October 2012 archive

Incoming Gadget – Apple iPhone 5

Just a quick heads up that I will have an unboxing video for the Apple iPhone5 coming up this week. I’ve not bought one for myself but rather my mother-in-law got one to replace her iPhone 4 as she was out of contract and it has been given to be to activate and do the …

Continue reading

How to Search in Windows 8 Metro Apps

Here’s a quick tip for those using Windows 8 or looking to get into it soon. If you’re in a Windows 8 “Metro app” (yes, it’s a deprecated name but the one that people seem to recognise the most) you might find yourself wondering how on earth you perform a search inside the app. Right …

Continue reading

Lucid Virtu MVP – Switchable Graphics for the Desktop

Yesterday, I was asked by a friend of mine to provide an opinion on which CPU would be best suited for his new gaming rig and of course the CPU also affected what motherboard you select and the RAM configuration (dual or triple channel). Then you get to things like the graphics solution for the …

Continue reading

Migrated MobileMe Users Receive a One Year Extension on Storage

The title pretty much says it all – if you’re a user who has migrated from MobileMe to iCloud Apple has extended the offer of free storage for another year concluding on 30/09/2013. This means that whatever storage these users had paid for prior to MobileMe being shutdown will continue to be available for no …

Continue reading

Android Easter Eggs

What’s an Easter egg you ask? Yes, there’s the chocolate egg-shaped variety that makes an appearance once a year but I’m not talking about those ones but another variety. In technology, Easter eggs can take on various forms such as hidden messages or a fun secret that would otherwise go unnoticed for most users. A …

Continue reading

Tomato Firmware with IPv6

I am looking at getting our home network up to speed with IPv6 capability and one of the obstacles to overcome is the limitations imposed by our current router. It’s a Linksys WRT54GL which has been quite reliable over the years particularly when it has been running the fantastic Tomato firmware. Unfortunately, the vanilla Tomato …

Continue reading

Alternate POP3 and SMTP Port Numbers

Here’s another quick tip. Some larger ISPs restrict the traditional ports for POP3 (incoming e-mail) and SMTP (outgoing e-mail) to only work with their own mail servers. This can be annoying particularly if you have your own domain name with e-mail hosting and you don’t fancy having to use your ISP’s SMTP server for a …

Continue reading

It’s Easier to Save Than to Script Again

While this probably applies more to a significant part of my line of work and others that do coding and/or scripting this can be applied generally to any other sort of data, content or programmatic creation. SQL or Server Query Language is what I use to import, manipulate, interpret and extract data from databases almost every day …

Continue reading

Converting Units of Measure – No App Required

Here’s a quick tip. Smartphones and tablets have all sorts of apps for them these days but you might be able to save yourself some screen real estate by using online services instead. For instance, Google can convert between measurements for you just by typing in the search bar. If you keep forgetting how many …

Continue reading

Convert Text Files From DOS to Unix Format

Here’s a quick tip if you happen to use both Windows and *nix systems on a regular basis. If you need to edit and move text files (such as HTML or PHP files) between systems then you need to convert them to ensure that their format new lines are created properly then you might find …

Continue reading