Flattery as a form of spam

August 11, 2015 | Comment

As spam goes this is pretty benign but irritating nevertheless and I have no idea how to rid myself of it.

Just recently I have started to receive messages through the contact form on our website that are allegedly related to our blog posts and they are smothering with kindness and praise for our work.

I blog quite often and I seriously appreciate your information. This article has truly peaked my interest. I’m going to take a note of your site and keep checking for new information about once a week. I subscribed to your Feed too.

When they take … Read the rest

A little spring cleaning

July 30, 2015 | Comment

This is why you need to open up your PC occasionally and give it a bit of TLC. The pile of grubby dust above is just six months worth from our always on media server.

I got into the habit of cleaning it out regularly after it started (unsurprisingly) to become pretty noisy and given that it is in our lounge that became an issue. It is amazing the difference that a really good clean makes.

2015-05-17 17.16.50

One important thing is that you MUST NOT use your normal hoover to suck out the dirt. This is a bad idea as it … Read the rest

A (Very) Simple File Manager in PHP

July 20, 2015 | Comment

A while back I decided that I didn’t require my iPad any more so I sold it. On the whole I haven’t missed it until this week when I needed to do some testing for a project at work. Given that this was such a short term requirement buying an iPad just wasn’t sensible but I decided sitting in the local Apple store and spending half an hour doing the testing there was! However, part of what I needed to do was to save some screenshots and get them back to my work machine, something that the restrictions on the … Read the rest

The dio Naked Reversible USB cables

May 20, 2015 | Comment

Reversible USB cables are, it seems, a lot like buses – you don’t see any for ages and then two come along in quick succession. Just last month I wrote about the Belaycord and now here is the dio Naked from moopti.

Like Belaycord this is also being offered through a Kickstarter campaign and as of writing there are just over two days before that closes. Rather than have to wait for mine to arrive (I have backed the project) moopti kindly sent me a sample to review which arrived today.

The first thing you notice is how well the … Read the rest

Belaycords Reversible USB Lightning Cable

April 6, 2015 | Comment

My Belaycords Reversible USB Lightning Cable arrived this morning and I’m pretty impressed and also left with the question why hasn’t this been done much, much sooner.

USB connectors have had one major problem (until the USB C arrived) in that they had to be inserted the right way round and when you were most likely to be doing that round the back of a PC in a dark corner it was bound to lead to frustration. It seemed that you had a 50/50 chance of getting it right but ended up always 100% wrong!

The Belaycord overcomes that … Read the rest

Seeing Double – Duet Display for iPad

December 19, 2014 | Comment

There has been a lot of noise this week about a new iOS app called Duet Display. This allows you to turn your iPad into an extra display for your Mac. This has been done before but the difference with Duet Display is that it claims to have no lag as it is connected over the lightning/dock cable rather than using wifi.

Duet Display was release yesterday afternoon and I installed it on my iPad Mini and iPhone 6 along with the mandatory companion app on my iMac.

The good news is that it certainly works as described. I … Read the rest

Enforced Posting Silence

November 14, 2014 | Comment

You may have noticed that there haven’t many (any) posts for a while. This is due to the following email I received from my existing server host:

Thank you for your years of loyalty. We regret to inform you that VPS Unlimited will be closing permanently on November 17, 2014. All customers must move their data off to another provider before this date. This is a hard deadline. All data will be destroyed on November 18, 2014. There will be no way to access your VPS after this date.

Insert your own expletive here.

Given that I have about eight … Read the rest

iOS 8 Keyboard Issues

iOS 8 Keyboard Issues

October 7, 2014 | Comment

iOS8’s introduction of custom keyboards is one of my favourite features but like so much in this release it is very buggy. I’m not sure if the issues are with iOS or the keyboards or a combination of both but they are frequent.

Some of the issues I have encountered are:

1. keyboards not appearing
2. no words appearing when I type
3. no button to change the keyboard appearing (and not just in passowrd fields)
4. keyboards appearing all over the place (see below)

I’m sure that all this is fixable but right now I would describe the custom … Read the rest

Flickr Sildeshow Code Generator

Flickr Sildeshow Code Generator

September 22, 2014 | Comment

Despite all the changes over the years I still like Flickr but since the sexing up of the interface there are some things that I have found have become impossible to find. One of these is the ability to find the code that allowed you to embed a slideshow on another page (you can see an example at the bottom of the page).

Fed up with this I decided to take matters into my own hands a write a script to throw out the necessary code. Just copy the album url as follows and paste it into the form below. … Read the rest