New iMac!
A while ago, I was debating whether or not to ditch Windows and move over to a Mac full time.¬¨‚Ć Well, here’s the outcome: I’m still setting it up, but this new 24″ iMac will soon replace my now-ageing Athlon XP PC. Shiny!
Tag: computers
Slipstreaming SP2 into Windows Server 2003
And other tales. For the last couple of days, I’ve been struggling to get Server 2003 installed on a new Dell PowerEdge 2950 III server. I didn’t think ¬¨¬£500 for the OS and Dell to install it was value for money, when I had some spare licences lying around. Unfortunately, wishing to save this money was a real headache. First of all, OS-less Dell servers come with… nothing. No software at all (aside from some drivers). When you turn them …
Give more than 110%
Toast for the Mac doesn’t just get things 100% done. Or 110% done. No – that wouldn’t be good enough. Toast will go above and beyond the call of duty by getting things 749,984% done! And that’s only burning one of two discs!
How to install XP on a Philips Freevents laptop
We got a couple of Philips Freevents 11NB5800 laptops at work this week, and they’re actually very nice. Of course, they come with Vista installed, so we had to remove that. Problem #1 There are no XP drivers for the Freevents 11B5800. There’s nothing in the box (not even a Vista restore disc), and Philips have no mention of any of their laptops on their website. In fact, outside of PC World’s online store, the Freevents doesn’t appear to exist. …
Am I ready to go Mac-only?
I’ve had a Mac mini now for almost four years. I bought it for two reasons: I needed a new Linuxy server, and my wife needed a machine for internet and email use. Since OS X, under the hood at least, is close enough to Linux to allow me to set up the SSH server, Leafnode, Apache and PHP things I used my old (P233) Linux box for, and it was easy to use “at the desktop”, it seemed perfect. …
Never mind the EeePC, HP’s trumped it?
Good lord. What a nice looking tiny notebook this is! With an 8.9″ screen (at 1366×768) the HP Compaq 2133 is instantly more usable than the EeePC (which, I should point out, I do love) without being much bigger. It’s a little heavier, sure, but LOOK! LOOK AT IT! HP’s Linux sub-notebook spied on web | Reg Hardware
ActiveSync and ZoneAlarm: Happy at last
I upgraded the free ZoneAlarm a few days ago, haven’t not done so in about 6 months, and was annoyed when it started asking me if I wanted to allow all the programs I’d previously allowed.¬¨‚Ć I thought upgrades were supposed to carry over the settings too? However, I’d noticed this morning that ActiveSync, which I use with my PDA/phone, wasn’t able to fully connect. It’ll see the phone when I plug it in, but can’t sync. Looking in ZoneAlarm’s …
Are you getting a MacBook Air?
You know, one of these: No, the laptop, not the very rich grinning bloke dressed in black. I’m not getting one. Of course, I don’t buy all gadgets (I’m more of a games person), but I do occasionally have pangs of gadget lust. In this case, however, I’m just thinking “meh”. It’s very impressive, though – incredibly slim and light, nice and shiny, and the “remote drive” features are clever (although almost completely necessary in this case). It’s just there’s …
Formatting mail merge fields in Word
This comes up all the time at work, and I always struggle to find the page and never remember to bookmark it. So now I don’t need to! Who’d have thought you could use a blog as a bookmarking tool? Oh yeah, StumbleUpon realised. Anyway. The reason I needed it this time was because numbers in an Excel spreadsheet were being rounded up, or down, or converted from (say) “75.0” to “74.99999999999999” for seemingly no reason when mail merged in …
Wii remote interactive whiteboard combo
Take two pens, a Wii remote and projector, and what do you get? Not only an interative whiteboard, but also a great desk-screen thing with multi-touch capability. Now, we pay about £1750 for a board and projector, and this setup will cost, what, £500? And does more? Amazing.
Need a load of random data?
For my job I often do – testing things in Excel or in a database, providing data for students to work on, that sort of thing.¬¨‚Ć I stumbled across this site this morning when searching for something to create random (but specific) data – and it does exactly that. You just choose fields (such as names, postal codes, email addresses, etc), fill in any specific ranges, and decide how many records you want. It then provides the data for you, …
More EeePC pictures
Due to popular demand (that is, one guy on Rllmuk), I’ve taken a few more pictures of the EeePC, in (hopefully) much better quality. And there’s a video of it’s graphical prowess too – a quick clip of it running TuxRacer. Yeah, not the best example… anyway! The photos! And that amazing video: See? Amazing.
Weighted Companion Cube Icon (OS X)
Everyone needs one! Red‚Äö?Ñ?¥s Ramblings v.2 – ¬¨¬™ Weighted Companion Cube Icon (OS X)
Spoke too soon
Because my connection has all gone to pot again. Actually, it was up and down for most of yesterday afternoon.¬¨‚Ć One minute, I was getting 350Kbps upload, the next nothing.¬¨‚Ć At all. I’ve posted a message to the Virgin Media support newsgroup, and it seems that I’m on a congested channel (whatever that entails), at least, judging from the problems other people on there are having anyway.
Virgin on the ridiculous
With apologies for the rather obvious headline. Since Wednesday, my internet connection (4Mb cable, ex-NTL now Virgin Media) had been playing up.¬¨‚Ć I’d not really had time to look into the fault, but on Friday night with the arrival of some new networking kit (ordered before I started getting problems, ironically) I decided to get to the bottom of it. After some testing with various speedtest sites, it became clear that the problem was my upload speed.¬¨‚Ć On a Virgin …