FAQICA

Censoring the internet

2012-01-14T15:22:00.000Z

This chart and several others illustrating different attitudes to freedom to view internet content are featured in an excellent site by Evan You designed to promote awareness. You can also cast your vote there (scroll through the page).

What's new at Android?

2012-01-06T23:23:00.001Z

I searched for 'new' on android.com.

Hmmm.

OK, I suppose I'd better add that they have put a sweet little game. Click on the icon bottom left and see if you can get a medal :)

Yes! ASUS Laptop Resolution Fixed [by me]

2011-12-26T23:51:00.000Z

You may recall the last post about ASUS support saying that my laptop didn't support Windows 7 and there was no help available for changing the resolution or recognising the ATI card instead of some default PnP monitor...

... a colleague said 'just get the driver from ATI (now AMD). Tried that but still couldn't get Windows to recognise it and spent a while going round in circles. Then I had a look at an identical laptop that had been running Windows 7 fine for ages and I did know what graphics card it had and what to do with it. Diving into Display properties you can eventually find Driver details which lists all the files apparently required. I copied those from one machine to the other. The next time I hit Update Driver, instead of being told that I already had the most up-to-date driver for a PnP monitor, Windows proceeded to get what it reckoned I needed and a few moments later I see this screen.

So I'm afraid that ASUS support haven't exactly excelled themselves on this query and, presumably, have left a whole pile of customers languishing in XP or Vista land or with ovals where there should be circles.

I'm not quite sure whether my efforts actually helped or whether Windows just took its time realising the ATI card was there. Either way, job was done in time to give the youngest son his brother's previously ailing but now looking and working great laptop on Christmas morning. As few people will have more than one of these laptops, if you have a similar problem and need the driver file list just drop me an e-mail.

ASUS: Is this problem solved? ME: No. Obviously not.

2011-12-23T15:07:00.000Z

I have bought two ASUS F5V laptops in 2008. Both have done good service, one being carted everywhere with me and often used in class when the software I wanted wasn't available on College machines. The other started off with my daughter who passed it on to my son and now it's going to his younger brother. I'd put Windows 7 on mine, initially the trial version Microsoft issued and later an N version from work. That's been fine although I did have to fiddle around to get the web cam working again. So I thought I'd put a similar version on the younger son's to spruce it up a bit and, in the process, clear out all the rubbish that had accumulated as only a clean installation can achieve.

All went well, running like new except for a couple of minor-looking things. There were only two settings available for the screen resolution as Windows only puts on a PnP generic driver without the settings I need for the widescreen monitor. So I have oval icons instead of round ones. The other was the web cam again but otherwise no worries.

So I dropped ASUS suupport a line, having found nothing on their site of much use. Today I get this e-mail:

That can't be right. I know it's old but surely a driver for a screen display isn't that difficult to provide, especially as my other identical machine works OK. If anyone knows where I can find it on one machine then perhaps I can somehow copy it on to the other one.

I could also do with the registry amendments required to convince the machine that it has a DVD drive, not a CD drive. Having said that, it did just manage to read the installation DVD so that might be a dirty reader rather than a driver problem.

Suggestions welcome.

"My Program Files Look Quite Lonely..."

2011-12-19T11:10:00.000Z

A clean installation of Windows 7 left my son with just a few, lonely-looking applications in his Program Files folder. "What else do you think I should get?" he asked. I was tempted to say "Nothing - you can do everything on-line these days" but I just know he won't be capable of leaving half a terabyte of space empty so before he starts downloading this, that and probably the other too, I decided to list what I had lying around and which did actually get used. And why. And, by the way, they're all *free.

It may be a useful guide to others too so I thought I'd publish it here. That also saves me typing it in an e-mail. (I've omitted games which you'll know far more about than me!)

Security stuff:
CCleaner helps tidy drives up and remove rubbish
WinPatrol (Scotty) keeps an eye on changes you may not want applications to make
Microsoft Security Essentials (it may be there already) jolly good anti-virus and general protection from Microsoft getting it right for a change
Prey (for mobile phone protection link) activate a camera and GPS or shut down if you think it's stolen

Design / photos etc
Irfanview open anything, quickly.
Picasa Google's brilliant album and editing application
JAlbum Another excellent on-line album maker
Sketchup make shapes, be an architect or just have fun
ColorPix get exactly the colour you need
Rasterbator make huge pictures and cartoon effects
Serif DrawPlus design
SerifPhotoPlus edit
SerifWebPlus publish
ArtRage draw, paint, splash around

Music
Windows MediaPlayer (if not there already)
Spotify one of the first in the on-line music field
VLC Media Player play anything
Total Recorder record anything

Utilities
Nuance PDFReader better PDFs
Skype communicate
7Zip compress and extract
LibreOffice if you haven't got Microsoft Office

Browsers
Rockmelt or just Chrome
Firefox (English UK) still useful to have around
(and ensure Internet Explorer updates automatically even if you never use it!)

*Serif offer free older versions but students can get the latest versions for about £10.
Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote are all freely available on-line via SkyDrive.

Scary stuff in the States

2011-12-12T18:12:00.001Z

Another on-line photo editing tool

2011-11-20T01:05:00.001Z

It's been a long time since Microsoft Word crashed on me. Thereagain, it's been a while since I did much with the Edit Wrap Points feature that has been in Word for as long as I can remember but hardly ever used by any students or colleagues I know.

But that's not the point I intended to write about. That's another entry in the on-line photo editing tools that are getting better and better and with more and more features. This one is called FotoFlexer and seems pretty effortless to use. The image above was grabbed from another blog, edited and downloaded in about 3 minutes with no log-in required.

One cautionary note - there's a big 'Download' button staring at you on the main page after you've done your editing. I should have known better but it isn't the 'download my image' button or 'download a local version of the application' button but, annoyingly, something quite different that I only caught a quick glimpse of but looked like one of those tools like Vuze that search for on-line stuff and control the downloads. Probably nothing bad, just very unnecessary and it certainly should be displayed with some accompanying description.

Fotoflexer claim to have more features than any other on-line application. That I doubt, although this does have a lot, including layers management and quite a few resources that some others I've recommended before lack. So it is worth a look but just beware the green button. I'll update all the editors that I am happy to recommend shortly on the webtools site.

Web display - some statistics to bear In mind these days

2011-10-25T13:54:00.000+01:00

Windows 7 overtook Windows XP at last a little while ago. Mac and Linux maintain a small but constant share and it will be interesting to see how Android and mobile browser use statistics grow.

There are three clear leaders in the browser field: Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer. Google and Mozilla continue to eat away at Microsoft's domination. Will IE9 halt that decline? Will Chrome take over the No.1 spot?

Time was when we designed web pages for users with 800 pixel screens with some nods towards the 1024 folk with nice backgrounds to occupy the space either side. Now, it would seem safe to move to utilise an extra 25% of monitor estate although we may have to make mobile versions more readily available too. Unless your site is going to appear as a small box on the screen it may be time to look again at all those 760 pixel pages! But let us hope text lines don't start stretching.

These charts have been made using Google Documents' Spreadsheets and feature data from W3Schools. The nice thing about Google Charts is that now you can add them to sites not as a mere image but as an interactive feature where you can move the mouse to see more data and if I change the 'home' spreadsheet these will be automatically updated too. That is just so cool.

Google Charts are still in development and I noticed that I wasn't able to add a text box (for the thanks to W3Schools bit, for instance) and the Spreadsheet is still a bit clunky compared to Excel. Try as I did, changing the dates so that they would actually be interpreted as dates not text proved impossible (unless I added 1 to each which would have been a drag) and percentages seem to have to be either 0 or 2 decimals (or umpteen, perhaps) just not 1 decimal point as I wanted. No doubt someone will tell me how to fix these things under the bonnet before long!

Beware! Statistics Are Often Misleading

You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. Statistics can often be misleading.Global averages may not always be relevant to your web site. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, while other sites attract hobbyists using old low spec computers.Also be aware that many statistics may have an incomplete or faulty browser detection. It is quite common by many web-stats report programs, not to detect the newest browsers.(The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but they are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures).

I Need Islands In My Stream

2011-10-12T21:55:00.000+01:00

My goodness, things are changing so quickly! I am doing my best to keep up but doing so is my excuse for not having written anything here for ages. I will try and make up for that with some posts about all sorts of exciting new applications and web tools in a while. For now, though, I thought it might be a good idea simply to share this feeling of being overwhelmed - excitedly overwhelmed, I should add, but also slightly exhaustingly so too!

I blame Google Plus. A little while ago it was a pretty but pretty dead area where one or two posts would appear in my stream, like a few headlines in a newspaper. Twitter was my main source of morning news and E-mail is something that I'd look at as apart from a very quick scan by phone to make sure I wasn't missing something important.

My Rockmelt browser would advise me if there were any Facebook messages so, unless my daughter was panicking about something, I didn't need to go there which had somewhat brought my incoming stuff back into some sort of order. Rockmelt also lets me mark tweets to read later if a first glance wasn't enough or a link needed to be clicked so that was vaguely under control.

Not so, Google Plus. I now have a genuine stream of fascinating, interesting and other complimentary adjectives I could apply to the posts that are arriving from all over the place. Really talented people in mainly Tech or Educational fields, mostly, but, for my sins and probably much to the annoyance or frustration of some people who follow me, also things to do with X Factor now that I am writing the reviews and recaps for both the USA and UK programmes and getting featured in various web magazines. I cannot keep up with it all. I want to. I try but I am staying up until the early hours of the morning most nights now just browsing through the steam and adding comments as and when I can.

Retirement would be brilliant because I could do this in the normal, sensible part of a day. However, there's too much interesting work to do to even envisage such a concept just yet. there's also the small matter of needing income. But there Google Plus offers hope too as I may well find that one or two of the new people who are reading the stuff I write might actually like me to write or do a bit more and pay me for it. The main problem is that everyone is just too damn interesting. Google Plus is not like Twitter or Facebook. Twitter shows you very short bursts of views, ideas or whatever from people that you follow. Facebook is a bundle of comments and status changes, mostly, amongst my 'friends', of a social nature and which can be smiled at, grunted at and I can move on without my brain being unduly challenged. Google Plus provides me with much longer items, usually well-written too, from experts in their fields about subjects that interest me and offering advice which I'd like to take or at least try out or asking for help which I'd like to provide.

And these posts are coming from far and wide, people I've never met, seen or passed in a conference corridor. They're in Circles that I've added to my Circles because they seemed just as deserving of being there as those I do know and I also get the comments and ideas and links that people in their Circles have added. At this rate I shall have vast numbers of posts flying down my screen and I don't have a clue how to handle them all and, more importantly, remember the ones that either I remembered wanting to remember or, even more importantly, remember that I had said I would respond or do something for some of those that I have now drifted past and into the first or second stream hidden under a More button.

LinkedIn people don't stand a chance of hearing from me more than once a month at this rate and I have completely abandoned Plaxo and Plurk. They had their uses but they used too much time that I no longer have spare.

I am also beginning to wonder if I should get a vertical instead of horizontal screen as, at it stands now, a few hours' worth of e-mail occupies the whole of a screen and, unless I am really fast archiving, labelling or deleting in GMail, someone's message has disappeared from view only to emerge several days later when I do eventually either remove its successors on the page or press the Next 25 button. In fact, I am beginning to wonder whether I shouldn't start displaying them in reverse date order. I wonder if I can?

I have now managed to get Google Plus to show me Twitter and Facebook streams without leaving its environs which is a good start. I can also post to whichever I choose or to the whole damn lot from there which is marvellous. That uses an add-in called SGPlus. Google must surely eventually come up with their own but, until they do, SGPlus is worth a a look for Chrome users.

On the occasions when I do have to dive into Facebook it seems that I have a new learning experience each time with ever-changing (and, I must say, quite impressive) displays of whatever is there. With its new Active Display my blog tool of choice, Blogger, is also now threatening to take over my daily news with a display that looks remarkably like a ruddy newspaper in some options too. But I already have paper.li aggregating all that it thinks I might want to read anyway.

I now learn that Google Goggles can solve my good old-fashioned Daily telegraph suduko, crossword and it won't be long before it does the balancing birds too. So maybe that will give me more time to read the rest. and perhaps catch up with my article writing on what is going on. Maybe. We'll see. Watch this space.

Good tutorial videos from Google Privacy

2011-08-24T18:33:00.000+01:00

Some nice explanations by Google Privacy people of terms like HTTPS and VPN can be seen at Digital Inspiration's really useful site. When I viewed this on YouTube I found a whole pile of others too. Well worth a look if you're either teaching or studying this sort of thing and need simple, Plain English (well nearly), tutorial material.

Not too sure about this young lady's pronunciation of S but once the novelty wears off you'll stop giggling and learn something!

Groovy: Google Image Chart Editor

2011-07-27T16:15:00.001+01:00

Google Image Chart Editor is a really nice tool to put charts on-line. Choose a type of chart from a gallery. Edit the labels and whatever else is available to change for that type. Copy the code and add it to your site, blog or whatever.

There are also post-it notes and other things too.

Experimenting with slidestaxx

2011-07-17T18:18:00.002+01:00

No idea what this is all about but just trying to see what it does...

