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

Google Chrome 2012 A-Z

January 5, 2013 | Comment

John Rentoul in the Independent produced an A-Z list of sites Google Chrome takes you to if you just press the first letter and press enter. If you are logged in to Google then these results will be tailored to your usage.

I thought that it would be interesting to do the same and my results are below. What was interesting was that it was quite narcissistic in that several of my own sites appear on the list, although not this one. I was also surprised by what was missing. For example I would have expected to see Autosport under … Read the rest

Virtually, the UK Leads the World

December 17, 2012 | Comment

Fascinating new report from OFCOM which shows the the UK is still a world leader in one thing and that is consuming online content.

According to the report the UK is top dog when it comes to:

watching TV from catch-up services, such as the BBC’s iPlayer
online shopping. We spend an average of £1,083 per person per year online
accessing social networks on our mobiles

Watch a slightly surprised Yank go through the numbers in the video below or see the data courtesy of the Guardian here.

Go Team GB!… Read the rest

Hacked Off (again)

December 9, 2012 | Comment

A dozen years ago, when the web was a very different beast to what it is today I, wrote a series of scripts in the language Perl what was a simple content management system (CMS) to run my websites. Those websites have run using those same scripts with little change over that time. Now I only have two sites left on that infrastructure and after a hacking this week I have decided that it is finally time to retire the scripts and more the sites to WordPress. I am a bit sad to have to scrap my work but I … Read the rest

Prioritising Marketing on Start-up

November 23, 2012 | Comment

Something struck me recently about the difference between OSX and Windows. What is the first thing that happens when you start-up a Mac? You hear the “Wall-e” sound (if you don’t know what that sounds like take a look at the video below). Only then does the start-up begin. When you start up a Windows PC you see the BIOS checks and then Windows logo and eventually the Windows tinkle.

In order to do this Apple must be prioritising loading the sound drivers first in order to do so. Something that they can do because they have control over both … 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

The Chubby Challenge

November 13, 2012 | Comment

One of the great things about the Internet is that it allows new ideas to be quickly built and got into the hands of the public without having to spend huge amounts of cash. This has allowed countless number of people to become entrepreneurs even if only in a very small way. And now it is my turn.

For the last few months I have been working on a new project called The Chubby Challenge which is based on something that we used to run when I was working at AppSwing.

Most office workers seem to lead a sedentary lifestyle … Read the rest

A Weekend Pi Project

November 8, 2012 | Comment

… Read the rest

pIO – microSD Adapter for Raspberry Pi

November 7, 2012 | 2 comments

The Raspberry Pi is a great little device – cheap enough that it can get into the hands of just about anyone and challenging enough to pique the curiosity of most. As a lifelong software developer and gadget freak I am fascinated with mine. I have decided though that it is pointless (for me) to use it for development as I have some many other outlets for that. I have decided therefore to use it to look at interfacing with hardware and have ordered a breadboard and other bits and pieces to do some simple tests. Nothing more challenging than … Read the rest

Forcing the Upgrade to iOS6

October 21, 2012 | Comment

I have Bento, the Apple produced database app, on both my iMac and my iPad and it is pretty good for what I need – it’s no SQL Server but then it’s not intended for such heavy duty querying. I decided that it would be useful if to also have Bento on my iPhone so that I could update date a database that I often need access to and when I tried to purchase it the message to the left is what I saw.

I haven’t upgrade to iOS 6 yet for a couple of reasons: my iPad is jailbroken… Read the rest