Latest Blog Entries

17 May 2008: Installing Linux on an elderly laptop

Windows was slow, and whilst I felt that re-installing Windows XP might help, Muffin is only a 900Mhz Celeron with 384meg of RAM and a 20Gb hard drive. And I don’t like Windows (although XP is far better than Vista) - I’m a Linux user and have been for years. And it was time for Muffin to get a conversion.

16 May 2008: Forgetting about, but not being forgotten about

Like the world and his giddy aunt, I’m on Facebook. And for various reasons, I’m rather hidden on it - if you don’t know me, you won’t find my picture; you can’t see my friends list. You can find me, but you can’t find much out about me.

9 May 2008: BBCi on Freesat Launched!

So if you’re the one person who has been eagerly awaiting a detailed blog post about it all, well you can now have it.

6 May 2008: It launched! Or did It? I dunno. I wasn’t actually around…

Well it’s 6 May 2008 and that can only mean one thing. Yep, it’s the day after May Day. And of course it’s the launch of Freesat and the formal launch of Phase 1 of BBCi on Freesat. That is, baring any last minute technical issues or problems.

30 April 2008: The completed quest for an £8 refunded

Turns out that in the end, the £8 had never been refunded to the credit card in the first place - they’d refunded it as a gift certificate instead, mainly as the original purchase had been mostly gift certificate based.

26 April 2008: Humpf

I can’t be the only one to be sad at the news that the wonderful Humphrey Lyttelton has sadly died.

25 April 2008: The never ending quest for an £8 refund

I have an internet retailer that wants a fax, and a bank who don’t know what paper is.

23 April 2008: Doctor Who and Dilbert feeds

As I mentioned recently, the BBC’s Doctor Who website recently redesigned and moved their XML feed, without putting a redirect or message in the old feed to point people to the new one.

20 April 2008: So long beeb.net

Launched in 1999 as freebeeb.net, and later renamed beeb.net, BBC Worldwide’s ISP slowly and quietly kept chugging along. By 2001 it had entered profitability with 140,000 users. And it’s been around ever since. But this year will be its last - on the 30 June 2008, Beeb will close down and be no more.

16 April 2008: Who is G and what did he do to my ADSL?

One of the reasons I quite like Plus.net as an ISP is that they’re pretty open and honest with you. For example, for those of us on a capped broadband package, they provide a simple online tool that tells you how much you’ve used in a month. Very simple but you’d be amazed at how many ISPs don’t do this.

8 April 2008: Spell checking in web browsers

Occasionally I’ve dug up some old post from three or four years ago and re-read it. And noticed something slightly depressing - how awful my spelling is.

7 April 2008: When you move house, you tell people where you’re moving to. Now why don’t websites do the same?

One of the wonders of having XML feeds is that you can keep up to date with what’s going on quite nicely from one place instead of having to go through hundreds of different bookmarks, remembering what you’ve seen and what you’ve not. And it’s something more and more sites are now realising that they should provide, and which will bring them traffic.

3 April 2008: Comment Spam of the Day

Most of the time, the comment spam I get from my blog is pretty ordinary junk - sex sites, MP3s, etc. Then there’s the “posting almost-geniune looking comments but with a hidden agenda to promote a commercial web URL” - which seem to have a strange focus on buying houses, double glazing and, for some reason, a lingerie blog.

1 April 2008: Penguins everywhere

First I find out that Linux Format is available in Greek and Russian, but now the BBC tell me that there are penguins that fly!

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