Browsers used commercially across the globe

2010-12-03T18:33:00.002Z

Well, excluding China, or IE6 would be even higher than the extraordinary 8% it still manages in late 2010. I genuinely have difficulty using even IE8 now as I use it so seldom and I'm about to make the wonderful RockMelt adaptation of Chrome my default browser at home and on laptops.
Stats courtesy of NetMarketShare.

AND NOW... YOUR COLLEGE... BRINGS YOU... YOUR TUTOR...

2010-11-13T01:59:00.000Z

Yes, you can have the X Factor Voiceover Man, Peter Dickson, introduce you at your next lecture, presentation, speech or whatever. Not easily spotted on his site is a small item that takes you to this page where you can download something he's done already or get him to say what you want (within reason).

Small price to pay for a bit of fun!

1 minute videos for absolute beginners, from Auntie

2010-11-13T00:14:00.000Z

BBC Webwise have put lots of little videos on-line which answer those little questions you may know the answers to but perhaps some of your students, or your Mum, doesn't. Some seem a little pointless and one even confused me more but most are cute and you may be able to use some of them in a lesson or something.

They're all available at this link.

Here's the list:

How do I use a digital camera?
How do I stop getting spam?
How can I make free phone calls online?
What is the internet?
What is a firewall?
How do I prevent ID fraud?
How can I build my own website?
What is a search engine?
What is social networking?
What is podcasting or vodcasting?
What is online shopping?
Buying a computer
What is e-mail?
What are computer viruses?
How do I download files?
What is BBC iPlayer?

As I said, you'll know the answers but FAQICA has to broaden its appeal a bit and the Firesheep post was a bit heavy. Just keeping in with my dumber readers.http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009sbnn

Firesheep. Possibly the best web security learning tool!

2010-10-25T13:36:00.001+01:00

So many other people have written about this new simple application that I won't go into detail. TechCrunch do that much better than me anyway. If you've managed to miss the news then there's a simple little tool available that will not only show you who in your vicinity is using an open wireless network but enable you to log in to their facebook, twitter, amazon accounts using their log-in (and there's a massively long list of more).

If you fancy trying it out the you need Firefox 3.6+ as Firesheep is an extension to that browser. The extension doesn't appear obvious in a search for Firefox extensions which is probably wise and I'm not going to publish it here. It isn't that difficult to find, though. Windows users will also need to install Winpcap first. Once you've installed the Firefox extension a sidebar is available which displays all the icons and screen names of people using unsecured sites around you. Click on one and you're free to run around their pages! Hacking my youngest could manage while reading Noddy Goes Shopping.

Being unusually responsible, here's a link to suggestions for another Firefox extension Force-TLS which will help you protect several (but not all!) of your accounts. The TechCrunch article author, Alexia Tsotsis accepts that this is of no help to the vast majority who'll be using Internet Explorer (or Google Chrome, Opera, Safari etc. etc.) but promises to publish more on that soon. Watch that space.

graphic by Dave Hoffman

Perhaps this will be the wake-up call we all need to be more careful about our on-line activity. I have no doubt that there will be patches and adjustments galore in the background, even attempts not to frighten us all with this story in mainstream news items, and a lot of people are very concerned to fix things today and it will all go quiet soon enough. In the meantime, though, just give it a try and I promise you it will be the most effective learning experience on the topic of internet security short of being fleeced for a few grand by a dodgy Luton fuel station till operator.

In no more than 255 words . . .

2010-10-01T19:47:00.000+01:00

Many assignments still take the form of [yawn] essays and despite wondering at the start how on earth you'll ever type 2999 words it's not long before you're tearing your hair out and desperately trying to figure out how to get it down to the 3000 limit (or whatever the tutor has probably set in a totally arbitrary manner. "Oh, it's Thursday, let's make 'em do 5000")

You probably already know about the Word Count option on the Tools menu, but it would be much more useful to have a constantly updated word count displayed in the top of the document (or even in the header or footer) so that you can keep an eye on it. Word has a way to allow you to do this, but not many people know about it. To add a word count, you need to insert a field code as follows:

Place the cursor at the position in the document that you’d like to add the word count (e.g. at the beginning of the document, under the title).
Click Insert > Quick Parts > Field (Insert > Field prior to Word 2007)
Scroll down the list of available fields and choose NumWords. Click OK.
The word count will be inserted. To update the count after adding more text, right-click on it and choose Update Field.

No, that doesn't help actually write the essay I know, but gives you something to do while you're typing.

Another useful tip from the good people at Windows Secrets.

Pin a removable drive to your Windows 7 taskbar for fast access

2010-09-18T09:14:00.000+01:00

The advent of huge amounts of storage on tiny memory sticks and portable hard drives that are now denominated in TB tends to result in us keeping more and more stuff that we might regularly access on them, plugging them in to whichever pc or laptop wherever we happen to be.

This article from the nice people at Windows Secrets should help make it a bit easier to get at those external drive files on equipment you use regularly.

Windows 7’s ability to ‘pin’ icons to the taskbar allows you to quickly access a program by clicking on its taskbar icon, even if it's not running. This quick access feature should also allow you to rapidly access an external hard drive, but unfortunately the process isn’t as simple as dragging the drive’s icon to the taskbar, as you would an application – doing this actually adds a shortcut to Windows Explorer. In fact the process is much more complicated, but it is possible to add a quick shortcut to the taskbar as follows:

Right-click on a blank area of your desktop and choose New > Text File.
Name the new file DRIVE-SHORTCUT.EXE, taking care to change the .TXT ending to .EXE.
Press [Enter] and click Yes to confirm the suffix change.
Right-click on DRIVE-SHORTCUT.EXE and choose Pin to Taskbar.
Right-click on the new icon on the taskbar, right-click on DRIVE-SHORTCUT.EXE from the pop-up menu and choose Properties.
Click on the Shortcut tab and change the Target and Start in fields to the drive letter of your removable drive followed by a colon (e.g. E:\).
Click OK. When you now click on your taskbar shortcut you will be taken directly to the removable drive.

Note: if you don’t see the .TXT ending in step 2, go to Start > Computer > Organize >Folder and Search Options. Click the View tab and untick Hide Extensions For Known File Types then click OK.

Icons from IE9 site

2010-09-16T21:31:00.000+01:00

Internet Explorer 9 beta available

2010-09-16T21:08:00.000+01:00

Well it certainly looks pretty. Internet Explorer 9 that is. You can download a beta version from here if you have Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7. And you do need to download the Vista Service Pack 2 before it will work. I could add what on earth are you doing using Vista but I won't. Oh, too late. Note the url - I wonder how much they paid whoever first registered that!? Anyway, as someone who only now uses Internet Explorer to work on moodle VLE pages and who has to tryreally really hard not to use bad language when forced to use it on classroom pcs, I can only hope that it's as quick, as intuitive and pleasant to use as Chrome.

I'll let you know in a while . . .

I presume it will be labelled IE Ja in Germany.

Nice range of free media and pc tools

2010-09-16T14:44:00.000+01:00

Ashampoo, maybe not renowned for their choice of brand name, are offering a nice range of free tools.

Just go to this link and use the coupon code ASH-444LW1. Take your choice from a Screen Capture app, impressive image editor, home designer a Blu-ray/DVD/CD burning studio or their Windows optimizer.

All appear to be full versions and with no time limits. I guess they hope you'll like one of them a lot and eventually buy something like and upgrade. But you don't have to.

Ashampoo^® Burning Studio 2010 Advanced
The complete suite for burning projects on CD, DVD and Blu-ray Disc!

Ashampoo^® Home Designer
Plan or renovate your home in 3D

Ashampoo^® Snap 3
Capture anything on your screen – including videos

Ashampoo^® WinOptimizer 6
Built with 12 years of Windows optimization experience

Ashampoo^® Photo Commander 7
3D Acceleration, Panoramas and Virtual Albums

Reserve your name at about.me

2010-09-11T20:30:00.001+01:00

A bunch of clever people bought the domain about.me which is probably about the only .me worth bothering about. They've now come up with a nice idea that they propose will combine multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. You register your name and get the page about.me/yourname which will feature all that's happening across your sites and profile pages.
As they say: "... and one problem we face is pulling all of this information together to build a single on-line identity — be it for personal use, or to create a professional on-line profile. Our focus is simple, enable you to:

create a personal, dynamic profile page (think splash page) that points users to your content around the web (versus depending on Google search); and
understand how many people see your profile, where they're coming from, and what they do on your page."

Their investors include True Ventures, Radar Partners, Freestyle Capital, Scott Kurnit, AOL Ventures, David Mahoney, Founder Collective & Ron Conway.

It may or may not develop but it won't cost anything to register your name. Remember how you wished you'd got on Facebook, Twitter etc. earlier before someone else had grabbed the name you wanted and left you thinking up something that hadn't already gone? OK. Don't say I didn't warn you! I've got mine.

Office 2010beta beware!

2010-08-20T01:41:00.000+01:00

I liked Office 2010 and the free beta version seemed to last for ages. But all good things must end, someone said, and one day I realised I was back in Office 2007. That was OK as I hadn't got a spare £100 and wouldn't be able to get a free copy from College for a while.

A little while ago I was trying to print the final version of my huge great MA paper and the air had already turned blue just drafting it all. It became a purple haze Jimi Hendrix would've been proud of, though, when I tried printing it. Pages of nothing flew out of the printer. Now I know some people might say I write a load of poppycock but at least you can see poppycock. And anyway, that's for Middlesex University to decide.

Now, I admit that I did run the cartridges down to their last droplets and the level indicator showed just a thin line along the bottom and that was my first thought as to what was wrong. Replaced them. Same problem. Next I wondered whether the printer's drivers had got either corrupted in a strange way or one of my children had plugged and uplugged the thing and it had had some sort of coronary or brain damage. Installed new drivers. The old ones were 2004 vintage and the new were dated at around the time Office 2007 with its nice new Cambria, Calibri et al arrived. That must be it, I thought to myself and hit print once more. Still nothing.

Strangely, I could print PDFs fine so I did that to get the work off in time. I look for some answers on Google and the excellent Woody's Lounge. No-one else seemed to have had the problem. I even used one of those Just Answer type sites and some nice guy from the States had a go but gave up.

I did notice on my travels through the US Microsoft site that there was a trial version of Office 2010 available. No money to pay, no credit card, just download and away I go. That seemed a good idea anyway and maybe that would solve the problem. It did! For a while anyway.

On the way through installation it instructed me to uninstall 2010beta manually. I did that and now all the fonts print just fine.

What I don't know is whether all I need to have done was uninstall 2010beta. It would be pretty strange if I had to uninstall 2010 to get 2007 fonts back but it was, in fact, a suggestion from one of the leading Office guys on the planet who did reply on Woody's Lounge. Even he wasn't sure, though.

So, for the odd few people who had 2010beta but couldn't afford the upgrade and who now have the same problem, do give the uninstall thing a go and let me know.

Incidentally, I didn't see an equivalent free trial on the UK site.

My laptop hibernates more often than my tortoise

2010-08-02T21:18:00.000+01:00

Nice free defragging tool from the people that brought us the excellent CCleaner. It's a task that I don't do as often as I should but this should encourage me to have a look at the state of my hard drive a bit more frequently and actually do something about all the bits that have been dumped randomly across the place by various users, including myself, not always closing things as carefully as I should, especially on the laptop which gets carted around fom room to room and hibernates more often than my tortoise.

Click here to download this.

How does Google work?

2010-07-02T13:27:00.000+01:00

I suppose this is the second most frequently asked question and I'm delighted to be able to link to the remarkable graphic produced by PPCblog. I have no idea who they are or what PPC stands for. Readers who know me well may think it's something to do with the Paddock Party Committee whose Minutes are amusingly published on another of my blogs. It isn't. But well done to the other PPC, whoever they may be.

Memories of old computers

2010-06-15T11:44:00.002+01:00

Nice article by the TechRepublic team althoulgh they don't have pictures of a Digital Dual Display with 8" floppy drives, of which I have really fond memories.

Arial Black italic problem

2010-05-14T12:01:00.000+01:00

Arial Black or Arial Black?

Arial Black is a useful font. Big and bold and, importantly, installed with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996 and has been one of their Core web fonts since March that year That means most people using Windows will see text using that font in your document or web page as you intended rather than having it substituted with something else which may or may not look right.

A few years ago I was perplexed when I looked at instances where I used it and found the text had become italic. Putting it down to something wrong with my computer, or the way it was being rendered, I've been nervous about using it ever since as it seems to be fine on some computers and not on others, thinking that I would investigate one day. I finally had a spare moment today and did a quick search for the problem and wish I'd done that ages ago as it's nothing like as complicated to fix as I'd thought it might be!

