This morning I received an email claiming to come from Facebook. It claimed that they were implementing new security measures and I would have to update my account.
It all looked very authentic, right up until the bit at the bottom of the message where it said:
This message was intended for xxxxxxxxxxx @ trapperindustries.com.
I don't remember setting up a company called Trapper Industries, which appears to sell deactivated weapons and military hardware. I guess the email wasn't intended for me after all.
I have a Compaq desktop computer which I don't use very often. It used to be my main machine but I now mainly use it to back up data or the scanner which is attached to it.
It has been running infuriatingly slowly recently so I decided to reinstall Windows, using the 'System Recovery' option which replaces the contents of the hard drive with the 'factory fresh' copy of XP.
The computer now runs quite quickly again. Boot-up time has been reduced from over 4 minutes to 38 seconds. The computer had so much software installed, and a lot of rubbish would load on start-up. The desktop actually used to appear after 2½ minutes but it was a further 2 minutes before you could open any windows or run any programs.
Clicking on files and opening windows is amazingly quick now. There used to be several seconds of disk-thrashing and a long wait when the "Start" button was clicked. Now the menu appears pretty much instantly. I had started to wonder whether my old computer had always been this slow, and I only thought I remembered it being fast when new, but no. It is back to being quick and responsive again.
I have been an occasional user of Open Office for a few months. Most of the time is seems to be fairly usable but there are a few niggles.
Embedding videos into Impress is a bit clunky. I don't know whether it is a problem with my version but they play as soon as the slide appears, irrespective of any pauses or 'on-click' actions I set up.
Every time I run Open Office, I get the "R6034" error, informing me that the application has tried to load the C libraries incorrectly. Again I don't know whether this is just my machine or whether it is a common problem. A brief ATFG (Ask The F_ing Google) doesn't help.
Yesterday I tried to print some documents using the networked printer in the department. The first time I tried this, it was about half an hour before I went to retrieve the print-out. When I got to the printer there was no sign of it, but the document had gone from the printer queue so I thought it might have disappeared due so some sort of error.
Later in the day I tried to print something else. I can see the printer from my office door so I watched to see if the lights on top started to flash. Nothing happened so I deleted the document from the print queue and decided to use the other printer, which is down the end of a long corridor. This other printer worked ok. Nobody else had problems with the first printer so I suspected my computer and thought a re-boot might help.
This morning, after turning my computer off overnight, I tried to print something out using the first printer again. I sent the document to the printer and watched for the flashing lights. The printer leapt into action so I walked over to retrieve my print-out. I was surprised to find it had printed out the missing document from yesterday morning as well as the document I had just printed.
I don't know where this first document was hiding. It can't have been in the printer because other people had successfully used it after me. It wasn't visible in the printer queue of my computer. For some reason it only started to print when I decided to print something else, so it looks like it was hiding somewhere in my machine. Very puzzling.
I have been using Skype to talk to Emma while she's away for the week. I started by using the USB microphone which came with Guitar Hero but earlier today I found out that my laptop has a built in microphone. I can't find a mention of it in the user manual. For some reason Dell have decided to keep quiet about it.
I saw the Diet Coke advert with Duffy riding her bike and singing. It is an awful pile of !"#*%. Her voice sounds terrible.
A cup of hot chocolate, thickened with cornflour, makes a quick and easy chocolate custard.
And talking of hot chocolate, I tried a chocolate peanut drink, by stirring a couple of spoons of peanut butter into a mug of cocoa. I couldn't really taste the peanuts properly, and since I only had crunchy peanut butter in the house, the lumps didn't fit with the rest of the drink.
I regularly use a few forums (fora?) and one of the other members has started using the <marquee> tag in his signature. It's rather annoying to have text whizzing across the screen while you're trying to read something.
With Firefox it's possible to disable the marquee tag, so the text doesn't move. There is a file called userContent.css which is located in the chrome subdirectory of the Profiles folder, which in turn can be found hiding in the C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\ directory (at least that's where it is in Windows XP).
Load this file into a text editor, or create the file if it doesn't exist. Add the line:
marquee { -moz-binding: none; }
then restart the browser. The annoying marquee text will no longer move.
