There have been a number of occasions when I have been out and about and would have found it useful to be able to text a landline phone. Well with a new service from BT, BTText it seems that you can.

The service allows you to both send and receive SMS messages from a home phone. I have only tried the receiving part but it does seem to work. If you have a suitably enabled phone you can read the message on the text display, if not you get to hear the message read by some alien from planet Mars. … Read the rest

After 12 months of negotiations the company I work for, AppSwing, have pulled off something of a coup by receiving investment from Citrix – not bad for a company of seven employees! Read the full press release below:

AppSwing Limited Receives Strategic Investment from Citrix Systems

AppSwing Limited, a leading developer of mobility middleware solutions for extending applications to wireless handheld devices, announced today it has received a strategic investment from Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the global leader in access infrastructure solutions. Privately-held AppSwing will use the funding to further develop and market its flagship AppServer™ solution, which … Read the rest

How’s this for a neat gadget and a free one at that.

A colleague of mine recently returned from the Citrix Solutions Summit in Orlando and presented me with this 1.3 mega pixel camera that all the delegates were given. It’s about the size of a cassette tape (if you remember such things!) and is pretty featured packed for a give away at any rate.

As well as being 1.3 mega pixels it has an internal memory of 16mb, a built in flash and a rechargable battery which gets it’s charge when you connect the camera to your pc via … Read the rest

This site is built using the content management system, Greymatter, of which I have written previously. The admin pages for Greymatter are great but for a novice offers little easy control over the look and feel of entries. This is where a very neat little control, HTMLArea comes in. This is a free control that gives the user a rich edit control allowing control over items such as fonts, colours, links and images making entering entries more like Word than Notepad. You can see the full range of functionality at the HTMLArea page.

So how do you include HTMLArea … Read the rest

As already stated elsewhere I am getting back into doing my family history fuelled by my wifes new years resolution. Even better I have now found a way of combining the search for my ancestors with my love for my mp3 player! Strange though it may seem but my iRiver iHp-140 is just the thing for capturing the past.

One of the first things that any family historian will tell you is that the best place to start your research is by speaking with your relatives who are still alive. They will have stories and information on your relatives that … Read the rest

Now here’s a great idea brilliantly executed – the Namco 5 in 1 Stick – all those games you used to play down the arcade now neatly contained in a small box with a joystick on the top. Plug it into your TV and you have access to great classic titles such as Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Galaxian, Rally-X, and Bosconian.

Proving how good the original games really were this is highly addictive fun with the Thompson family being pitted against each other to see who can get the top scores. I’m not normally a game player but even I have … Read the rest

As I have stated in past posts I am a long time Psion devotee having gone through various different machines.

About 18 months ago Psion broke with tradition and brought out a machine that, for the first time, did not use EPOC as it’s operating system. Instead Psion went over to the “dark side” and built a machine using Windows CE. I have been fortunate enough to have been using one of these machine for the past year. I say fortunate but it has taken me a year to get to actually like the machine.

The Netbook Pro looks just … Read the rest

Everyone knows Google, don’t they. Nobody bothers to use any other web search engine, do they? Now Google are trying to get into other areas of the computer users consciousness by launching a webmail and desktop search service.

Taking a look at the desktop search first this is a downloaded install that starts by indexing all the files on your hard drive. Typically this is Microsoft Office documents, such as Word and Excel. The length of time that this indexing takes will vary depending on the number of documents on your machine.

Once the indexing is complete the searching is … Read the rest

I have been watching the Windows vs. Linux debate with interest for some time now. Security seemed to be the principle reason that the Linux community were suggesting that you move over to the open source operating system. Now Microsoft are fighting back and using Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as their reason for staying with Windows. On the face of it that would seem to be an easy argument for Linux to win, after all it can be obtained at little or no cost.

Recently, as part of a project at work, we took at look at the open … Read the rest

I went to my website this morning and instead of seeing the usual posts there was the following message:

“El Pulpo Hacker Strike Again …
Las Malvinas son Argentinas …
See You in Canasvieiras ”

That was it, no other changes made. The reason it happened was because I had set the permissions on one file to give world write access, stupid I know. Anyway that hole is now pluged so that should be the end of it but never say never.

I have never understood why a hacker does what he/she does, although there was obviously a political element … Read the rest