What happened was that in 2008 Microsoft released Service Pack 3 for Windows XP and the update included a new version 2.40 of the font file ariblk.ttf. This was a mistake by someone at Microsoft who named an italicised version of Arial Black with that filename. Luckily, Service Pack updates retain uninstalled files so the problem can be solved by deleting version 2.40 and copying version 2.35 from the retained folder. This does mean diving into areas of your system that many of you may have never realised were there but it's pretty simple:

Go to C:\WINDOWS\Fonts folder and delete the Arial Black file. (ariblk.ttf ver. 2.40)

Now go to C:\WINDOWS\$NtServicePackUninstall$ and find ariblk.ttf (ver 2.35) copy it and paste it into the C:\WINDOWS\Fonts folder.

You should now have a normal Arial Black, and the italicised button will also work when you want it to!

Particular thanks to the good people at icrontic for the advice which I reproduce here for anyone still wondering what happened. Now I can get back to including it in designs again.

Big trouble with pictures still

2010-04-30T12:25:00.000+01:00

Despite all the amazing advances in the speed of our computers and the brilliant new applications we can run on them, our phones and before long on our car dashboards too, there still seems to be a blank expression on so many faces when problems with using images arise. Pictures are, at last, being used by tutors and staff a lot more but the old problems still remain.

The main ones I encounter, almost on a daily basis, are these:

E-mails that either don't go, seem to go but don't arrive or just take ages to send or open

You have exceeded your system storage limit messages

Classroom printers that just seem to give up or take a session to print just one person's file

It's all about pictures. Technology today makes taking great photos easy but even mobiles are now producing image files of 5MB or more. Now that's lovely and I'm the first to appreciate the detail and ever-increasing quality that all this brings. But if you're sharing a picture or using them to illustrate a report or presentation it's highly unlikely that you need to use the original gigantic file.

I seem to return to this theme every couple of years or so. Back in 2003 I wrote some simple notes for colleagues to follow to resize their images. In 2005 I was wailing about senior staff at a government funded organisation set up to help teachers and staff at educational institutions setting terribly bad examples themselves with massive e-mail attachments everywhere. In 2007 I was helping colleagues struggling to upload files to moodle or use illustrations on their course pages that didn't explode on the screen when opened. More recently I've been trying to get senior staff in colleges to practise what they preach.

Over and again few people seem to have much idea about how to make their lovely pictures more manageable and even if they wanted to do something about it they couldn't quickly access a simple program to do it, either because they didn't know what to use or did but couldn't have it available on their computers at work or in the classroom.

I thought I'd cracked it at one FE college when they finally got a licence for Serif PhotoPlus but over-estimated their abilities or, perhaps, willingness actually to open the application and edit their images before getting on with the job in hand. No, people open Word, PowerPoint or start typing their message, decide to stuff an image in and just browse, drop it in and continue as ever was the case.

Those few minutes that it would take for Serif or whatever to open and then figure out what size they might need and the slightly unnatural business of having to save it with a different name were simply not part of the process the brain was running to get the job in mind done.

You need a simple, very simple way to do the resizing. Thanks to a colleague at an E-learning Forum I think I've found something. It's not new, but like many tools in Windows, it's not well-publicised and does require an installation which may still prove the death of yet another idea. Microsoft have for years had a set of extra tools which I guess their geeks play around with and some make it through to us to use. They call them Power Toys. One of these is their Image Resizer. I love the way it works. You locate your image in a normal folder view:

Right click and there's a Resize Pictures option now in the menu.

A helpfully worded set of options appears. Take your pick.

Click OK and you have the smaller image saved!

The filename is automatically changed so the original is still safe. In this example my original 2200+ pixel wide shot, which, at full size would have been twice the size of a typical monitor was cut down to something that would fit nicely into a Word document or e-mail. More importantly, at 45KB it's less than 1/20th of the file size! Much better for e-mail and even ancient printers shouldn't struggle to print a document with it in.

Yes, you may need to get IT staff to install the PowerToy at work but they might then realise how useful it is and how much trouble it might save them too and even roll it out to lots of people.

I have also raved before about Irfanview which is just so quick for making screenprints. Hit the PrScr button. Fire up Irfanview. It opens faster than anything else I know. Hit Paste or Ctr+V. File, Save and give it a name. You can also crop it before saving by just dragging the mouse to select the area needed, often just a much smaller part of the display.

You can also use Irfanview to resize other images and this is a solution if you can't get the XP PowerToy installed. Just download Irfanview and save it on a USB drive or even in your own files area. It's a standalone freeware application, licensed for personal, non-commercial use and, as long as you don't put it on a network drive you shouldn't get into trouble. I would, though, recommend that IT staff buy the licence and make it available across the network.

Scary apps on facebook

2010-04-30T10:27:00.001+01:00

I was going to use the word malicious but you probably reckon you wouldn't possibly fall for something malicious. I damn nearly did though and, as PC Advisor's Eric Larkin nearly did too, the word scary somehow seems more appropriate!

Read what he says and, if you do see a new app that you'd like to play with, resist the urge to be the first amongst your friends to feature it on your page. Check it out. Leave it it for a week and think again. It may look cool but it's not so cool if you have to spend hours a few weeks later wondering why you're getting a load of SMS spam or strange deductions from your phone or even bank account!

I make no apologies for the big text:

be especially wary of any app that claims to let you do something that you can't normally do - such as permitting you to see who's viewing your profile.

All in a dad's day

2010-04-18T17:10:00.001+01:00

Disaster appeared to have struck - as you'll gather from my daughter's breathless message:

"Hi Daddy!Hope you're doing well. Just thought I'd let you know that my computer has a pretty big problem. I think I must have downloaded something by accident because I have some sort of virus (I'm assuming) and what happens is:- Constantly freezes - Constantly doing something (egg timer on cursor ALL the time) - When I open the interent sometimes it opens about 21 windows. - My msn was hacked (not sure this has anything to do with it though but some weirdo added me and I blocked and deleted him then after I got message boxes saying 'Hmm are you sure you want to do that' and 'Let's have a look through your files' though I'm pretty sure that is just a joke which really isn't funny because i scared me a lot at the time)- I can't do anything properly because 'Avira Anti Virus 9.1' or something like that (which I have never heard of before) keeps popping up with the SAME 'encountered a problem and needs to close' window and despite how many times I click 'do not send' or whatever it keeps coming up - sometimes I have 50 windows up within a minute.- Other weird message boxes which don't go away- Just a generally slow and scratchy computer."

I really did think it was going to have to be an all day job, reinstalling Windows and so on. But I thought I'd have a go at removing the pesky trojan first. Easier said than done!

At one point there must have been 100 so-called 'Avira' windows open but by closing them as fast as they opened I was able to get at a Scotty WinPatrol window and disable 'Avira' and another programme from starting up while the free PC Tools Spyware Doctor (from Google Pack) found the nasty trojan and zapped it. It also found the hack tool that someone had thrown into the mix and zapped that. I was prepared to have to reinstall Windows but impressed at these two applications' success. The full scan did take several hours, though, with over 300,000 files dealt with in the end.

Update to hard disk technology could leave XP behind

2010-03-17T10:09:00.000Z

Since the days of the first IBM PC, hard disks have always split the data that they store in to small chunks of 512 bytes, called a sector. All versions of Windows have been developed to deal with hard disks that use the 512 byte sector, since it was the industry standard. However, many hard disk manufacturers are now switching to disks with 4 kilobyte sectors – eight times the size of the previous sector size, as 4KB sectors allow today’s very large hard disks to be used more efficiently.

Windows 7 and Vista both take this shift in the size of hard disks in to account, and can use 4KB sector disks without any problems. Unfortunately XP was developed before 4KB disk sectors became the norm, and by default is incompatible with such disks. If you’re an XP user and are thinking of upgrading your hard disk, first check that your new disk doesn’t use 4KB sectors. Alternatively, you can choose a Western Digital disk, since they supply a tool to allow you to use 4KB sector disks with XP. You can get the tool here:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/03/10/wd_targets_windows_xp_4k/

Article from Windows Advisor

New designs made easy

2010-03-13T09:08:00.000Z

Love this new template designer, just released by Google.

Browsers. You've always had a choice. Now Microsoft has to tell you.

2010-03-09T18:28:00.000Z

A European Court ruling has required that Microsoft offers people a selection of browsers to choose from of which Internet Explorer will be just one. Starting around now, a Windows update will result in those with Internet Explorer as their default browser being presented with a screen showing what appears to be the five alternatives, in random order. So Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer will be offered on a panel with buttons for download.

This is good news and should result in a much more pleasant internet experience for lots of people who have never even thought there might be another way than the familiar blue e symbol and its continuous warnings and annoying pale yellow bars and boxes asking questions that even now I have to think about before clicking Yes or No.

What is particularly interesting, though, is that those five are not the only ones actually being offered. Those five are the applications that are the First Panel contenders. However, look carefully and there is a second panel. Scroll horizontally and you'll see a selection of a further seven that I have to say includes six I had never heard of before!

[screenshots by Stephen Shakland, CNET]

Goodness only knows what people will make of these! Those behind these currently lesser-known browsers are expecting to see downloads rocket as to date their growth has been 99% through word of mouth and mostly among pretty specific groups of geeky types at that. Maxthon is apparently second to IE in China and even a 1% addition to its current user numbers will double its present share of the browser market! It will be fascinating to see which of these seven do best and how they react to their new-found fame as, courtesy of some suits in Europe, an estimated 100 million Europeans could see their logos on their screens.

I say could see as the Second Panellers are a little miffed that in order to see their wares people have to perform that unnatural business of horizontal scrolling and the bar isn't exactly obvious either.

I guess I'd better download all seven now and review them on the webtools site before the European Commission start knocking on my door.

Creating a blog and using it for an on-line portfolio

2010-02-28T23:46:00.003Z

Windows Media Player 12 and the red N on your desktop

2010-02-26T14:03:00.001Z

If you have a red N next to Windows 7 Professional then you have the version without Windows Media Player. I can't imagine that you actually bought it. It's probably a version that you got on the back of an employer's licence, like me. It's the version without Windows Media Player. Apparently some EU ruling forced Microsoft to offer two versions of Windows - one with WMP and one without. They both are otherwise exactly the same and cost the same. So you'll deduce that Windows Media Player is 'free' and yes, if you do have that red N, then you can download the Windows Media Feature Pack from Microsoft.

As usual, though, finding it ain't that simple! I actually only discovered that I didn't have WMP when I wondered what the red N was as googled it! The link to the free WMP download wasn't obvious on any of the Microsoft links but, thanks to CNET, all was revealed.

Here's the link.

Essential tip to enable Aero in Windows 7/Vista

2010-02-26T11:08:00.000Z

If you reinstall Windows 7 or Vista, or buy a brand new PC, you may find that the Aero interface is not enabled by default, even if you have the correct graphics driver installed. If this is the case, then you need to run the System Rating tool, which Windows uses to check that your PC can actually support Aero. This tip will also help if you have just installed a new graphics card too. To do so, follow these steps:
Right-click on Computer and choose Properties.
Click the link System rating is not available.
Click Rate this computer. The rating process can take some time, but when it is complete, Aero should be enabled.

Information from the excellent Windows Advisor

Helping an old friend out with Facebook . . .

2010-01-26T17:40:00.003Z

A colleague has just asked me and someone else he knows this question about Facebook, having been contacted by someone he didn't think he knew. Couldn't resist sharing the correspondence! I'll add 'Mum's' when I get it.

Dear Andrew & Shelagh

. . . I went on it for the first time in a year and I saw a debbie mclaren who asked me a question about my flying apparel on the front page - she seems a perfectly decent sort though I have no idea who she is and wondered if she came via your good selves?As you can tell I'm not sure how it all works . . .

Steve

Dear Steve

Come along, old boy, some frilly wants to be friendly and you need advice??!! Shelagh & I feel like your mum and dad!!I don't recognise the name but you may be able to find out more about her by clicking on her name or profile picture which should link to her profile. That may provide a hint. Could be someone that's been in an audience at one of your events, a friend of a friend or just someone who liked your picture!

My guess is that Debbie was looking for someone she had met called Steve Smith and Facebook has a simple name search facility which will have, in your case and unfortunately for her, probably come up with 100,000+ possibilities. (My name's pretty common - probably 20,000+ but Shelagh's luckier and simpler to find).

Anyway, Debbie has probably liked your floppy bits and decided to while away a couple of minutes in the office making a comment before proceeding with her search of the other 99,999+ Steve Smiths. You may find she's asked you to be a 'friend' (look at the top of the right panel) which would help identify her if you say yes. No harm done. You can always delete her if she's a nuisance. My daughter has an incredible 1000 'friends'.

Think of Facebook as something like a car park. People may occasionally scrawl on your dusty bootlid or stick a note under your wiper. You may even wind down the window and chat with someone else. When you're away from the car you can leave a note saying 'Back soon' or leave some pics on the dashboard shelf. Or you may just sit there listening to some CDs (sorry, cassettes in your car) or playing with yourself. Games I mean. I think. Maybe not but that's another matter we needn't develop here. Debbie may have parked next to you once a while ago or has just been leaving notes on anyone's car with something she's liked inside.

