Technology & Computers

If you've had an email address more than five minutes, you'll have received a phishing attempt. An email claiming to be from the tax man or a bank will try to persuade you to log into a bogus website or launch a virus payload sent via an attachment. For example,

Mon 31st Aug 2009:

Random sites fail to load, time out.

ADSL router got reset back to factory settings by the power tripping. After getting all the basic things reconfigured, everything looked ok.

Fri 3rd Jul 2009:

Some insight into the Madoff hustle

Some insight into how Madoff managed to keep his scam going for a decade or more, courtesy of This World, BBC Two, 29/Jun/09. Narrated by Robert Vaughn of recent 'The Hustle' fame, the scam had a couple of interesting threads in there.

Sun 26th Apr 2009:

Blogger API - more intelligent use of RSS

Blogger offers the ability to customise the RSS feed it generates on each site.

Sun 26th Oct 2008:

Adobe PDF reader takes command line options

There are some useful, but hard to find, command line arguments supported by Adobe Reader for Windows.

Sun 19th Oct 2008:

Using a BT Business Hub as a wireless bridge

After a cheap and sustainable way to get wireless in the house, I reused an ADSL BT wireless router that had been provided to a business and was no longer needed.

Fri 10th Oct 2008:

Printing out books with pdfTonto (A4 -> A5 duplex)

I have found a great script that will re-order the pages in a PDF so, printed '2 up' and (optionally) duplex, it can then be guillotined, stacked, and filed/bound - just like the printed copy, just shrunk in the wash. Just the job for those manuals etc. that you get off the interweb.

Wed 14th May 2008:

Vintage kit

I've been putting Ubuntu 8.04 on a couple of old machines; mainly because the newer ones are all spoken for. On boot up, a message advises that ACPI (power saving) isn't being enabled because the BIOS dates are so old .. in one case ten years old.

Tue 6th May 2008:

Oi, greedy. Give me back that bandwidth!

Browsing my web server stats, like you do, I was stunned to see the numbers go off the chart for April, with as much data downloaded as the first quarter of the year put together.

Tue 1st Apr 2008:

That screen in front of you. Think its showing you 16 million colours?

Most flat screens on the market sacrifice colour depth for moving image performance. And they're cheaper. Rather than showing 8 bits per colour, they're capable of just 6 bits per colour. This makes them 18 bit, not 24 bit, and natively capable of 262,144 colours, not 16.7 million.

Sun 6th Jan 2008:

Escape. Be Free. Don't conform.

I've been reading about the experiences of professional writers discovering the joys of word processors other than Microsoft Word.

Sun 19th Aug 2007:

Computers: reuse, don't recycle

I already knew that computers were incredibly nasty to the environment. The amount of kit being turned over in the West prompts, actually, a very obvious question: why are we trying to make new $100 computers to help poorer countries, when we're throwing away stacks of better performing kit ourselves?

Books on SQL - reviews, free downloads

Found a great site if you're looking to make some quick progress on SQL.

Sat 4th Aug 2007:

Polling day computers. A good idea, like a chocolate fireguard.

Berkeley University has completed a review of the source code for three ballot systems. 'Technological controls in the Diebold software do not provide sufficient security to guarantee a trustworthy election.' The other two vendors get similarly poor headlines.

Thu 19th Jul 2007:

Digiguide

I rather like the look of digiguide (http://digiguide.com/) Its a software+subscription service, £10/year, that provides a flexible TV Guide for Windows.

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