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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

Avoid Waiting For Downloads with Skipscreen

If you download a lot of stuff from services such as MultiUpload or RapidShare and you don’t have a premium account you may be all too familiar with having to wait up to several minutes before the site will let you download your file. I experience this all too often as I am keeping an …

Continue reading

Enable Stronger Security in Facebook

Facebook - Enable Secure Browsing

Here’s a quick tip and some news that might have flown under the radar for some. After the fuss and debacle created by the release of FireSheep and the ability for people to easily impersonate others on popular social networking sites such as Facebook it has become apparent that Facebook have now provided the ability …

Continue reading