Just a thought . . it is dead easy to make a profile so, for instance, Geoff Foot may have decided to make a new one with some random picture and a different e-mail address and to call himself Debbie. Always sobering to bear that in mind should some particularly attractive person appear on your page before you jump in the old red Cavalier and head for Cardiff on a promise :)

Andrew

There's more to life than Arial and Times New Roman

2010-01-22T13:20:00.005Z

An excellent range of fonts available free (check the licence terms as not all are limited to personal use) from Fonts2u.com. The standard Windows | Office set is pretty short on handwriting fonts in particular. Careful use of some good fonts can totally transform a document and yet I still see so many very tired looking notices and assignment covers in either Times New Roman or Arial where all the author managed to do was hit the italic, bold and underline buttons on the toolbar, usually all together too! Ugh! So go get some new ones and experiment a little!

17 drafts and counting . . .

2010-01-18T11:37:00.003Z

Some time ago a client gave me the nickname Merlin because he reckoned I could work magic on documents to turn tedious text into something professional that someone might actually want to read. It's quite an enjoyable pastime, especially when I can get paid for it too and I almost relish the prospect of getting some Arial bold underlined and italic text, usually justified and in too bigger font to weave a spell over.

A few days ago, 12 Word documents arrived for my attention - the idea being to merge them all into one. As it was something that would be getting a wide circulation and possibly forming the basis for some future regulations its content would be contentious and likely to be mulled over in great detail. I had a feeling it wasn't going to be the easiest of tasks. The first problem was an assortment of page orientation and margins. Setting one set of margins for the whole document was fine except for the landscape pages where tables now stretched off into the distance right and others now appeared to have text jumbled about. The author had carefully typed entries into cells in a table, including longer sentences being split into two or more cells. Why on earth they hadn't had the whole thing in one cell, or merged a few I have no idea. As if that wasn't enough of a problem, I was then faced with indents that weren't indents but three or four spaces. Now these probably looked lovely in a particular font at a particular size but they sure didn't work now!

Eventually things began to take shape but I still had lots more sections than I wanted. The trouble was, every time I deleted a section break I lost headers and footers and no amount of linking to previous seemed to work. Finally, just two sections, one for the front page and the rest in the other, headers behaving and footers too.

Sent this off. The client says he'd like a nice graduated colour background. Hmm. In Word? No. I don't think so. better use Serif Page Plus which does that sort of thing excellently. Unfortunately, I couldn't transfer the contents from Word into Serif. It kept going wrong at the tables and making a complete mess. Another idea: I'd make a PDF from Word 2007 and use Serif to add backgrounds then re-export as a PDF again. Well, it certainly looked nice. Unfortunately, there had been some typos and text changes to fix. That's when I learned what a complete mess Serif makes of text in tables on conversion to PDF. Admittedly the text was a bit odd with spaces, some cells merged, some not, but the collection of overlapping frames with bits of text here and there was a nightmare. Even some words appeared to be split. Then there were the lines. what had been continuous lines in Word were now hundreds, maybe thousands, of very tiny lines instead. Fine whilst they all stayed together but one slip of the mouse and all was lost. Adding just one character to a word resulted in everything moving in a most unpredictable manner too. I persevered and sort of managed to make the tables look OK but it took hours.

That would have been fine but then came the dots. I hadn't seen them on my screen but someone else asked about them and it seems that moving some lines around left 1 pixel dots here and there. I found a few and managed to delete them but most were on layers several below and proved impossible to get at without moving those odd frames out of the way. That was just impossible as they'd never fit into place again so I gave up on the Serif solution.

Back to Word, which I knew had a watermark option and by using a custom image I could get some sort of background in place. That was quite easy but the edge of the image was exactly on the same margin as the text so looked a bit grotty. I had an idea to indent all the text but that was far too big a job and would have meant narrower tables which would have messed up the words in cells again! I knew I should have sat down and retyped all those individual cell contents into one big one but too late to start that now.

Strangely, the client was quite happy with the background but I wasn't. How could I add a full width background to a Word document? Ah! I could use the watermark image but not as a watermark but as an image behind text. I tried one page and it worked. Great. Pasted another 64 in and, after a bit of lining-up it was looking as good as the Serif production. Better, actually, which is saying something for Word.

Another really nice thing about using Word was that I could get the client to correct their own typos, or amend something they changed their mind about! Such a relief! Unfortunately, they must have moved some of those images while they were fiddling so it came back looking a dog's breakfast again. That's when I discovered that if you add images to a document when viewing more than one page they are inclined to disappear without trace if you go slightly over one edge! No idea where they went but lost 6 or 7 that way.

Finally, by now at draft 15, the delight of just save as PDF in Word 2007 and I sent a nice-looking document to my client. Draft 16 was needed because my image had covered up the footer. I had made it transparent at the top to allow the header to show but had forgotten about the footer. But why doesn't setting the image as 'behind text' not go behind the header and footer? Silly. It should do.

This morning I gather that Devon needed to be Dorset. I was so tempted to say, well, just change it then. But I didn't. Luckily, the client agreed to dispense with the footer. The only solution to that would have been adding to the image - now that would be getting crazy!

Quite some spelling test for Merlin!

Windows 7 questions but Microsoft staff need to learn some other lessons

2010-01-18T11:25:00.003Z

To help you get the best out of Windows 7, Microsoft has produced a short guide, which we're passing on to you. It's a PDF full of helpful hints, tips and how-to information; download your Guide to Windows 7 here (802 KB).

Add your own questions and answers to our Word version of the Guide, then pass it on to your users. Download it here (2.3 MB).

Something that occurred to me when I saw the size of these 8 page documents, though, was the need for someone at Microsoft to look at why they're so massive! Having just worked on a 65 page document with illustrations, backgrounds etc. which still only lands at 1MB in Word2007, I reckon theirs should be considerably smaller. This business of sharing unnecessarily huge files is something I have been going on about for over 5 years now - and it so often seems to be people who should know better who cause the most problems!

For all that, I like Windows7 and admire the way Microsoft have created a Word document and suggest we add our own Q & As! Although it is a bit odd.

Page borders

2009-12-01T19:11:00.003Z

A friend just asked me this question: "Any idea where I can find free downloadable Word page borders? Please. I'm trying to make some Christmas card competition certificates and what I've found is so awful and basic."

I have always really struggled with Word borders and don't think I've used one since 1998. This is mainly because printers tend not to print quite what you'd expect or something has been set to Letter not A4 and all that stuff from the old days. No doubt things are better now but I can't suggest anything officially Word.

However, two ideas spring to mind (in the absence, presumably of the excellent Serif products?) and they are:

(a) take slices from an image - could be literally anything big enough (ie landscape wider than 3300pixels and deeper than about 2500 pixels for good quality printing). You have your own photos or look for something on morguefile.com or sxc.hu (registration required for the latter but both free) or, I suppose, Google Images (but remember to change options to show only large images). You could find particular colours by using the brilliant Flickr tool on my webtools site - can't remember what it's called but something like Multicolr on this page where you just pick a colour and it finds pics with that shade in. The slices can then be placed on the border of the document as you please.

(b) er, can't remember what (b) was now, oh yes, I know, PowerPoint - you know PowerPoint isn't just for slides, don't you? And you can write letters in PowerPoint just like Word. All you have to do is change the Slide Set-up to A4 or whatever you want. Then design your page the easy way with the usual range of tools. You could easily create a cool background by covering the whole page with a shade, graphic or image even and then putting a white rectangle on top of that. Hey pisto, I mean presto, you've got a very smart-looking template. Add text boxes for whatever you need if others are to use it. In fact, if you put all the design gubbins on the master slide then the kids can't possibly mess up the page anyway.

Old things that still work well, like sums in Google

2009-11-25T10:01:00.004Z

This has been around for years but, just in case you'd forgotten, typing a calculation in the Google search box will give you the answer. Even better is just typing the sum in the address bar in Google Chrome where the answer comes up without you even having to go the trouble of hitting Return!

I used to have the Windows Calculator pinned to the Start menu but that can go now. (It always struck me as odd that it was buried in Accessories, Notepad, too. Hmm maybe I can find something else for that too.)

Lastly, whilst on the topic of old stuff that's still useful, I am still amazed at how swiftly IrfanView opens up and does the job of editing and saving images like screenprints. The two illustrations above were so easy. Where no special effects or pixel work are required this free programme is quite brilliant and long may it remain light and simple.

If your browser takes forever to open . . .

2009-11-24T18:06:00.006Z

. . . it could be due to an overloaded Java cache. Firefox has been taking nearly 5 minutes on some computers, prompting me to switch to Chrome, but it may be due to clutter after all. You probably know browsers these days store every image, every page you visit, ads and all and that has to be swept away at least once a week. Same with java.

The Java Control Panel applet lets you clear Java's temporary Internet cache and reset the default cache size to a more reasonable amount.

For many people, the most-important application on their PCs is their browser. But sometimes it seems to take forever for the program to open.

To clear your Java cache, click Start, Control Panel, Programs (if necessary), Java. In the Temporary Internet Files section under the General tab, choose the Settings button.

In the Temporary Files Settings dialog, click Delete Files. (See Figure 1.) The default size of the Java cache on PCs I checked was 1GB (or "1000MB," as shown). There's no particular reason why the cache needs to be this large. A more reasonable cache size is between 100MB and 200MB.

With acknowledgments to the excellent WindowsSecrets.com

Office 2010 beta now available for download

2009-11-18T20:38:00.002Z

If you fancy taking the new Microsoft Office 2010 for a spin then download it here. Microsoft suggest that you remove any previous versions first which means you may need some alternative way to deal with Office stuff on whichever machine you decide to put it on. Just in case.

Google Image Swirl

2009-11-18T18:11:00.003Z

A nice new feature for Google Images.
&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;If you can see this, your browser doesn't &amp;lt;br&amp;gt;understand IFRAME. However, we'll still &amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;lt;A HREF="http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/html?query=jaguar#"&amp;gt;link&amp;lt;/A&amp;gt; &amp;lt;br&amp;gt;you to the file.&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;

Watch out for Voddler

2009-11-12T22:17:00.002Z

I have a suspicion that the name may change by the time it gets here but perhaps it sounds better to the Swedes, who can use this application to watch movies streamed to their computer, laptop or phone. It's very much like Spotify, the clear winner to date in free and legal music streaming but to be able to get movies on demand will be something impressive.

The service isn't available outside Sweden yet but there people can choose from over 800 movies already, with just a short advertising feature at the start of each. Whether there will be interruptions from 'This is Sebastian from Voddler, thanking you for . .' and all that jazz remains to be seen, (or not, hopefully).

keep an eye on developments at the Voddler site.

Very smart animation - it'll make sense at the end

2009-11-05T01:10:00.002Z

Catch a wave

2009-11-03T17:45:00.004Z

Delighted to get a Google Wave account at the weekend. And 20 invitations which I have already had requests for at a ratio of about 5:1. If you haven't heard of this then you soon will (and there are links in some previous posts). Think e-mail, IM, live collaboration on a document, image or video sharing, maps showing where you or something mentioned is, polls all rolled into one application that lets you see someone's message or additions as they enter them rather than waiting for them to hit send and you may get the idea.

I'll be trying it out with some carefully chosen friends, probably doing something silly like planning a trip to Greece or boring like agreeing a meeting agenda at first and then hopefully extending it as we get more expert and figuring out what we can achieve.

If you think you could be a useful ally in this trial then contact me - there should be a link somewhere on the blog. Or look on my web site.

So, to end as I started, with a Beach Boys track, Let's go surfin' now, everybody's surfin' now, surfin' USA . . . and UK.

Microsoft Security Essentials is free

2009-10-24T01:57:00.003+01:00

Once there was One Care Live or Live One Care which was free for so long that I don't think I ever had to pay for it. It was a bit slow but did seem to catch some nasty stuff that other anti-virus applications had missed. Then there was the Malware protection that came with IE8, free again, and a suggestion that the OneCare pack would be available free under a name I did publish ages ago but can't now remember. Then came Windows 7 and you may find that you need to install some new anti-virus and malware protection. Windows 7 does come with some pretty smart firewall protection and IE8 will bring the same as it had before but for peace of mind you may wish to download Microsoft Security Essentials. (Here's what they say about it in their own words. Hope they don't mind the copy and paste but saves me time!)

Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free* download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple.

Microsoft Security Essentials runs quietly and efficiently in the background so that you are free to use your Windows-based PC the way you want—without interruptions or long computer wait times.

*as long as you're running genuine XP, Vista or 7

Who's following @kirrisdad?

2009-10-22T21:36:00.001+01:00

This nice little application will make a mosaic of your Twitter followers' avatars. here's mine at the time of writing:

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Great new themes for your browser

2009-10-22T18:32:00.003+01:00

As long as it's Chrome, that is. Version 3 started offering these really great designs a few weeks ago but for those of your who haven't got Chrome here's a nice preview (short and with a surprise at the end.)

"Sorry I'm late - laptop tooks ages to shut down . . ."

2009-10-15T17:18:00.004+01:00

If you're in a hurry to get home you might want to start shutting down your Windows laptop a good bit earlier than usual for a few days. There's a huge set of updates which, if you've subscribed to automatic updates, will come your way (and if you haven't you should) and, whilst they'll download quietly in the background, when you go to shut down there's be a message along the lines of "installing updates 1 of 18" + the familiar remonstrations against unplugging or turning off.

