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

There has been a lot written on the web about detecting a user’s browser. The reason why there is so much discussion is that Internet Explorer and Netscape have differences in the way that they render HTML and so the “experience” you get can be different for the same site. At least that was the reason so many people worried about it. Now that Internet Explorer commands over 90% of the browser market it is hardly worth worring about.

However, there are other reasons for detecting a user’s browser, such as redirecting to a different site or set of pages … Read the rest

I have been using the Greymatter content management system to drive my website for a few weeks now and have been very impressed with the results. The majority of my sites are written in the Perl scripting language and this gives me the flexibility to have my sites exactly as I want them. However, when I was looking for a way to refresh neilthompson.co.uk I looked for an open source script that would allow me to create my own look and feel and to easily update the entries. I had read an article on Greymatter in PC Plus magazine and … Read the rest