Digital Distractions

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

From the main Fignition website FIGnition is a £20 educational DIY computer which works like an 8-bit home Micro: outputting to composite video and ready to be interactively programmed from…

Notes to remind myself how to configure my Mac so that its swap file is not stored on the SSD.

I 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…

I recently bought an SSD for my Mac Mini. Being a late 2009 model with a 2.26GHz Core2Duo, 4Gb of RAM and a 500GB HDD there wasn’t much else I…

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…

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,…

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…

Just some notes to remind me next year… Stuff that worked Hanging baskets with strawberries in The greenhouse Peas Beans Chillies Tomatoes Brambles Grow bags from the 99p shop Stuff…

Short 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.

It annoys me that in this “Web2.0″ world we seem to have turned the Internet into a great way of sharing data with other people, but nobody really seems to…