I have always wondered why I couldn't unplug if the battery's in good condition. One explanation may be that on battery use the sleep or hibernate conditions may kick in much earlier and interrupt the installation.

So, as this can take a good 20-30 minutes, unless you're happy to wander around with an open laptop that isn't about to hibernate, you need to allow a bit of extra time for all 18 to get done.

More about what the 18 are all about here.

Google Chrome themes make beautiful browsing

2009-10-05T19:17:00.003+01:00

Firefox has had some excellent themes but Google's latest are stunning. I have often remarked on how well Google things work but how they really should employ the services of a good designer and now they've gone one step further and asked a whole bunch of some of the best designers around to come up with styles for their new Chrome browser.

There are lots to choose from and, I should think, something for everyone. Can't wait to see students' faces when I casually open up some links in the morning and the efficient but bland and minimalist window has become something pretty impressive!

get the latest Chrome browser and then use the psnnaer icon to access Options and then Get themes. Here is a link to some previews.

My son's < fell off

2009-09-06T17:16:00.003+01:00

It will happen from time to time. A key snaps off the laptop keyboard. It just happened to one of my son's, probably as a result of an argument with his big sister but that's not relevant here. What is relevant is how pleased I was to be able to put it back on again.

The keys have three components: the flattish bit with the letter, number or symbol on, a retainer device (usually plastic) and a metal clip which is unlikely to come away, being well fixed to the base around a squishy bit that handles the pressing of the key to make it work.

If you're lucky, just the flat bit with the symbol has come off. You can take these off with your fingers relatively easily, in fact, and they will snap back into position with a satisfying click.

If you're not so lucky, the retainer clip will have come off too. It may not be very obvious but a bit of careful poking around with a small screwdriver should separate the top of the key from the clip. You may find you can fit this back into position but if you're not sure which way up or where it locates itself, take another key top off and that'll give you an idea. Mine took a bit of fiddling and experimentation but it did eventually stay put.

Then you should be able to snap the key top back on.

If something has actually broken then spare parts are available and inexpensive - unless someone's damaged the base itself, I suppose.

All this I discovered by visting the excellent site called Laptop Repair Help which has nice photos and links for spares. Brilliant. Another reminder of just how the world has changed. One Google search and up comes the answer. I can't think of how many trips to shops, calls and messages that would have taken by any other method, let alone cost!

I wondered why I was writing to myself

2009-08-05T19:35:00.004+01:00

Getting a couple of e-mails from oneself is usually a bad sign. I do tend to talk to myself but seldom e-mail unless it's some kind of last resort method to transfer a file or make a note of something. It is 99% certain to mean that there's a trojan operating on one of my pcs and goodness knows who it's sending spam out to. I discovered the trojan by taking Google's Spyware Doctor for a spin. This free little application found it (as well as a few harmless data collectors) and zapped it in a flash. The full scan (which I'd recommend as these things don't always hide in what even this application thinks are the most likely places) does take a while but it's still faster than Windows One Live Care and a lot less intrusive. Currently trying to run it on Windows 7 but so far no luck - more on that later.

The link will take you to a Google 'pack' of goodies, many of which you may well either already have or not particularly want now. Just remove the ticks as necessary. Even if you think, like me, that you have all the protection you need, this can do no harm and if it all comes up clear that's good to know!

There's another wave coming

2009-07-29T12:46:00.002+01:00

Microsoft also tend to be a little backward in coming forward sometimes. I've mentioned the brilliant deal on Office 2007 available to many and time is running out for the most quietly announced Windows 7 cut-price offer too. Now I discover they have a Wave of their own, obviously hoping that this will prevent Google claiming the word as their own!

An attractive site (Google still have a bit to learn there) sets out in reasonably plain English what they're up to and links to various betas, trials etc. Worth dropping in from time to time.

Microsoft Wave

Google goodies: Spy Doctor

2009-07-29T12:33:00.003+01:00

Many of Google's goodies are well-hidden. Just found this good spyware and nasty things identification tool amongst their Google Pack offering. The pack includes a bundle of other stuff that you will either have or maybe not need but it is simple just to tick those that you want.

Interestingly, their SpyDoctor found a couple of items that Avast and CCleaner had missed. Hmm.

when = doesn't = equals in Excel 2007?

2009-06-26T18:30:00.002+01:00

Just for a change, it's me that's looking for an answer. Something strange happened during a recent Excel 2007 course when I was demonstrating how to make one cell use the content of another one and compare it then put a statement in a box depending on what the result was. For years I have been using something along the lines of =if(A1=0.01,"right","wrong"). Pretty simple stuff but it didn't work!

Investigating, it appeared that instead of A1 containing something like 0.01 which was the result of some basic adding and multiplying it actually contained something like 0.0099999913. So I was getting wrong when it should have been right.

We looked at other numbers on the sheet and lots of them were similarly odd. Even though we'd entered just numbers with at most two decimal places in cells and none of the calculations could have led to intermediate steps in the calculations (just adding or subtracting or multiplying by whole numbers) some had lots of extra decimals and were nearly the right number and when rounded showed the right number but weren't stored by Excel as the right number.

Now, unless I have been really silly or the coffee and biscuits had a detrimental effect on not only my sanity but also that of some pretty talented delegates, this is bizarre to say the least. I guess I should do a search for the answer but thought I'd share it with you just to show that there are questions I can't answer! No doubt there'll be more on this soon!

I don’t want people to see my formulae (and may also want to prevent editing of some cells)

2009-06-24T22:26:00.001+01:00

To hide formulae in Excel2007 select the cell(s) with the formula or formulae and right click. The Format Cells panel has a Protection tab. In there check Hidden (and locked if you don’t want people to edit the cell at all). Then return to the sheet. On the Review ribbon, click Protect sheet. Be careful if you set a password to make a note of it somewhere!

In older Office all cells are locked by default, so ‘protecting’ the sheet will prevent any changes which may not be what you want. So you need to uncheck the ‘locked’ setting first for whichever cells you want people to have access to. I think it’s the same for Office 2007. To protect a sheet in Office 2003 and previous versions use Tools>Protection>Protect sheet after clearing cells as necessary.

Similar principles apply to hidden cells (‘hidden’ seems to mean formulae only rather than anything else)

My language setting is Welsh! How do I change it?

2009-06-24T22:24:00.000+01:00

Use *Tools menu > Language > Set Language

In the panel select just English (UK) and click on Default then click Yes to change Normal template for Word

If this doesn’t work try using *Tools > Options >Popular options and change language settings

It is more likely that your default language may have been set as English (US) instead of English (UK) which you’ll spot by things like color, dialing with one letter l and organization with a z instead of an s etc.

*see other post to locate Tools in Office2007

How do I stop overwriting in Word?

2009-06-24T22:21:00.001+01:00

This happens in older versions because you have (usually accidentally) hit the Insert key.

Use *Tools menu > Word Options > Advanced

On that panel uncheck the Use Insert key to control overtype mode

In Word2007 this is off by default but may be on in older versions

*see my other post for the new Tools location

Where on earth are Tools and Options for Office 2007?

2009-06-24T22:19:00.001+01:00

To get to the Tools menu in Office 2007 either download the ‘old style’ toolbar add-in or use Start>All Programs>Microsoft Office>Microsoft Office Tools

Office 2007 Ultimate for £38 or even free

2009-05-31T21:52:00.001+01:00

Microsoft sure hid this well. They call it The Ultimate Steal. This is a great deal for anyone who can't get it from their boss (many organisation licences include a Home Use element which is worth asking the boss about) and who is a 'student' with an institution recognised by Microsoft. Most .ac.uk e-mail addresses are recognised.

Here's the link:

http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-uk/default.aspx

Good luck!

Simple adjustments to images in Serif PhotoPlus

2009-05-10T20:58:00.002+01:00

Very, very simple stuff here but some students needed to have some basic instructions on how to get started with making adjustments to images that would be suitable for a rollover effect - each picture being similar but one needing dadjustment for the right effect

Adjusting images using Serif PhotoPlus

Creating a web page and adding (some simple) CSS

2009-05-10T20:54:00.002+01:00

Creating a web page and adding CSS

Pretty simple stuff, I know, but I'm having trouble getting some students to get started with CSS and these notes seemed to help a bit as they could kick off in a pretty normal way and then, provided they stuck to the defaults, adding a little code worked wonders.

How can I add tooltips to web page images or links

2009-05-10T20:51:00.002+01:00

Well, I'm not sure they should really be called tooltips but here's the low-down on ALT and title text with examples of how to include them.

How and when to use alt and title text

Some more notes I did for a task students will be doing this week which I can share if anyone's interested

How do I create rollover images on a web page?

2009-05-10T20:48:00.002+01:00

Creating rollover images: javascript vs css

Some notes I prepared for students which may help someone out there

Bugs

2009-04-10T16:02:00.003+01:00

Conficker started spreading last November, and there are many variants of the virus around that can spread in several different ways, including through infected USB drives. If you are worried that your PC might be infected, Microsoft have released a tool capable of removing several Conficker variants, plus several other malware infections. You can download it from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/malwareremove/default.mspx

Even if you don't think you've got a problem I would recommend downloading and running this and then repeating the scan once every week or two as I've seen several instances of decent anti-virus software being fooled by this.

By the way, this is a typical time for people to send all their friends mail foretelling great disaster and so on. Just remember to check in at snopes.com (link to the virus and hoax page) before taking any notice.

Scareware - don't get fooled again!

2009-04-03T16:45:00.003+01:00

As The Who said.

You may remember AntiVirus2008 or whatever it was called. You get this message that says you need to get protection which takes you to a site where you were asked to pay money for some software that didn't actually do anything. The virus itself didn't do much in the first place but was very annoying and damn difficult to remove. I know from experience, which is why I want to tell you about the latest, much nastier development.

Called Antivirus2009, you'll get it by downloading some dodgy software or clicking a link in an e-mail to a site that's set to install it and, whereas its predecessor did nothing much, 2009 encrypts your files so that you can't read them. Now that is a pain. So then you will need their FileFix Professional program to unencrypt them. And that'll cost you $50.

There are, unfortunately, so many e-mails going around frightening people about all kinds of totally invented risks and calamities that warnings about this genuine one may also get ignored as yet another hoax. So be particularly careful until your virus protection programme has caught up with this threat and is capable of keeping you out of trouble or, at least, warning you that something's amiss in that innocent-looking music, video or Pictures of Lily download.

Are your friends getting odd e-mails from you?

2009-04-03T16:27:00.002+01:00

You may not know about it if your friends are polite but your computer could be mailing everyone on your address list a whole load of stuff if you've got a virus. The one that everyone's talking about at the moment is called Conficker and, whilst supposed to do things on 1 April could well rumble away in the background and mail out or share information any other day in reality. I've already had a few examples from people I hadn't expected to be victims but who may not have got the important patches when they were released by Microsoft.

To make this as simple as possible, if you have any doubts (and especially if the computer's been running sluggishly on occasion) follow the instructions below to see whether you have the necessary Windows update file. (XP and Vista versions coutesy of Office Watch. There are links to the patch if you need it.

Windows XP

Go to Control Panel | Programs and Features | Add or Remove Programs then check the ‘Show Updates’ box and wait for the long list of updates to appear. Scroll down to the list of updates under ‘Windows XP – Software Updates’:

Windows XP - Conflicker patch details.jpg

Scroll down the long list and look at the ‘KB’ references – the one you want to find is KB958644 .

The Windows XP patch if you don’t have it installed.

Windows Vista

Go to Control Panel | Programs and Features | Installed Updates. It may take a little time for the entire list to appear including all the Windows patches.

Windows Vista - Conflicker patch details.jpg

Scroll down the long list and look at the ‘KB’ references – the one you want to find it KB958644 .

The Windows Vista patch if you don’t have it installed.

Office 2007 menus!

2009-03-27T11:09:00.002Z

There are lots of things I like about Office 2007 but even after all this time I often struggle to find things that I could do in a flash in Office 97 (which I still use quite happily on a couple of machines!) I've searched and searched through the new ribbons and actually thought that it would have been quicker to search Google first but, of course, by the time you realise that you think that surely it won't be much longer before you find what you want!

Classic things that left me stranded for a while were form things and discovering how to switch off Protection took ages! Even headers took a while at first and I missed the nice tables and borders menu. There is a solution, though: get a 'classic' menu like the one above that should be a much more familiar environment for anyone else like me. It's free, too. Courtesy of UbitMenu as featured by the splendid OfficeWatch people.

Cloudy days coming

2009-03-27T11:00:00.003Z

Cloud computing is the latest industry buzzword. There is a lot of debate within the industry as to exactly how Cloud Computing is defined but, basically, what it refers to is the concept of providing applications as services over the Internet, supported by a remote pool of servers doing all the computing hard work. Examples include services such as Hotmail and Google Docs. The user of the application doesn’t need to install any software on their PC except for a web browser to access the application, and has no idea where the application is running, or on what sort of computer.

