February 2011 archive

No Pen and Paper? Use Notepad!

Here’s another quick tip. In many cases when I make or receive a phone call I am in front of a computer but also, for the life of me, I never seem to have a pen. One trick I have used for many years is to use the good old Windows Notepad application to jot …

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Mount Your ISOs Quickly with MagicDisc

If you download a lot of software (legally, mind you) sometimes they will come in the form of an ISO file which is basically an image of an optical disc (be it a CD, DVD or Blu-ray disc). Normally, these files had to be burnt to a physical disc before you could actually start installing …

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Capture a Disk Image Quickly with DriveImage XML

DriveImage XML - Backup Wizard

From time to time I help people undertake the often laborious task of doing a clean installation of Windows on a computer. The installation itself is fairly painless but there are other tasks involved that can take up a considerable amount of time, including: backing up the existing data (although I recommend people have regular …

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Adjust Text Brightness on Android with Screen Filter

A tip for the Android users out there. Have you ever woken up during the night and needed to check your phone only to find your eyes burnt by the brightness of the screen even on the minimum or automatic brightness setting? It’s definitely not a pleasant experience but there is something you can do …

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Google Prevents Use of American Express Cards on Certain Cross-Currency Transactions

American Express unusable for this purchase

Up until yesterday I had only ever downloaded free application from the Android Market but yesterday I was looking to get some nice looking widgets courtesy of the “Beautiful Widgets” app. I thought for the cost of €1.45 (approximately AU$1.95 at the time of writing) it was a fair price for something that has received pretty good …

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Drive Extender Alternatives for Windows Home Server 2011

Last year, I covered the shock announcement that Microsoft was dropping the Drive Extender (DE) technology from its second version of Windows Home Server (formerly codenamed “Vail” but now dubbed Windows Home Server 2011). In a nutshell, DE provided some critical functionality including: storage pooling (the ability to combine multiple drives into one large storage …

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Did You Know About Triple Clicking?

Another quick tip for the night. It would be fair to say that most people know about the concept of the single click normally used for selecting objects on the screen, dragging objects to other places or clicking hyperlinks. Similarly, people know about double clicking to open applications or documents (although I find it annoying …

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Secure Online Transactions with VeriSign Identity Protection

These days we hear horror stories of accounts being hacked and unwanted activity occurring under those accounts. In the worst cases, this can involve finances which can really cause major problems depending on what happens. So really, prevention is the best cure as trying to pick up the pieces afterwards can be time consuming and …

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Keep Tabs on the Climate Conditions with Forecastfox Weather

Weather on my Cisco IP Phone

Another quick tip for tonight. Not all of us are lucky to have desktop phones that show the weather at a glance but there is a way to get it in Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome without too much fuss. There’s a great little add-on called Forecastfox Weather which, as you might guess, add the …

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Nokia Wises Up to Their Shrinking Market

For many years it has been widely acknowledged that Nokia, once the world leader in mobile phones and technology, has become nothing more than a random handset generator that uses a combination of numbers and letters to label its phones (possibly using a random alphanumeric value generator). Whilst there are Nokia handsets that are fit …

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