I recently changed the default background colour on Firefox from white to grey so that I could check the transparency on some images before uploading them to the site. I didn't bother to change the colours back because I didn't think I needed to. I expected that these days most web pages would define a background colour if they needed one.
The normal google home page looks ok but some of the other pages seem to expect the default white. The Google logo and icons appear with white backgrounds but the rest of the page is defiantly grey.
I've modified the comments system to use the reCAPTCHA system, rather than my home-made one which relied on the user to count the number of animals in a photo.
reCAPTCHA helps digitise old books by letting people type in words which are a challenge to OCR systems. More information can be found by clicking on the link above.
UPDATE:
Not impressed so far. Only an hour after installing the reCAPTCHA, I received 2 spam comments. Under my old system I rarely got any spam comments. I'll give it a day and if it stays like this I'll put the old CAPTCHA back.
UPDATE UPDATE:
Two hours later and another spam comment. I'm putting the old CAPTCHA back. I had hoped that reCAPTCHA would work. I didn't expect to get more spam with it installed.
Yesterday I mentioned using the .htaccess file with Apache to prevent people hot-linking images. That would only be a temporary solution, which would stop current hot-links from working. Any future image theft would involve people downloading images and re-uploading them somewhere else.
I've had a problem recently with people stealing images from my website - either hot-linking them or re-uploading them to other sites. My first attempt to stop this was by modifying the .htaccess file on the web server, telling it to only allow image requests from recognised places.
The Blosxom blogging system doesn't have a built in way of previewing posts before making them publicly visible. There are various plugins available but for me they seemed to overcomplicate things.
I have been using the Blosedit post editor which includes a preview option but if any Blosxom plugins are used to alter the page appearance (such as Markdown or photo galleries) then the page won't display correctly.
My solution requires the entriescache plugin to keep track of posted stories. Normally, any stories will only show if entriescache knows about them. I set the delay variable to a high number eg.
$delay = 9999;
to stop the index from being rebuilt unless I say so. This means that I can add new posts without them showing, until I tell it to rebuild the index.
To display all posts, not just those in the index, I made the following change to entriescache:
sub start {
# Force a reindex
$reindex = 1 if (CGI::param('reindex'));
return 0 if (CGI::param('preview'));
return 1;
}
Entries are written as normal, then they are viewed by adding ?preview=yes to the end of the URL. If am I happy with the entry, I put ?reindex=yes instead.
This method can also work with the wikieditish plugin too, by adding:
<input type="hidden" name="preview" value="yes" />
to the form in the foot.wikieditish file.
I was searching for some information about the Cray Y-MP computer. The article I found was a PDF scan of an old paper. The OCR seems to have got slightly confused. I didn't realise there was a Crap 2 computer or a Gay Y-MP.
I have never had a positive experience with DRM (Digital Rights Management). I can appreciate why content producers use it, to restrict unlimited copying of their copyrighted materials, but in my experience it just doesn't work.
Part of the problem is that it relies on proprietary (and possibly untrustworthy) software which often demands a specific computer setup. The original version of the BBC iPlayer insisted on Windows XP and the latest version of Media Player. Pretty much the same configuration was specified for Channel 4's 4OD system. Despite my computer complying with all of the requirements, neither system would work on it. I never managed to work out why. I eventually managed to get iPlayer to work on my new laptop.
Read Part 1.
Part 2
On the Desktop Computer
Setting up the FTP server was straightforward. After installing the programme, select the User Manager and click 'New' to add a new user.
Part 1
I have been given a laptop computer for work but when I work at home I sometimes use my home desktop computer. I decided I needed some way of synchronising files between the two machines, so that I could easily keep both up to date.
Both machines have Bluetooth, which I could use to transfer the odd file manually, but I decided I needed something I could automate. All of the bluetooth syncing software I could find was designed for transferring between a computer and a phone, not between 2 computers.
I found other solutions which expected the files to be on a networked drive, but would keep local copies available for editing. I can't change the network settings on my work computer so it would be tricky for me to set up something like that. See more ...