While Hotmail is one of Microsoft’s most popular current cloud offerings, they are planning a massive expansion of applications they make available ‘in the cloud’, which could eventually lead to versions of Microsoft Office, paid for via a subscription model, accessed via your web browser. Microsoft’s cloud system is based on a new technology they have developed called Azure Services Platform. The interesting thing is that this allows other developers to write software that runs in the cloud, on Microsoft’s servers, potentially rendering Windows, and the desktop PC as we know it, redundant.

Acknowledgements to Stefan Johnson of Windows Adviser who writes cool news in Plain English and gets to know stuff like this earlier than many.

GDrive and Live Mesh

2009-02-05T17:01:00.004Z

There have been rumours but it does look like Google are getting ready to launch something that could be really big. The article below from David Mayer at ZDNet.

There's been a flurry of speculation of late, surrounding Google's online storage play, the fabled "GDrive". We're always suspicious of such unconfirmed, echo-chamber-type stories, but this one is most definitely real.

The evidence lies in an online, recently-updated Google Pack file that refers to a product, called GDrive, that "provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents [and] allows you to access your files from anywhere, any time and from any device - be it from your desktop, web browser or mobile phone".

It is not yet clear how much storage will be available through GDrive, as Google has not yet officially announced its launch. A Google spokesperson sent a statement to ZDNet UK on Friday, which said that "cloud computing is going mainstream" and noted that "the applications people use every day, such as email, photo sharing, and word processing, are moving to the web because it's easier to share and access your data from anywhere when it's online, in one place".

"We're always listening to our users and looking for ways to update and improve our web applications, including sharing and access options, but we don't have anything new to announce right now," Google's statement read.

Quick addition. Microsoft's Live Mesh! More soon but it looks brilliant, in theory, at any rate. Access one computer's files from another, synchronise stuff. Sounds like exactly what I've wanted for ages and this could transform the way we all work. OK. I'll calm down. Go check out Office Watch and make your own mind up.

December bugs

2008-12-19T11:18:00.002Z

You can hardly have missed all the news about Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 having a pretty disastrous hole that could let sites you visit collect data.

According to The Register, an estimated one in 500 users worldwide have been exposed to the vulnerability, Microsoft estimates. The volume of attacks grew by 50 per cent from Friday until Saturday alone with little sign of a let-up. It's highly unusual for Redmond to quote such stats, and the fact it has underlines the mounting seriousness of the problem.

At first it was reckoned that only IE 7 users were affected, but further analysis suggests that versions 5.01, 6, and 8 of the browser are also vulnerable.

A patch has been released by Microsoft so do make sure you get it and install it. If you have Windows updates turned on to automatic then it should by now have been downloaded but you may still have to click a little yellow shield icon in the tray near the clock to install it. If you aren't sure, just visit Windows Update and follow the instructions.

While you're at it, download Firefox or Google Chrome and use one of them instead. You may still need Microsoft's product for some banks and other sites but the alternatives are currently safer (and quicker!)
A couple of viruses are also doing the rounds:

If you do have either, there are removal instructions available. Let me know if you need them.

W32.Tidserv

This virus copies itself to removable storage (flash drives, external USB drives etc).

A quick way to discover if your PC is infected is to search for the following file:

Windows Vista Home Premium/Vista Home Basic/XP: C:\Windows\System32\dll.dll
Windows 2000: C:\Winnt\System32\dll.dll
Windows Me/98SE: C:\Windows\System\dll.dll

W32.Randsom.A

As with the previous virus, W32.Randsom.A copies itself to removable storage.

A quick way to discover if your PC is infected is to search for the following file:

Windows Vista Home Premium/Vista Home Basic/XP/Me/98SE: C:\Windows\TEMP\errir.exe
Windows 2000: C:\WINNT\Temp\errir.exe

Anti-virus: Morro to replace Live OneCare

2008-11-20T19:59:00.003Z

Microsoft's Live OneCare has been around for a while and I have taken advantage of what seems to be a very long free trial period on some equipment. It was the only product that managed to remove a nasty trojan on my daughter's laptop some time ago but other equipment has survived reasonably well with Avast and a selection of other excellent freeware tools such as CCleaner, WinPatrol and Threatfire.

What was a bit of a pain was the nannying that came with it - until I eventually told the software that I didn't want it checking this and that or backing up things. So hearing that Microsoft will cease offering Live OneCare on a subscription basis is fine by me. The replacement, called Morro, will be essential an anti-virus product and will be available free but not installed by default with Windows or IE.

All seems well with that world, then.

W3C standards resources

2008-11-17T19:40:00.003Z

This may sound a bit grey and I have to admit that for a long time I couldn't get excited about these. I mean the idea of over 450 organisations and experts ever being able to agree on anything, let alone publish anything in a way that could be helpful for those of us who don't start creating web pages by writing code or can manage only some pretty basic code and only when we have to, seemed highly unlikely.

I am pleasantly surprised, therefore, that, having finally got around to finding what The World Wide Web Consortium was all about, they talk a great deal of sense. Anyone who has had to struggle with making pages look good in umpteen different browsers or had to explain to a client why that beautifully crafted png file looks dreadful on the ancient IE6 browser his office is still using will appreciate the excellent work being done and will be in favour of their desire to make the web a better place - and a more consistent one - where we make one page and that's it, it works.

By way of introduction and to gather a bundle of links together for students and colleagues, I have made some resources available at this link which, whilst pretty basic, may help someone.

I do love CSS stylesheets and the ease with which I can switch the appearance of content but they're still a bit of a pain in that I have to write out all the code and I just wish I could find some nice software that recognises what I'm doing and translate my efforts into acceptable code for a sheet. I have to say that the ease with which very attractive pages can be put together by complete amateurs utilising software like Serif Web Plus and Coffee Cup is going to have an impact sooner or later and someone simply will have to come up with an application at a reasonable price that does the same job and meets the standards.

To make a small site using tables I need a quiet evening a a couple of cups of coffee. To recreate the same thing using CSS takes me ages unless I borrow someone else's template. And several glasses of alcohol to calm my frustration at getting layouts to behave as I'd like and easily been able to do in the old way. So, for the sake of my health, driving licence and possibly future career, software suggestions welcome!

Will w3c validation help your Google ranking?

2008-11-14T23:20:00.002Z

There has been lots of debate about this. w3c validation may mean that you have clean code on your web pages which will ensure they appear consistently in most people's browsers and that they can be better interpreted by small screens on PDAs and phones and, in particular, will have many of the features that make them more accessible to those with some disabilities. This, in itself, though, whilst commendable, does not mean they'll get higher ranking in search engines.

I have just come across this quote from an interview with Adam Lasnik (SEO Strategist at Google) in which he says:

[T]here are many great reasons to have your site validate, and to do validation checking. It can help your site, and could be more accessible to a lot of different people and browsers. But, here is the core problem why we cannot use this in our scoring algorithms currently: There are a ton of very high quality sites, pages and sites from universities, from research institutions, from very well respected ecommerce stores, of which I won't name any, that have really crufty sites, and sites that won't validate. On some of these you can view the source and cry. And, because this is quality content, we really can't use that as an effective signal in search quality. So, you can quote me a saying, I would be thrilled, it would make my day if people would decruft their sites, but it's not going to directly affect their Google ranking.

I thought it was worth adding it here. Not the sort of thing that all readers will be interested in but those working with CSS will. What I particularly liked, though, was his comment that there are many crufty sites from respectable and often-consulted organisations and insitutions that do not qualify for w3c validation yet have considerable merit and deliver what people want (albeit not in the best way, perhaps).

I have never encountered the word crufty before. A combination of crap, rough and grotty perhaps.

Lost files and folders

2008-10-28T17:36:00.002Z

Several people have been telling me that they have lost files or folders - even My Documents and e-mail - recently. Whilst one or two may have been a little unimaginative in their excuses for not doing something, most I reckoned were genuine. Often a careless sweep of a mouse or unfortuante combination of keys, especially involving Alt or Ctrl instead of shift, can have strange effects - the important thing to remember is that nothing just disappears.

Everything you've ever done is there somewhere (unless you have formatted the whole disk). You just don't know where. Searching is worth a try but not using Microsoft's sluggish tool. Get Google Desktop and give that a whirl once it's indexed your drive. Take a peek in your Recycled bin too. Failing that, and especially if there have been visual changes to the desktop, try going back to a recent Restore Point. Start>Control Panel>Performance & Maintenance>Restore Points.

Files never actually leave the hard disk, even when deleted. If there's something important stll missing then you may be able to find it using a program like Recover4All which is worth keeping a link to for another day too.

"Sorry - forgot the attachment . . ."

2008-10-27T09:38:00.002Z

We've all had to say that - in my case on umpteen occasions! In fact I had a standard phrase worked out to add to the second message which ran along the lines of why on earth doesn't someone come up with a little program that scans your mail for certain words like 'attach' or 'enclose' and warn you when you forget to do so and planned to paste this in each time.

At last someone has come up with just that! Gmail users can now get a simple add on created by someone called Jonathan K (hopefully not singing Everyone's Gone To The Moon). Look in Settings and then Labs and scroll down to the required entry. Click Enable and that's it. Great!

Now maybe someone can make something as simple for the tediously ill-featured Microsoft Webmail I have to use for College mail.

FAQs they can answer

2008-10-05T17:17:00.002+01:00

The CNET Community is one of those nice sites where you can get answers to problems and, in particular, read other people's questions and see what sort of replies they got. Yes, there are a few very geeky ones and a few more that even my daughter (she's the non-techy one) can answer but you can ignore all those if you like.

Here's the link. That'll take you to the Archives.

Internet Country Codes

2008-09-19T19:49:00.002+01:00

If you've ever wondered where that .ky site relates to or what the suffix is for Guernsey then this list provides all the answers.

Now, can I find someone in Lesotho to register bal.ls . . ?

XP Antivirus that isn't anti at all

2008-09-18T22:54:00.002+01:00

This article is from CNET (Download.com) and, having experienced this one myself and knowing several others who are still suffering from it, any free help is more than welcome.

Kill Antivirus XP 2008 for good

Masquerading as software to protect your machine from threats, the "rogue" security program Antivirus XP 2008 uses deceitful and invasive tactics to con users. The fraudulent software will detect nonexistent viruses and other malware and use continuous pop-up windows to advertise the scam. Although Antivirus XP 2008's antics are well known, it seems to have lately affected a rash of new users. It's also doubtful that the scamware will disappear anytime soon. Sunbelt's Alex Eckelberry recently noted the arrival of a new rogue clone, named XP Protector 2009. One interesting aspect of the recent Antivirus XP 2008 outbreak is that many users with adequate protection are still finding themselves infected. If you're one of the many unlucky PC users to get stuck with this malware beast, you don't need to reformat your hard drive (unless you prefer to, of course). At the least, first read Seth Rosenblatt's instructions for removing Antivirus XP 2008. He has step-by-step details in plain language for kissing that rogue spyware pest goodbye forever.

Read more about removing Antivirus XP 2008

Google chrome shines

2008-09-03T21:33:00.005+01:00

It just works. Really well. Very quick and simple download. Your Firefox bookmarks get imported and there you have it in pretty minimalistic Google style. I've always thought Google should employ some good graphic designers and the pale blue may not be to everyone's taste but, when you think about it, a browser really just needs to show pages accurately and efficiently and make it simple for you to get around. Google Chrome does just that, with a few nice touches. The screenshot above is a visual guide to your history which I particularly like, although a clear list is available too.

Chrome will also keep track of the sites you visit most often and automatically provide fast access to them which I really appreciate. Firefox's address bar behaved similarly but this is even simpler.

This really does make Internet Explorer awkward, bloated and old-fashioned.

Google for webstarters

2008-08-26T21:17:00.004+01:00

How did I miss this? Google have substantially improved their provision of web pages for all and sundry. So if you want a web site you can have one. Free, and not too bad looking. At the moment it seems so new that it is definitely experimental but I would expect it be to be running well soon.

Google Pages never really caught anyone's imagination although, at the time, it was quite unique. Google Sites is much better. As usual, it doesn't get much promotion and is buried deep in the More section of their tools and services.

They'll have to work hard to catch up with Microsoft's Offoce for Small Business offering which also gives us a nice free domain of our choice. I still find that amazing and the tools are dead easy to use. Two quite different approaches and, whilst Big Blue are out in the lead, I still fancy a tenner on Google in the long run. Remember Moonfruit anyone?

Google for webmasters

2008-08-26T20:26:00.004+01:00

Sometimes Google doesn't exactly make a brilliant job of helping us to find their own services. There are lots of useful tools lurking in strange places behind the familiar search page that we all stare at at some point in the day.

One of these is their webmaster tools section. The main reason you'd want to go there is to get Google to recognise your site and some nice reports on who knows about it as well as lists of what Google perceives as problems.

On the search page, there's something called Business Solutions. Click that and then look for Web pages. (I guess you'll need a Google account but it's free and well worth getting anyway.)

Click that link and you'll be able to register you sites and get all sorts of useful information. Registration is reasonably straightforward and certainly quick. You simply enter the site address in a box and then will be asked to verify the site. This is to make sure that you are actually a webmaster and not just a passer-by. Verification can be done in a couple of ways but the easiest is probably to add a new page to your site. Google will provide the name - some long combination of characters.html - so you just make a new page and save is as whateveritis.html (best to copy and paste the name!) Keep the Google webmaster tools page open.

