Welcome
On my site you'll find technical things such as how to configure and modify various items of hardware or software.Adverts
Shellinabox – Access a command line over HTTP
Being able to remotely administer a Linux machine using SSH is something so common and normal that it often gets taken for granted. Mobile broadband is quick enough that with…
Administration
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Shellinabox – Access a command line over HTTP
Being able to remotely administer a Linux machine using SSH is something so common and normal that it often gets taken for granted. Mobile broadband is quick enough that with…
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Recover files from a TimeMachine sparsebundle that isn’t recognised
Right, so the worse has happened… your shiny Mac has gone wrong – while booting it took forever and showed a mysterious grey/white progress bar. A progress bar you’ve never…
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Make Netatalk work on Ubuntu 11.10 and OSX
I recently upgraded my server to a new machine running Ubuntu 11.10. With the Macs in our house I’ve always used Samba for file sharing – it works, it’s stable…
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Amazon Kindle 3 ‘WiFi’ problems and pfSense
A few weeks ago I replaced my malfunctioning Netgear ADSL modem/router/firewall with separate pieces of hardware, the main one being an old PC running the BSD-based firewall ‘OS’ pfSense. After…
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Using ‘dd’ on OSX
Poking a USB device into a Mac causes it to be automounted, with suitable entries appearing in /dev. Ejecting or unmounting the USB device makes all the /dev entries disappear,…
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NAT Loopback on a Speedtouch 780 BeBox
If you still have a Thompson Speedtouch 780 ADSL2+ router (for example you might be a Be Internet customer who signed up when they first opened, and received one of…
Hardware & Electronics
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Stop your Citroen C3′s radio from beeping at you
Has this ever happened to you? You’re driving around listening to the radio, switch the car off to go and do something (fill up with petrol in my case) and…
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Inside a Motorola 8500X brick phone
Everyone likes looking at the innards of electronic devices. Modern ones are a bit boring now unless you’ve got a microscope, but there’s plenty of interest in old tech… especially…
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The insides of an iPod 1.8″ HDD and a 2.5GB Seagate Microdrive
Hard drives are pretty fascinating things, full of complex and precisely machined pieces of metal that spin at high speeds. And they’re strangely reliable too, considering what’s in them. Well,…
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Fake Hello Kitty iPod Shuffle from eBay for £0.01
Amy just received this amusing piece of Chinese electronic tat from eBay. It’s a Hello Kitty branded MP3 player that bears a striking resemblance to a popular brand of portable…
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A BBC Micro with an MMC Card… and some bad components
After the success of repairing my BBC Micro’s PSU I decided the act of shoving 30 year old floppies into an equally old drive, while amusing and all was a…
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Repairing filtering capacitors on faulty BBC Micro PSU
30 year old computers often have a few drawbacks, especially when the equally old components inside them start to malfunction. There is a known fault with the BBC Micro’s power…
Office Software Notes
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Restoring missing Microsoft Excel workbook windows
TweetI just had a rather strange problem with Microsoft Excel 2010. When opening the workbook nothing appeared on the screen: Evidently something had loaded since the formula bar contained data…
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Printing comments in Excel 2010
TweetShort version: Review tab – Show comments Arrange comments on page Page setup – Sheet tab – Comments at end of sheet Long version on the Office Online Help.
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Unlocking the “background” layer in Photoshop
TweetI always forget how to do this, so here’s how to unlock the background layer in Photoshop… Double-click the Background layer which will bring up the “New Layer” dialog. Give…
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Microsoft Excel VLookups
TweetI often have the need to match something like a student’s mark to a grade which lies within a boundary. For example a grade ‘A’ might cover marks in the…