Looking for technical information? The the web is a great place to start but there is just so much out there, where do you begin? Also sometimes it is nice to have an offline copy to refer to.

Today I stumbled upon a great site that has collected together a whole load of technical resources to download, somewhat imaginatively title The Quick Reference Site it has a collection of both quick reference guides and ebooks. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have been update in quite a while but there is still plenty there to get your teeth into.

If you … Read the rest

This must be one of my favourite sites at the moment – what the font. It allows you to upload an image that contains some text. The site then uses character recognition to match your text against a database of fonts and tells you which are the closest matches. It works well, particularly when the characters in the images are of a reasonable size.

I originally thought that that this would only be of limited use on an infrequent basis but I have found myself using it regularly. I have never made a note of the fonts used in … Read the rest

The BBC has been reporting from SXSW this week and today was reporting on how email use is being replaced with status posts to the like of Facebook. While I agree with the premise of the argument I don’t agree with the reasons given.

This shift in communications is, I believe, more of a generational thing.

My grandparents were of an age where they wrote letters and if the message was urgent or time bound then they would send a telegram. We have, for example, a telegram sent from my Grandfather to my Grandmother during the second world war but … Read the rest

Sometimes working from home shows things that I would have been unlikely to have seen had I been in an office – principally because I wouldn’t have been stood staring out of the window! Anyway, I was, and I saw this car driving down the road. Realising the significance of it (and that we live on a cul-du-sac so it had to come past me again) I rushed to get my camera, getting this picture as it drove away.

What you see here is a car equipped with a series of cameras mounted on the roof for the (probable) purpose … Read the rest

So the web has turned twenty, happy birthday to it. That means it came to life in 1989 so I have known it for 60% of its life and I can safely say in that short time it has revolutionised my life. If you want to read more about the beginnings of the WWW ITPro has this article Photos: The web turns 20.

Also if you are wondering about the picture on the left it is, apparently, the computer that Tim Berners-Lee used at CERN.… Read the rest

It is being reported on the BBC today that Microsoft are going to extend the life of Windows XP once again – this time until the end of May 2009. This is almost certainly due to two things: the public’s dislike of Vista and the huge take-off of netbooks, which use either a variant of Linux or XP. I have been using XP on my netbook for the last few months and think that it is perfectly suited to the job and so I can see the workhorse that is XP being extended once more if netbooks continue to sell … Read the rest

Stories that caught my eye this week – 8th November 2008:

• Google – do you speak the Queen’s English?
  

• Xobni Adds Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, Hoovers, And The Kitchen Sink
  

• Google catches downsizing fever
  

• Google’s Mobile App Uses Undisclosed Proximity Sensing System and Why You Should Care
  

• Google SearchWiki Launched
  

• Get to Google Docs from Gmail
  

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