Upload that file to your server and then click the box on the webmaster tools page to get Google to verify the site. A second later and there should be a nice tick appear and Google will start doing what Google does best.

There's a bundle of stuff about sitemaps too. It's all pretty heavy stuff, though, and the help files and further links seem to have been written by aliens. Do I have Python on my server? is a frequent question, for instance. I don't think I shall worry too much about sitemaps just yet.

There are more than 2 fonts on your computer

2008-08-14T19:20:00.003+01:00

Sometimes even the several hundred fonts that you'll have on your computer don't provide quite the one you want. There are lots that are almost the same too which can be quite annoying but I have never managed to pluck up the courage to delete them or, at least, stop them taking up space in the font list in programmes.

In fact, that reminds me of another question. In Excel, if you want to change the font for a header or footer you have this tiny box to scroll through. Typing an initial letter, which usually focuses in well in other places, doesn't seem to do much so you're left struggling from Arial to Verdana. I'm afraid that I dislike Arial. Helvetica's fine and I can see the point of that but Arial just never, ever looks right to me. A particular hate of mine is getting mail in Arial bold, size 12+. I could even cope with Times New Roman bold and italic for a while longer before running for cover as long as the sender didn't add underscore which, unfortunately, many do for good measure.

On the underscore front, there are precious few occasions now when that U button is needed. There isn't one in my menu as I type this blog. On the web it tends to mean this is a link (especially in that colour) so if a designer does go for the U button he's risking a lot of users' frustration in meaningless clicking. In documents, headers look good in a bold font of an appropriate size. I'd go further and say that you really shouldn't underline very big headings, and certainly not title page stuff. In Word or Word-like applications it is simple enough these days to add a whole line background too which is often far more appealing than the line. And don't even mention individual word underlining, please. The very thought makes me worry that I may even recall the shortcut for it if I linger any longer!

If you must have a line then use the whole line line thing which can look quite reasonable. It's in the Borders menu somewhere.

This post started with fonts and that's where I need to return if my sanity is to remain. Handwriting fonts can be great but there are few in that long list. Whilst Windows provides you with umpteen whacky fonts and a myriad Times clones it doesn't do much on the writing side, other than some very old fashioned scripty things that you'd only use to invite Grandma to a wedding. What you may well look for in vain are some fun but not over-the-top or excessively childish fonts. There are lots around and many are free.

Take a look at http://www.getfreefonts.info/ where you have pages and pages of the things.

To install a font in Windows, download it, unzip it if necessary then move the font file to the Windows | Fonts folder where it should install itself happily and be available next time you open applications.

Spaces on the web

2008-08-14T11:14:00.002+01:00

In the old days we were taught to leave two spaces after a full stop. Unless you're trying to reproduce an old letter in Courier, though, that's a rule you can forget now, especially on the web.

Thought of this when someone asked me about spaces on the web. The basic rule is that web pages don't recognise any more than one spacebar space. The reason is mainly because spaces need to have a flexible size (eg for justified text). I usually find that it is no problem and you should use a table where you simply need to separate things more.

Occasionally, I suppose there will be a desperate need to have more space and a table won't do what you want. In those instances, there are a couple of tricks:

The space gif
Make an image the size you need (or, if you don't know, make one that is 1 pixel wide and 1 pixel high). Save the image as something like space1x1.gif. Then you can put as many as you need next each other to build up an 'invisible' space. Beware, though, as images can move when browser windows are resized but small ones ought to be OK. They need to be aligned correctly or may break text lines where you don't expect! (You can do this simply in Serif DrawPlus, GIMP or similar or may be able to do this in Paint but you must save it as a transparent gif. If you can only make a bmp in Paint then use Irfanview to save as a gif afterwards.)

The text colour cheat
Just type something to fill the space required and change the colour to the background of that part of the page. This is a quick and dirty fix, and will only work if you have a solid colour background, a very tight texture or can be sure that the text is placed over an appropriate part of an image the same colour.
Beware, though, that some people's browsers may change text on web pages to a default colour and show it after all (pretty rare) and if they were to highlight the text by dragging the mouse across the page your text will show (possible) and, of course, printing the page may well include your text, either because white text is printed as black or because the browser is set not to print web page backgrounds thus revealing the fix (common)!

The code for a space is #nbsp but, as I said, browsers seldom seem to recognise two in a row. The moral of the story is, basically, find another way to present information and use a table. It's like Word in many ways - you should never, ever, use more than two spaces in a row in word processing and I can't quickly think of an occasion when, in fact, I would use more than one nowadays.

The ultimate re-install

2008-07-09T17:03:00.004+01:00

A couple of weeks ago Firefox started misbehaving, claiming that it couldn't find various files and refusing to start, closely followed by Internet Explorer coming out in sympathy and eventually even the portable applications gave up the ghost. Usually, when something goes wrong I find myself in good company and someone somewhere out there has experienced the same symptoms and published some nice instructions to get it sorted. Not this time. Whilst there were some posts here and there on similar lines, no-one was offering any helpful suggestions. So there was nothing for it but, for the first time in all my years of computing, wiping the thing clean and starting again. (I did have to do my daughter's laptop a couple of times when a trojan simply refused to budge but she had little on it she wished to keep but mine was a different story.)

This used to be a complete pain because you'd have so much data by way of documents, photos and music files etc. that it was really difficult and very time consuming to back up everything before it all got wiped. Now we have SD cards and USB drives and wonderful gadgets for transferring files in an FTP-like manner from one computer to another and several gigabytes were simply moved somewhere safe for a while.

It still took an age, a couple of hours just for Windows, and all the extra programs I had have to be re-loaded or downloaded which is a long evening's work but well worthwhile as things do zip along afterwards.

It's so good not to have to worry about e-mail in the process as, of course, Gmail is all on-line and stuff now stored in Google documents and similar places is unaffected. I guess it won't be long before the whole pile of applications themselves are running on-line and all we need is a computer that accesses them with nothing being stored locally at all. More drops in the price of 'normal' computers too and we may well find ourselves just buying a new one when they stop working! I mean the screen seldom gives up, nor do the keyboard or other peripherals and components so it could be that we'll see a sort of plug-in thing that does all the processing work which will enable manufacturers to make smart, trendy designs that last for the bits that don't go wrong. Some programme or Windows not working? Unplug that bit and chuck it away. The ultimate re-install?!

You read it here first, possibly.

That reminds me of an argument I had in a College staff room in 199something. "Google?" they said. "That'll never catch on. Yahoo! Ask Jeeves and MSN Search (or whatever it was then) do all we need already."

It's not what you do . . .

2008-07-09T16:32:00.004+01:00

It's the way that you do it. Microsoft's Service Pack 3 for XP may have all sorts of good things in it but if you're still using Internet Explorer 6 you could find yourself heading for problems. Now, you shouldn't be using IE6 still as IE7 has been out for ages and is a whole load better but I know plenty of people that haven't updated and I found myself back in IE6 land when all my browsers ceased to function and I finished up having to re-install Windows. (More about that in another post!)

To give you the advice first: install IE7 before XP SP3. If you don't then you may find that none of the updates they release will install successfully, and there are lots of them. I have to say that I find it really annoying that Microsoft didn't think about this before and included some sort of fix for the problem in the Sevice Pack download, or warn people not to download. After all, you have to wait while their on-line tool checks every nook and cranny of your computer before recommending what you should have and you'd have thought that this would have been simple to include in that process. Anyway, it wasn't. The subsequent updates are important, though, and you do need them, if only to stop the list of updates that Windows tries to install growing ever longer (and they include IE7!) and Live One Care or One Live Care or whatever it's called warning you every few minutes that you might be at risk! To which I have been yelling "I know, I don't want to be but you won't let me do anything about it!!"

The reason for this post is that I did a search for IE7 install problems and landed on a whole pile of articles, written by people far more qualified than me, which were without exception doom and gloom-laden and, basically, saying not much more than "you shouldn't have done that" which didn't help much. For a few days I carried on with Firefox, which I much prefer anyway, and just ignored the dire warnings but today I decided that this was ridiculous and Microsoft really should give me a hand.

I went to their Updates support area and after several attempts found the right combinations of words to get what I wanted - a solution at last. It seems that, to work properly, the Updates installation tool needs a certain file buried deep in your registry to work which, if you have things in the wrong order, it doesn't. In my case, I had reinstalled Windows from a CD probably created in the dim and distant past so the file wasn't as it should be.

To save you the trouble, Microsoft offer two methods to get out of trouble at this link. I've seen clearer instructions and if you've never used Start>Run before you may need someone more technically inclined to hold your hand but Method 1 worked for me and I now have IE7 and all the recent updates at last.

The browser does now say it is without add-ons which I've never seen before and so far I have failed to find a way to get it to work normally but as I shall probably only use it for those sites that refuse to function properly in Firefox (Facebook picture uploads, the bank and a few others) I can live without add-ons, I hope.

The Universal Edit Button

2008-06-23T20:06:00.004+01:00

I can think of a number of things something with such a name could be useful for but this is actually for giving you access to edit web pages that have a format of a wiki or similar. These pages are increasing in popularity, especially as the technology has now got round or over many of the barriers that prevented people using them. Now, in many cases, like PBwiki for example, it really is just a matter of clicking and typing or adding an image or link.

The Universal Edit Button will allow you to do just that, where you have access, of course. Eventually this will be a standard feature of any browser but until then download the Button from this link to get the Firefox extension. Some say it works in IE but I have no idea how.

Top ten annoying software programmes

2008-06-05T13:08:00.013+01:00

Every day I get interrupted at work. There I am, happily writing something and 'zap!' Windows wants me to restart, there's an update for something or I land on a link to a pdf file and Adobe tell me I need version 9 when I only got 8 a few weeks ago. Then there are the virus warnings - don't tell me, just sort it out, OK! And yes, I am sure I want to close something down! That's why I clicked Exit.

It was wonderful to read Rupert of ZDNet fame saying exactly what I thought, and here is his list. This originally appeared as a photo gallery written by Rupert Goodwins, published on ZDNet.co.uk, ZDNet, and TechRepublic.

The Internet has brought us many joys. It's rewritten the rules of business and pleasure.
And pain. For it allows what may have seemed like bright ideas at the time ('Let's use it to make sure our customers have the latest software,' for example) to turn into a stinking pit of misery—usually, but by no means always, after marketing gets its fangs in. Here are just 10 of the guilty parties that try to do the impossible: to make us hate the Internet and wish it had never been invented—and who very nearly succeed.

1 Adobe Reader

What does Adobe Reader do? Displays PDF pages. How does it do it? With as much bloody-minded bureaucracy, delay, and needless interaction as possible. Perhaps it's because we humans have been spoiled by books, where the gap between wanting to read something and reading it is as short as the time taken to lift the cover. But Reader's incessant updates (demanding you reset your computer—why?), thundering great list of modules to load, and hour-glass-provoking pauses for thought have given Portable Document Format a reputation for being as welcome as a flatulent camel in the kitchen.
Which is a shame, because other lightweight PDF readers seem to manage perfectly well.

2 Apple

Oh, Apple. You created a domain where humans came first. You took usability and distilled it into an art form. Now look at you. iTunes is a music player the size of a fat-bottomed whale that gobbles resources like krill. It spends half its time trying to sell us stuff and the other half trying to stop us using it. But that's not as bad as your auto-update policy: slipping us stealth copies of Safari under the cover of important version updates to iTunes and Quicktime—what is this, Make Microsoft Look Good day?

3 Windows Update

Your machine will reset in four minutes. Your machine will not shut down until these five updates are installed. You must restart your machine now. You will install Microsoft Genuine Advantage. Please wait while these updates are installed. Please shut down all applications before applying this update. Pop! New updates are ready to be installed. And now that we've stopped you doing whatever it was you were doing (like we care), shall we go ahead and install them now, or would you rather be interrupted yet again later?
We've been kind and not talked about Vista.

4 RealPlayer

If this software turned up at your door, you'd call the police. RealPlayer commits just about every sin in the book, sprinkling itself across your desktop and offering "Free games!" It installs a "Message Center" that tells you about microcelebrities. There is more advertising embedded in the application than used to be on the front page of The Times. And you just wanted to stream The Archers.
At least Europe's been spared Real's Rhapsody music shop. When we looked at a beta before a subsequently abandoned UK launch, we were given software to install. 'Disable your firewall," it commanded. "Drop dead," we replied.

5 Java

Java doesn't do anything by itself. It's a programming language. Programming languages are like sewage plants: If the average user becomes aware of them, something's gone wrong.
Java doesn't know this. Java wants to be in your face. Java wants to be updated. Java wants to tell you the good news about Sun. Have you heard about Sun? Here's a nice picture of our logo. And fancy a copy of OpenOffice? No? Well, never mind. Java's installed a copy of Yahoo Toolbar in your browser instead. Because that's what programming languages are there to do, right?

