This little device arrived through the letter box this morning and while it looks like a three year olds first calculator it is, in fact, my banks attempt at improving on line security. Now you might think that I would welcome this but actually I have mixed feelings on its use. It seems that it will be used for signing on to the internet banking service and then to carry out some of the more "dangerous" transactions. I say "it seems" because the accompanying documentation is, well, pretty much non-existent other than a short letter – all the documentation is … Read the rest

At the end of yesterday I had a fully functioning laptop again having completely wiped it and done a fresh install. This process involved a trip into the office to join the machine to the domain and synchronise Outlook to my Exchange folders, all of which took an hour or so. One thing that this exercise has shown me is that installing the software is the easy part – anyone can double click an installer and get the files onto their machine – no, what is really challenging is getting right all the settings for all the programs.

As … Read the rest

My laptop has been giving me increasing problems over the last few months and I have been putting off the inevitable need for a rebuild. Today, however, the final straw arrived in the form of a very untimely "Blue Screen of Death" so I decided to rebuild from scratch.

Before blatting the laptop I took a good look at what I already had installed and came to the conclusion that I had an amazing amount of stuff that I used on a regular basis that would need to be reinstalled. I was equally amazed at the even greater … Read the rest

I wrote recently about the impact of the new Google to Outlook synchronisation tool on the third party supplier SyncMyCal. I felt that Google’s free tool would cause significant difficulties for SyncMyCal who were selling their tool at £25 a pop. It seems that SyncMyCal has a bit of a card up it’s collective sleeve as I notice on its website that they are soon to support contact syncing. I have been looking for a way to do just that and so far not found anything suitable so I am pretty excited about the prospect. Not that it will … Read the rest

Been playing around with Twitter recently to try and understand what the value of it is and how I might make it work for me. Right now I can’t get over the thought that no-one is going to be interested in what I have to say. Then again I slavishly work on these blog entries on a regular basis so I must be expecting someone other than my immediate family to read my thoughts.

My initial problem with Twitter was that it was a pain to have to remember to do it and then when I did remember to go … Read the rest

A few weeks ago when I was having problems with Outlook I mentioned in passing emoze and said I would blog about it at a later date, well that time has come. Emoze is a service that allows you to have your email pushed to your mobile device (Symbian or Windows Mobile). It comes in a couple of flavours, the personal edition, which is free, and a corporate version, for which I couldn’t find any pricing. The latter is set to compete with RIM’s BlackBerry offering. I have been using push email with BlackBerry for a few years now and … Read the rest

With the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch SDK on its way and the first raft of application intentions announced I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what applications I would like on my Touch and, what I would pay for.

The list itself is actually pretty short but these are a few of what I would regard as killer apps for me:

• mobipocket reader. I like the idea of eBooks and have a number from various sources which I currently read using the mobipocket reader on other devices, such as my BlackBerry. However, a mobipocket reader on

The picture on the left is of a small piece of plastic that comes with the Apple iPod Touch. Initially I had no idea exactly what it was for and the lack of any instructions meant that for quite a while it just sat in the box. Then I also noticed that the box stated that included was a “stand” but I could find nothing in the box that fitted that description. Then a friend of mine who also has a touch pointed out that that bit of clear plastic was the stand I was searching for. A quick trial … Read the rest

I have recently been trialling emoze, a free push email solution, for delivering my personal email to my Nokia phone. I’ll blog about that at some point in the future. However, using it has highlighted an interesting issue with Outlook- it never closes. Yes, it appears to close but the outlook.exe process is still running. This has a number of unwanted side effects beside continuing to use vast quantities of memory. In my case if continued to download my mail preventing emoze from working correctly.

Searching the net I found a good article about the problem on Mike Swanson’s … Read the rest

I see that Google have at long last released a utility that allows synchronisation to take place between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. The only real surprise is that it has taken this long to be released. Since Google Calendar was launched this seems to have been one of the most requested features and has allowed a number of third party utilities to pop-up to fill the gap. In fact I already use SyncMyCal to do exactly what the new Google tools now does. The one significant difference between the two is that to get the same level of functionality … Read the rest