Network Hard Drives

October 2, 2008 | Comment

image A while ago I bought this hard drive enclosure from Maplin. What I wanted was some storage that I could access across the network rather than locally via a USB cable and this seemed to fit the bill at £35. I slotted in a spare 80gb hard drive and plugged it into the router. Within a couple of minutes I had connected to it from across the network and was able to transfer files back and forwards.

The management software for the device is pretty simplistic allowing you to setup folders and privileges and not much else. However, it does … Read the rest

Stories that caught my eye this week – 27th September 2008

September 27, 2008 | Comment

These are some of the stories I have been reading this week:

You can see the rest of my reading list here. … Read the rest

Stories that caught my eye this week – 20th September 2008

September 20, 2008 | Comment

These are some of the stories I have been reading this week:

You can see the rest of my reading list here. … Read the rest

Stories that caught my eye this week – 12th September 2008

September 12, 2008 | Comment

These are some of the stories I have been reading this week:

You can see the rest of my reading list here.… Read the rest

More VMWare Woes

September 8, 2008 | Comment

imageFurther to my previous post regarding getting VMWare Server up and running on Vista I spent a while over the weekend trying to migrate a Virtual PC image.

VMWare kindly provides a tool to carry out the conversion called VMWare Convertor.  My first attempt was met with a message: “Unable to Determine Guest Operating System”. I had a root around for logs or an entry in the Event Viewer to shed more light but there was nothing to be found. However, help was at hand on the ‘net suggesting that an install of MS XML 4 might resolve the issue … Read the rest

Duplicate Contacts on iPhone

September 6, 2008 | Comment

imageOne of the things that has been bugging me since I got my 3G iPhone was that I had duplicate contacts listed. Normally this would have been a minor irritation but given that the contacts take an age to load I was keen to keep the list as small as possible. A search on Google returned lots of others who had a similar problem but none of the solutions (many of which seemed to be clutching at straws) worked.

One idea that did come up regularly was that of having multiple contact folders in Exchange but I was pretty certain … Read the rest

VMWare on Vista

August 29, 2008 | Comment

image Just got a new laptop running Windows Vista Business and while it hasn’t been as painful as I had expected (having 4gb of ram helps) I did spend all of Wednesday morning trying to resolve a problem with VMWare Server. Installation was fine but as soon as I tried to start an image the machine just died but there was obviously something going on as the hard disk light was working overtime.

A quick search (once I had regained control of my machine) showed that this is a known problem and is due to Windows trying to page out the … Read the rest

What Time is it?

August 22, 2008 | Comment

image AppSwing have been using an online project management system FogBugz for a few months now and it’s very good. However, what makes it stand head-and-shoulders above the competition is not the functionality (which is superb and well executed) but the attitude towards support. I have emailed their help desk a few times and have always had a quick and helpful response but what got me this week was an email stating that the service would be down for maintenance. Nothing unusual in that but what WAS unusual was that they had noticed that I was in the UK and provided … Read the rest

Wordle

August 15, 2008 | 1 comment

Here’s a neat way of representing information in a very graphical way: Wordle. Using this service you can either choose to enter some text, perhaps a presentation or speech or direct it at the RSS feed of a website. That’s what the picture below shows – the feed for this site. Weight is given to the words that are used more frequently. So from this graphic you can see my obsessions coming to the fore: Google, Mobile, Interesting, Friend and Small!

Whether you use it as a business tool or just for a bit of fun it is slickly … Read the rest

Magic Bullet Get Video Coverage on BBC

August 14, 2008 | Comment

image A friend of mine runs a small media production company, Magic Bullet, producing high-quality corporate videos. It was the Magic Bullet team that was responsible for the iPhone video produced for AppSwing.

It can be very difficult for small business to make themselves heard but occasionally you can manage to get your head above the parapet. Magic Bullet have been producing a series of videos for the University of Reading and the latest seems to have caught the imagination of the national media featuring on both the BBC and Telegraph websites.

It’s great coverage and interesting too. Check … Read the rest