February 2012 archive

Flickr and Facebook Authentication

Here’s something I found out the hard way. I wanted to brush the dust off my old Flickr account and I noticed that it has the option of Facebook authentication. Given how rarely I use Yahoo services I thought it’d be a neat way to avoid remembering another username and password combination (not that it’d …

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Antivirus Software is a Potential Preventative Measure, Not a Cure

This might polarise the audience a bit but I just wanted to expand on my thoughts in this earlier article. In that article, I noted the only 100% effective solution to cure an infected computer is to format and reinstall or restore from a known good backup. Today, I tried and tried unsuccessfully to eradicate a trojan from …

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Mozilla Creating Boot2Gecko But Why?

Seems like a slightly crowded field these days for mobile OS market share. Up front we have Android and iOS while BlackBerry OS and Symbian are slowly being sucked into a black hole. Meanwhile, Windows Phone is carving out a small niche for itself prior to Windows 8 hitting the scene as WebOS is stuck …

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Workaround Windows Terminating HDMI Audio Playback When Sleeping Monitors

A quick tip for tonight. One disappointing “feature” in Windows 7 is when you are playing back audio to a television over HDMI and the power saving feature kicks in to turn off connected screens it also stops audio from being transmitted over HDMI. This can be annoying when you are relaying sound to a …

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R18+ Classification for Video Games – Nearly There

It’s been in the news today but I thought this topic was worth mentioning. I’ve also written about this in the past, specifically: R18+ Video Games – One Step Closer R18+ Computer Games Classification – Its Time Will Come Draft R18+ Guidelines for Computer Games Released Today, a bill was introduced into Federal Parliament to …

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MetroTwit – Get a Taste of Twitter, Metro Style

MetroTwit Settings

Here’s a software pick for those looking for a Twitter client for Windows other than TweetDeck. MetroTwit is a Metro styled Twitter client for Windows. For those that don’t know, Metro is the interface found on Windows Phone 7 and will also be the interface for Windows 8 tablets. The Metro design language basically gives …

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Converting Text Dates to Proper Dates in Excel the Easy Way

From time to time you might receive an Excel spreadsheet that has been created by an application but it has output the dates in its own text format instead of being stored as an actual date value. I’ve seen instances where the time has been placed before the date which would leave many to think …

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Everywhere You Go, Always Take the Weather With You

Here’s a quick tip for tonight. I’ve mentioned this in passing in prior blogs but it’s worth a mention by itself. Sometimes, you need to keep an eye on the weather if you have pets at home who don’t fancy thunderstorms or if there is a hailstorm warning and you want to track its trajectory. …

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Windows on ARM Comes with Office 15 Baked In

For people seriously considering a Windows 8 tablet as their next tablet OS here is something that might sweeten the deal a bit. While the iPad has built in viewing capabilities for Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slidepacks the ability to edit them as part of the base operating system is absent. The …

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Visualise the Scale of the Universe

Scale of the Universe 2012

Thanks to John Tomic for sharing this with me 🙂 If you’ve ever wanted to get a visual idea of the scale of stuff in the universe then there’s a great Flash-based tool that shows you a variety of objects and scales all the way from the length of a planck through to the estimated size …

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