6 Yahoo!

And talking of Yahoo. Please stop. Please stop trying to take over my e-mail, my search engine, my home page. Please stop "updating" your IM client to include more emoticons, animations, noises, and whatnot—or at least have the good grace to produce a grown-ups' edition I can use at work without feeling like I should still be reading Smash Hits. And yes, when I ask to exit the software, that's because I really want to, not because I'm having a crisis of doubt.
And there is absolutely no point in a toolbar that just replicates all the options on your Web site's front page. Not unless you want to come across as the sort of shrill, desperate, needy software company that makes big noises about user relationships but in fact knows less about its users than the Queen does about shopping in Lidl.

7 Norton Antivirus

It's a little unfair to pick on Norton Antivirus and make it carry the sins of half the desktop malware industry—but only a little unfair. If ever a class of software deserved to be cast into the lower reaches of Hell and run on Satan's own desktop, it is this. Performance-sapping, space-hogging, noisy, irritating, and prone to inducing just as many problems as they purport to solve, these horrible, ineffective, expensive lumps of digital thuggery keep entire platoons of support engineers in business and home users in tears. We know. We get the phone calls.

8 Preinstalled software bundles

After a quarter of a century of the IBM PC, we still don't understand why so many companies feel obliged to create swathes of below-par software to install on the computers they sell. Notebook makers are the worst, and Sony the king of them all: The first job for any new Vaio owner is to strip out the layers of desktop "enhancements," media '"managers," and system "control software" that serve only to get in the way of doing things the way you know how to do them, interfere with other software packages, and suck up such enormous amounts of resources on start-up that two weeks after you've bought one, you're still not sure whether it's broken or not.

9 Outlook/Exchange

Free, Web-based e-mail systems have more storage than you can use. They have powerful, accurate, swift search systems. They have clean interfaces, with threaded conversations and sane attachment management.
Then there's Microsoft's Outlook. Things have been getting better for those whose corporate upgrade strategy allows it, but with major updates happening every four years or so, that's a long time to be looking at a non-threaded, license-restricted storage-squeezed, treacle-slow-searching e-mail system. Especially while the online services get better and better, and doubly so now that e-mail is the single most important business application ever created.

10 Flash

There's nothing wrong with Flash, provided you don't use it to construct Web sites where people want to find information, navigate easily, or do anything beyond passively consume exactly what you choose to give them in exactly the way you've decided. There's also nothing wrong with using it for a splendid splash screen replete with movies, sound and animation—if you don't mind frustrating, annoying, and possibly even driving away people who might, just might, have something better to do.
In fact, Flash-based Web sites are quite possibly one of the most useful pieces of network technology around. Like heroin or microlights, they ensure that those who think it's a good idea aren't around to annoy us for too long.

OpenOffice 3

2008-05-09T18:29:00.002+01:00

There's a beta version of this popular and free Office package now released for public testing. By this point most bugs have been sorted and it ought to function smoothly. From a quick glimpse this is a genuinely new version and offers a smart interface and plenty of features. Of course, two reasons alone make it worthwhile for many (other than being free!).

You can save as or open pdfs which Office 2007 will not. You can open Word2007 documents which WordXP will not (without a shove and a push from a converter you need to download).

Give OpenOffice 3 a try - and do feed back any things you'd like changed to the OpenOffice developers. Links to how to do that are available at the software download site.

http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta

100 exabytes of data

2008-04-15T20:41:00.003+01:00

An exabyte is a billion gigabytes. It is believed that Google has 100 exabytes of data. There's a good article at Tech Republic that makes sobering reading and suggests that the sheer size and potential influence of Google and their developing applications may force governments to take action and the world according to Microsoft looks like changing quite significantly in the next couple of years.

Worth a read if your into this sort of thing. Link here.

And it was only today I learned (from a student!) that the word for 1000 terabytes is perabyte.

Really slow typing

2008-04-11T16:31:00.002+01:00

As if poor old Vista users haven't enough problems, here's another for those who may be using a keyboard that uses a PS/2 socket (i.e. not a USB connection).

It seems that in the upgrade to Vista some vital bits of code were left out and systems will return to s default setting that, for reasons best known to themselves, shows the characters typed 12 milliseconds after hitting the key. Now 12ms may not sound long but it will result in you valiantly typing away and the letters appearing in a delayed fashion that can be quite odd.

In some cases it may also appear that the lovely new and zippy processor you have isn't coping well at all with a simple task and your computer may even freeze. (Remember those days? Well Vista brings them back!)

All this can be fixed, though, so don't panic. I would be inclined to get a new keyboard - you've probably worn out the E and backspace keys by now or scratched off bits of the N. However, if you want to adjust the settings to put things right there's a bit of Registry editing to do. Write to me for details.

XP one more time

2008-03-29T00:06:00.004Z

I said I'd publish the replacement kit when I'd found something. Well, these were so well-priced at about £400 each I've ordered two of each! Mesh have served me well for many years and supply them with the following spec which ought to do me until operating systems settle down and do a bit more than look pretty. And who knows? Maybe Linux or even another will have broken through into the mainstream and we'll all be able to turn on and tune in without waiting for ages.

ASUS F5V-Pro Laptop

Windows® XP Professional Edition.
Intel® Core™ Duo T2250 Dual Core Processor (1.73GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 533MHz FSB)
15.4" WXGA TFT with Active Colour (1280x800)
512MB (128 Dedicated) ATI Mobile Radeon X2300 Graphics
1GB DDR2 677MHz Memory (1 x 1GB)
120GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (NB)
DVD Super Format Dual Layer DVD Writer +R/-R/RW/RAM
Wireless LAN - 802.11b /g (with Built in antenna)
Built in Webcam (1.3M)
3-D Stereo Sound + Internal Dual Stereo Speakers
Gigabit LAN Ethernet (on-board)
56k v90/92 Fax Modem
3 x USB2, Line-in, Mic, Headphone, VGA, Gigabit LAN (X50, F5V)
Windows 88 keyboard with "Fn" key for extended function,
USB Mouse
ASUS carrying case with shoulder strap and pouch for accessories
367mm(W) X262mm(D) X35mm(H), Weight: 2.6 Kg - Inc Battery (F5V)
2 Years Worldwide Warranty Parts & Labour

Mesh Matrix xxx+ PC

AMD Phenom 8400 Triple Core AM2+ ( 2.1GHz, 2MB Level 3 Cache)
Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005
New MESH Mini-Tower Micro ATX Case +300W PSU
AMD PCI Express Mainboard AM2+ Phenom MATX
4GB DDR2 667MHz Memory -( 2x 2GB )
500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive with 16MB Buffer
LightScribe Super Format 20x Dual Layer DVD Writer +R/-R/RW/RAM
256MB Integrated On-board Graphics (SMA)
19" Widescreen LCD TFT Display with internal speakers
5.1 High Definition onboard sound card - 6 Channel Cinema sound
Logitech Cordless Keyboard & Cordless Optical Mouse
Free Microsoft® Works® 8.5 + 60 Days Microsoft Office Trial
Free Cyberlink Video Editing Suite - 7 titles (oem)
4x USB 2.0 Ports (onboard)
Network Ready integrated 10/100 Ethernet
Multi-format Memory Card Reader (matx)
1 Year Hardware Warranty - Back to Base (UK Mainland only)

Plug and go go

2008-03-28T23:20:00.003Z

With a computer on its last legs and a laptop down to its last GB of space I've got some new equipment coming. That's nice but how on earth do I move all the files from one to another? External hard drives would work but less than £10 got me a USB Data Link cable from Gizoo. It's great, plug one end into one computer and the other into another and you get a split screen with the local files in one part and the remote machine's in the other. Moving stuff is just a cut and paste job and several gigabytes that would have needed several trips by normal USB stick were almost instantly transferred.

Another gadget I got is a Pama bluetooth hands-free box. Intended for the car, as I seem to get more calls when I'm driving than I do when I'm not, it is a slightly revised version of something I bought a couple of years ago. That refused to recharge for some reason I never discovered and, as it had been a bit scratchy and basic I didn't bother getting another. This version is much clearer and displays caller ID too which is useful. Only about £30 from Amazon and it also has another use - I live in an area of poor mobile reception with none anywhere inside the house where I can sit in any comfort. With this device, the phone can be placed wherever the signal's good and I can just chat to the box in the warm and dry. Few of you will appreciate the difference but those that do should take a look. It's cheap and works.

XP vs Vista revisited

2008-03-25T22:01:00.004Z

I was thinking that it might be time to dip a toe in the Vista water as I'm about to buy some new computers and laptops. First run through the ads produced some good prices and interesting products but all with Vista and no obvious alternative which was what prompted the idea that maybe it might not be so bad now. I mean it's been a while, a Service Pack is on the way and surely by now all the problems people had been having with it not recognising their hardware or other applications had been resolved?

And Vista is better than XP, isn't it? Like faster, more secure, more efficient in the way it manages files, prettier . . . ? Well, it seems that, apart from prettier, it is none of the above and no, IT service staff at retailers and elsewhere are still running around like mad trying to find drivers for customers and fixes for applications that don't work like they used to.

As someone who does have rather more odd applications than average and zero time to mess around trying to find solutions to problems, and having just about got the hang of how to fix the few problems that I do encounter in XP from time to time and who really does need to be up and running as close to 100% of the time as possible, Vista is still not for me and I am seriously thinking about hanging on until Windows 7 (or whatever it will be called, hopefully next year,) arrives.

Helping to convince me that I'm not really odd, or stuck in a time-warp in this respect, is an excellent article by Randall Kennedy in the latest PC Advisor magazine. Well worth a read, particularly if you're about to make the switch or thinking about buying a new computer.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=12495

My problem now, though, is finding somewhere that will supply XP instead of the advertised Vista and it looks as though many of the best-looking offers won't be much good. I'm actually wondering whether some of the very good prices for kit I've seen could even be because retailers are having trouble shifting it with Vista installed.

I know it'll be hard work and I may even have to spend a bit more but I am definitely sticking with XP. I'll publish the best of the places I find in my search which may help others who feel the same.

DreamSpark - free software for students

2008-02-25T08:56:00.002Z

Microsoft have launched a programme called "Microsoft DreamSpark", which allows university and college students to download a range of free development and design software resources to help them in their studies. The applications are pretty 'geeky' and I guess their main appeal will be to Computing and Art & Design students but there may be something in the offer that might appeal to people in other fields.

This is a remarkable offer for anyone who knows about these things. To access downloads students will need to identify themselves as genuine students and I understand Microsoft recognise Athens accounts which we would probably have to create for them. There is some well-presented information for anyone who wants more information at either

the UK Further Education Blog (staff)
http://blogs.msdn.com/ukfe/archive/2008/02/19/dreamspark-free-software-for-your-students.aspx
or

Microsoft DreamSpark (students)
https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/

Do pass this on to anyone who might be interested.

And don't forget that 'students' are eligible for the full, Office 2007 Professional suite, at a ridiculously cheap £30 or so. That was in another of my posts some months ago.
http://faqica.blogspot.com/2007/09/office-2007-ultimate-for-1295.html

Why do people feel they have to put images in Word to send them?

2008-02-03T19:36:00.000Z

I notice that what a lot of people do when they want to share pictures by e-mail is paste them into a Word document and attach that. This is a pain from several angles for the recipient
1, they may not have Word and are left staring at a load of code and, more relevant as most people do have Word,
2, the pasted image can only be as big as the width between the document margins so if anyone wanted to look a bit more closely at it for some reason then they're stuffed,
3, the paste operation turns it into some weird .wmf type of file which no-one uses anymore and the only way to extract it and use it somewhere else if they wish to is to screen print the flaming screen print in the attachment which is silly,
4 Word can take an age to open if you haven't already got it open and
5, the file size is much bigger than it need be for the size of image sent.

This often is used for Screen prints. OK, so it's dead simple for you to hit PrtScr and paste into a handy new Word doc. That's the + point but it's all one-sided and selfish. Here's what you should do:

1. Do the Prt Scr thing
2. Open IrfanView which you should now have. It's instant and just zaps open no messing.
3. Paste.
4. Save the file (usually as a jpg)
5. Send that as the attachment.
6. Smile - you've been a good boy/girl and they'll appreciate it.

I reckon that, from scratch, with no apps open already, this route is also quicker so maybe the + point isn't such a + point after all. Any image editor will do, of course. It's just IrfanView is so fast and doesn't ask complicated questions. I particularly like closing things and not being asked a million times if I want to save changes and not finding another 79 files also open behind it that need closing too.

Of course, if all you want to do is send an image that's already an image then just attach that and forget Word altogther! If it's an original modern digital camera (or even mobile camera image nowadays) then it may be a good idea to resize it and compress it via IrfanView or whatever first. I must have written about that a hundred times before so you should have that message by now.

Access Denied (but maybe not for long)

2008-01-15T19:34:00.000Z

You may really have a good reason to access a web site that has been blocked by your employer's IT Services or some catch-all, over-protective bit of management software.

You can. Try this. Type
http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.site.com
in the address bar, replacing www. site.com with the url required.

This often works because Google has a translation service to help others understand our sites and vice versa. They use a proxy service to present the new page and this may get around Big Brother. Of course, when you have time you should also get the site you want removed from the blacklist or included in a permitted list and discuss matters with him.