently brought home a shiny new iPhone and upon connecting it to iTunes you receive: “Could not connect to iPhone because [...]

No more books?

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

MacInTouch has an interesting review of Amazon’s electronic book reader, the Kindle. The review is based on long term usage of the device rather than the initial “test drive” articles which appear when a product is first released.
When the Kindle was launched, the Internet was alive with speculation as to whether this was an [...]

Bletchley Park’s Money Problems

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

BBC, Thursday — “financial crisis”

Schneier, Friday — “…may close”

Techworld, Friday — “The press has been a little over dramatic“.

Netgear DG834Gv3, iChat and Linux

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

I recently picked up a Netgear DG834Gv3 wireless router and modem on ebay for a very reasonable price. In order to make iChat video conferences work seamlessly (i.e. without having to configure port forwarding) I had to:

Upgrade it to the latest firmware (V4.01.30).
Toggle UPnP off and on (twice according to some forums).
Disable port scan [...]

No spots on this Leopard

Saturday, January 19th, 2008

Leopard is the product name for the fifth release of Apple’s OS X operating system. I was pretty happy with the previous release, so apart from the automatic backup feature known as “Time Machine”, I was unsure as to how much benefit I would derive from the upgrade but it turns out that the little [...]

Macbook not putting itself to sleep

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

Buried in the changelog of the latest NetNewsWire release:
Sleep
Fixed a bug that prevented automatic sleep for some people.
Which is interesting because for some time now my macbook has not been putting itself to sleep after the correct period of idleness (although a manual command to “sleep” worked fine). After shutting down NetNewsWire and leaving my [...]