I recently wrote of my inability to get the new Carbonite Remote Access facility to work and my frustration with getting anything useful out of their support. Well shortly after I had made the post and put up a tweet about it I got a direct message from Carbonite saying that if I sent them my email address they would contact me and sort it all out. And do you know what? They did! (well sort of).

After a couple of calls from Paul in the States it seems that the reason I wasn’t seeing anything when I went to … Read the rest

I’ve been using Carbonite as my online backup service of choice for about a year now and it works seamlessly in the background sending my important files to the cloud just in case. Until recently that was all it did. A one way upload of files from my machine to the cloud. You could see them but unless you wanted to restore them they were untouchable in a virtual vault somewhere.

That changed just recently when Carbonite Remote Access was launched. Remote Access, as the name suggests, allows you to get access to your archive from just about anywhere via … Read the rest

Occasionally I have the need to create an icon file – usually for use as a favourite icon for a website. Until recently I struggled to find a simple way of achieving this as the graphics programs I use, as good as they are, don’t seem to have support for *.ico files. Then I stumbled upon the Online Icon Maker which, as the name suggests, is a web-based system for creating icon files.

You can choose to either create your icon from scratch or upload an existing file. On screen you see a simple view of the icon on the … Read the rest

Sometimes technology has a way of surprising and Twitter did that last night.

I have been using Twitter for a while now and while I am still not a complete convert it is certainly getting much more mainstream acceptance with the likes of Obama, Oprah and Fry all tweeting away. In fact a recent mention on the Oprah show is said to have increased the subscribers by a further one million.

A lot of these new users, the majority I would suspect, are based in the US but there is clearly a strong band of users here … Read the rest

While doing some research for my post on Google Docs’ drawing feature I tried to enable the offline feature, something that had worked perfectly on my previous laptop. The process got right through to the very end before displaying the following error message:

“An error occurred while updating software.Failed to update software for the applications”

I re-tried a few times and even gave it a go on Internet Explorer rather than Firefox to see if that resolved the issue but with no luck. So in the end I did a search of the web see if anyone else had the … Read the rest

Google has added a drawing option to it’s Docs applications so now you can insert simple diagrams into documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

To insert a new drawing select Drawing from the Insert menu and a new window pops-up over the document (see left). This is the same for all application types.

You are then free to draw using any combination of lines (both straight and free form), text and a series of predefined shapes (see below). You can do all the sorts of things that you would expect to be able to do such as change the colour of the … Read the rest