Can you have too much cloud storage as Microsoft offers unlimited space?

November 18, 2014 | Comment

Recently Microsoft announced that everyone with an Office 365 subscription would be granted unlimited storage on OneDrive, their Dropbox and Google Drive competitor. If it doesn’t seem long ago that they bumped up the storage from 15gb to 1tb then it’s not, because that announcement was made just last June.

On the face of it this seemed like great news – all the space to store whatever you want. However, the reality is somewhat different. Firstly this is a syncing service (as they all are) and so the absolute maximum you can sync is the size of your hard drive … Read the rest

A Potentially Dangerous Experiment

May 27, 2014 | 1 comment

Being mobile means I have to work in a number of different places on a number of different machines. The one constant is that no matter where I am I want and need to have my files with me. While I have Dropbox and Google Drive and and iCloud and Box and OneDrive and OwnCloud accounts I found that files that were in the Documents and Downloads folders on my iMac weren’t available to me on the move.

This led to a light bulb moment. What if I could store my Documents and Downloads folders in cloud storage? And so … Read the rest

Internet Explorer (the joke)

April 29, 2014 | Comment

My son sent me this today:

Internet Explorer users at risk from major bug

“All four users have been informed” a source said.

I thought that it was a joke until I subsequently saw this. (Obviously it is a joke but the problem clearly isn’t).

While IE usage is not as high as it once was it it still high enough that this is going to affect many people, particularly as the bug seems to be in versions 6 through 11.

Setting aside the issue itself this, and the recent Heartbleed bug, highlights just how easy it is for … Read the rest

3 Things Evernote is Missing

January 30, 2014 | 1 comment

I an a keen and active user of Evernote paying for the service not just to gain access to the “pro” features but also because I want to repay Evernote for the use I derive from it.

That’s not to say that it is perfect though so here are three things that I would add to it from the normal to the whacky.

Better table support

Evernote has support for tables but it is pretty basic. Once created you cannot add new columns, change the width, add new rows anywhere but at the bottom and you cannot apply any styling … Read the rest

Quickly Get to Top of All Notes in Evernote

September 25, 2013 | Comment

One thing that has bugged me for a while in Evernote is that there didn’t seem to be a quick way to return to the top of the All Notes list.

If you have several thousand notes and you are a long way down, perhaps because of a search, I found myself having to do some little finger dance to get back to the top.

Yesterday, quite by accident I found that if you click in the grey space either side of the “All Notes” title you magically get taken back to the top of the list.

A real time … Read the rest

Font from Your Own Handwriting

August 8, 2013 | Comment

Here’s a great one for all narcissists – a website that turns your handwriting into a font that you can use on your computer such as in Word documents.

Simply head over to myscriptfont.com, download and print the template. Then with a marker pen write out the alphabet in both upper and lower case where shown (see below). You’ll now need to scan this page in black and white at a resolution of 300dpi and upload it to myscriptfont.

Send the file and wait a few minutes and you are presented with a view of what your font will … Read the rest

Here’s a Bug They Can Fix in Mavericks!

June 12, 2013 | Comment

There’s definitely something not right here!… Read the rest

The Bane of Family Tech Support

January 12, 2013 | Comment

One of the occupational hazards of working in the IT industry is that you become official tech support for family and friends.

There is a expectation that you will be an expert in all forms of technology.

My mother-in-law regularly asks me questions about her android phone, for example, despite I having never owned or used such a device. My requests for her to move to an iPhone or use my wife who has exactly the same phone as her have so far gone unheard!

Sometimes, however, the job is made so much harder by mischievous software vendors and I … Read the rest

“Modern Internet Explorer”

November 15, 2012 | Comment

This made me laugh out loud when I saw it.

Running Windows 8 via Parallels on my Mac the caption for Internet Explorer is shown as “Modern Internet Explorer” presumably as opposed to that old, out-dated version that they previously shipped! This text would normally appear on the title bar of a Windows application but with the new Metro style app you don’t get to see the title bar.

I have to admit that I do like the clean look of the new version of IE but at the same time it is hugely frustrating as I have yet been … Read the rest

Stopping Office for Mac re-Opening Windows on Launch

October 13, 2012 | Comment

One of the new features of Mac’s latest OSX operating system is the ability to reopen windows when an application is launched. So if you have three documents open in Pages then you shut it down and reopen these same three documents would be opened again. What a drag! Fortunately you can turn off this functionality very simply from System Preferences – there are more details on this on the Mactip website.

However, surprise, surprise, Microsoft Office for Mac doesn’t follow this convention and even after you have set this option in System Preferences Office still continues to reopen … Read the rest