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

…and I had trashed it! Never happy unless I am tinkering I made one change too many last night. I am not sure whether it was the script to shut down the device when the lid is closed or a new tool to manage the simple interface but either way it caused the EEE to constantly reboot on startup. If this had been Windows I might have been able to unpick the damage I had done but it quickly became obvious that this was not going to be possible for me under Linux. So I needed to rebuild the whole … Read the rest

So I have had my EEE PC for a week now and thought that it would be a good opportunity to let you have my initial thoughts. For those that aren’t familiar with it the EEE is a Linux based, fully featured, high portable laptop for around £200. It is also tiny being just slightly larger than a hardback book.

At this price point you could reasonably expect the spec to be cut price but it’s not the case. I have the 2gb "Surf" edition which comes with wifi, 3xusb 2.0 ports, Ethernet, vga out, headphone and microphone sockets and … Read the rest

Well almost. If you have an Orange mobile phone SIM then it seems that you can send up to 30 texts per month for free from their website. Why would you bother? Well my main phone is on t-mobile but I keep a phone with an Orange SIM so that I can take advantage of the 2-for-1 cinema tickets offer on Wednesdays. Occasionally I leave my phone at home and could do with sending a text and now I can. It’s also easier to send longer texts using a full keyboard than using t9.

Log into your account at the … Read the rest

So I received my Asus EEE PC yesterday and immediately set about playing with it and changing the interface. The device itself is just great and I’ll blog about it later but I wanted to share my thoughts on Linux first.

The EEE uses a customised version of the Debian distribution and out of the box has what is called the simple interface (shown left). I initially eschewed this in favour of the advanced version which is basically a Windows XP look-alike. I quickly realised that this was adding little value as it just gave huge areas of empty space … Read the rest

One of my biggest gripes about eBay has always been the feedback system and how it works – in fact I have written about it previously and often refer sellers to this post when they write to me asking for feed back. So I was interested to see on the BBC website today that eBay are due to bring in some changes to the system from May. However,  the change seems to be to simply not allow anything but positive feedback. It seems that people were reluctant to leave negative feedback for a seller in case they retaliated by similarly … Read the rest

So it is all over the web today that Microsoft are making a bid to purchase Yahoo no doubt in an effort to regain some of the ground lost to Google in the search space. How different it could have all been though. Microsoft were late in realising the power of the web and seem to now be paying dearly ($44.bn) for their lack of foresight. However, whether they would have ever had the flexibility to match the agility of Google is another matter.

It is difficult to image two more different business than Microsoft and Yahoo and so knitting … Read the rest

My younger son got a new PC for Christmas and this was blessed with some flavour of Microsoft Vista which apart from requiring a new wireless card as Vista drivers weren’t available for the old one, was reasonably painless. Well that is apart from having to relearn where everything is that you have become so used to finding. The real problems began, however, when we went to access the network storage (NAS) device we have on the home network. Vista was able to see the device but whenever Mat went to open a folder on the device a green progress … Read the rest