With iPhone stories pretty much drowning out all other news on the Internet, it seemed worthwhile to watch the keynote and see this marvel firsthand. Based on that presentation, it’s impossible to know how well the iPhone will perform as a telephone (I noticed that Steve Jobs “fat-fingered” the keyboard on several occasions during the [...]
I felt I had to blog about this because I’ve tried to do this twice in the last 12 months and each time the Internet has given me some wrong information that has led me to spend a frustrating hour puzzling as to why it didn’t work.
To allow a Windows computer to print over the [...]
Whenever you give out your email address to a commercial entity, there is always the risk that they will pass it on to some evil spammer. Assigning customised email addresses to a company is a great way to keep tabs on which ones are spammers, and I discovered today that Google’s Gmail allows you to [...]
Recently I wanted to schedule some routine apt operations on our server. I discovered there is already an “apt” entry in /etc/cron.daily, but sadly it seemed that the documentation on how to configure it was less clear than it should have been. Hopefully this will aide another Debian user in the future!
In /etc/apt/apt.conf
# Perform a [...]
Owing to an unpatched security hole in Gates’s Windows-powered home-monitoring system, the meeting of the two Great Leaders was bugged and a transcript of their conversation has been obtained by The Observer …
Read the transcript [via Planet Debian].
(Warning: This post is all about a computer!)
When Rosie’s brother came to dinner he commented that we had surprisingly little computer equipment cluttering up our flat. Fortunately the day before I had just ordered us a Shuttle SS59G system with 2.5GHz Intel celery CPU [1] to act as a small server for our flat [2]. [...]
Given the popularity of Mac laptops, it’s not surprising there are a plethora of applications for writing blog posts offline.
mtsend.py: Definitely the ultimate geeky cross-platform solution: use your favourite editor, and then run a Python-script from the terminal to upload your post. It’s also free (unlike the others featured here) but it does have a [...]
Being a non-technical publication, the BBC News website has an insightful look (and live demos) at the new user interface in the forthcoming version of Microsoft Office. (The short version for the video-challenged amongst you is that the traditional menus are out, replaced with “ribbons” of buttons which appear to be context-sensitive toolbars.)
Nokia mobile telephones have a reputation for being the best on the market, but for a long time they didn’t produce a phone with all the features (tri-band, bluetooth and GPRS) that I required and so I had bought (Sony-)Ericsson phones. Recently I noticed that the Nokia 6230 does have all these features and [...]
There’s been a lot of headlines about Web 2.0 recently, and at least one person has asked me: “What does all this 2.0 stuff mean exactly?”. With the dot com “bust” still a recent memory, a lot of people have proclaimed it more Internet-hype—and there is no denying the 2.0 moniker is pure marketing—but if [...]
del.icio.us has been heralded as a classic example of the sort of application that is “Web 2.0” but until recently I could not really see the point of it—web-based bookmarks? However, having been something of a computing nomad these last few months, without permanent access to an always-on, always-connected server of my own, del.icio.us has [...]
A couple of my colleagues have been thinking about buying a new laptop. I was keen to extol the virtues of my ibook, but discovered they needed little persuasion on this front—a single trip to the Apple store and they were hooked. The only problem they have now is ibook or powerbook!
This reminded me that [...]
Britain is famous for its rain, but it rarely rains really heavily for an entire day like it has done here, today — the puddles are so big the pavements are practically flooded! The forcast is “rain”, “heavy rain” and more “rain” through ’til Saturday too; I never thought I would be find myself missing [...]
I walked to work for the first time today. Although it’s about a 30 minute walk, it’s actually a lot more pleasant than taking the subway as it wasn’t too hot on the streets, and while subway trains are air-conditioned, the subway stations are not and often suffocatingly hot. There also seemed to be many [...]
Today really reminded me how New York is so fantastic. It started with a group of us having lunch in a classic 50’s style diner featuring singing waiting staff who were very entertaining. To get an idea of how long it was going to take to walk to work, I wandered down Seventh Ave back [...]