I love the immediacy of email. To send off a message to a friend or colleague and get back something in minutes or hours rather than the days it would previously have taken to use snail mail. My kids know no other way. No longer do parents have to force their children to write their thank you letters, now they have to be forced to send their thank you emails. Even that is getting old fashioned now. My two can Skype their uncle to say a quick thank you and then get on with their lives.

Problem is too many … Read the rest

One of the great things about a Windows powered SmartPhone is the level of customisation and personalisation that is possible, particularly around the home screen.

As the buttons and screen are so small it makes sense to have as much available as early as possible, i.e. the home screen. Usually what is displayed is the carrier name, date, time, next appointment and message count details. However, Microsoft have provided a method to change and extend this information. So, using some third party plug-ins I have access to Windows media player, my task list and my alarm as well as all … Read the rest

For reasons that are too complicated to explain here I have gone back to using my SPV E200 in place of my trusty old Nokia 6310i. It has been six months or so since I last used the SPV and abandoned it due to it’s poor battery life. I have since discovered that ALL modern devices have poor battery life and so I’ll just have to put up with it. Actually that statement is not entirely true as my BlackBerry 7230 has phenomenal battery life but that is wandering dangerously off the plot.

In the intervening six months I have … Read the rest

If you have read any of my previous posts about spam comment entries you will have felt my fustration coming through that a) this happens and b) that there seemed to be little to do about it. However, thanks to a post from Steve Conlan, I seem to have found a simple way of blocking out the spammers.

As the spam comments are made by a machine and not a human the answer is to check for signs of human life. Normally this would be done via entering some sort of distorted word held in an image that cannot be … Read the rest

There was an article in this month’s PC Magazine that detailed a number of applications that you could run from a USB key. Some of these were fairly run of the mill but some were also pretty impressive and included: Firefox, Windows CE and, most amazingly of all, OpenOffice. I have tested all these out and can say that they do indeed work. What is most impressive is that these are fully functional applications and given the number of dlls and registry settings that most programs seem to need this is quite an achievement.

So this led me onto … Read the rest

You know when you think you have had a great idea and then you find that you were probably very wrong? Well after my last post Comments please? I am beginning to regret turning the bloody things on.

Since the comments page went live I have received three comments for each of the last two entries. I was really pleased when I saw the comment count and wondered what people could be finding to say about my words. In short the answer is nothing – it is a new (to me) form of on-line spam where on-line gambling services flood … Read the rest

I recently had the opportunity to purchase a large amount (for our business at any rate) of kit, including six laptops and five servers. Having bought Dell kit previously and had no problems we elected to do so again. It was a tourturous experience that I would not wish upon anyone, friend and foe alike.

Once the kit had finally arrived I set about building it to our specification. We had elected to take the laptops with Windows XP PRO pre-installed. What I hadn’t bargained for was all the other things that were also installed. For example FOUR ISPs on … Read the rest

For those that don’t have the time or attention span to read a manual a quick reference card can be a short cut to gaining the information you need in the shortest possible amount of time. Unfortunately these are not always available and so you are left having to pick through the manual to find just the information you want. However, there is another way and once again it is provided by the power of Google.

By entering the following into a Google search literally hundreds of quick reference cards are returned in PDF format for easy printing.

"quick reference … Read the rest

Working in the software industry for the last fifteen years I have seen a lot of code written by other developers, some good, some bad. Inevitably you can’t always get the code to do what you want it to do and frustrations spill over and the temptation is to put an acerbic note in the comments. Usually the end user does not get to see these comments as they are compiled into something that is only machine, not human, readable.

So I was very pleased to see this (very tame) comment remaining in a source file (MyMagazines.htt) from the Zinio … Read the rest

I discovered another great thing about Greymatter today – it is BlackBerry compatible. This entry is being posted via my BlackBerry 7230 and will be submitted over GPRS.

This is a great feature and means that I will be able to post no matter where I am – like the States in two weeks time!… Read the rest