Random Thoughts » Technology

Using OpenID from Your Own Domain

Drew — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:12:21 +0000

I’ve recently added OpenID support to my WordPress installations via a plugin. This allows anyone with an OpenID to log in and set up a profile using an existing provider such as Google,Yahoo etc rather than having to remember yet another username/password combination.

However the one problem I have had using OpenID is that I settled on [...]

Map A SkyDrive Folder In Windows via Office 2010

Drew — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:28:15 +0000

DISCLAIMER: What I’m about to describe is tortuous and potentially useless but I use it and I even give an easier alternative so there .

Google tend to get most of the buzz (no pun intended) around the “Cloud” and Microsoft tend to be seen as a company who are being dragged kicking and screaming in [...]

Windows 7 “God Mode”

Drew — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:57:03 +0000

I’m a big fan of Windows 7, it has finally moved me from XP on my work machines. However I still haven’t quite got the locations for the settings stuck in the old memory and find myself hunting for them every now and then. I was going to blog about a piece of software called Windows [...]

Installing Windows 7 on a Netbook Using USB

Drew — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:12:57 +0000

I’ve recently acquired a Netbook (Asus EeePC 1005HA to be precise) and in common with many such devices it came preloaded with XP. Now up until 6 months ago I’d probably have left it at that but having used Windows 7 for those last months I really didn’t want to go back. So I decided to [...]

OS X Screen Grab Shortcut Reminder

Drew — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:13:59 +0000

When putting together the earlier post I needed to grab some shots of the process and as always I’d forgotton the OS X screen grab shortcut keys so I thought I’d stick them down here.

Command-Shift-3 will capture the whole screen and save it Command-Shift-4 perhaps more usefully will present crosshairs to allow the capture of a specific [...]

Setting Up Snow Leopard VPN from PCF File

Drew — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:54:48 +0000

Having recently upgraded to Snow Leopard one of the things that stopped working was my Cisco VPN client for access to my work network. From reading around it seems a reinstall should solve this but rather than go down that route I decided to look to the built in VPN features instead.

The starting point for this [...]

Colours Made Easy

Drew — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:09:23 +0000

For the non-arty one of the hardest things to do when putting together websites is to get just the right colours. For the criminally untalented, like me, there are loads of free css templates but when using these there is always the desire to choose different colours that make the site stand out. Even if we [...]

TED++

Drew — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:41:34 +0000

I’ve posted before about how big a fan I am of the TED conference videos. I have recently stumbled across a similar source of talks, fora.tv.

The breadth and depth of subject matter is very similar to TED, the main difference is that FORA gathers talks from a wide range of different conferences held around the world [...]

An End to Coin Tossing

Drew — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:14:19 +0000

Decisions. They can be tricky. There are lots of techniques to help though, tossing a coin, rolling a dice, eeny, meeny, miny, moe (which bizarrely has a Wikipedia entry!). There must be a better way.

Well now there is. Hunch.com is a site that guides you through the decision making process. Whether the decision is life changing [...]

Unknown Files? No Problem.

Drew — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:25:47 +0000

You have to love software developers. If there is a chance for them to use a standard file type for whatever app they’ve developed you can guarantee that they will avoid it completely in favour of a proprietary file format that only their software can create or indeed read. So what do you do when you [...]

Alternative Software

Drew — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:23:48 +0000

I have no problem with paying for software when it is useful and I’m going to need to do something repeatedly, but what if you need to do something as a one-off or just plain can’t afford the mega-bucks “pro tool” such as Photoshop? Help is now at hand thanks to alternativeto.net. The site [...]

Ahhhhh Nostalgia

Drew — Fri, 15 May 2009 21:55:29 +0000

I’m the first to admit I’m starting to age. It’s a good thing. Honest. Where technology is concerned I personally find that age brings some benefits and one of them is the ability to reminisce over technologies past. Now Harry McCracken over at MSN has created a list of one time technology leaders who have [...]

Google Street View in the UK

Drew — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:34:02 +0000

Google’s cool street view technology has now been rolled out to a number of UK cities.Â It’s oddly satisfying to be able to roam around a city that you know looking at what has changed.

Here’s a good pub

View [...]

Convert PDFs to Word

Drew — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:48:15 +0000

PDFs are great but every now and then I have a need to edit one. There are of course a whole plethora of PDF creation/editing tools available, most of which will set you back some cash. But generally I don’t need this level of functionality, I just need to move some bits around. Well to help [...]

Broadband – The Bad News

Drew — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:48:20 +0000

There are some phrases that we all know. “Don’t rock the boat.”, “Leave well enough alone” and “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”. I not only know all of these but also follow them wherever possible. Every now and then though I fail to heed them and always regret it. [...]

Microsoft – Why do you do these things?

Drew — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:48:23 +0000

It’s always the little things. They are irrational and trivial but they annoy the hell out of me. Microsoft seem to manage more of these little things than any other single organisation I know.

Now I’m not one to moan about Microsoft. Well OK, I’ve used their stuff for long enough that I have [...]

Smart Printing

Drew — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:00:26 +0000

Now in these days of environmentally friendly goodness we all try and refrain from producing printed output when we can. But every now and then there is something that we absolutely have to print and so the aim is keep it as brief and concise as possible. The problem of course is that web [...]

It’s the Microsoft Amateur Hour

Drew — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:57:22 +0000

Some people have an almost irrational opposition to Microsoft and everything they do. I’m not one of them, when they do good things I praise them, when they do bad things I criticise.

So this morning they are well and truly in the corner with their dunce cap on. What has brought this about? [...]

Memes R Us

Drew — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:06:00 +0000

Ah, internet memes. Where would we be without them. They come along, make us all laugh for a few days and then disappear.

Who can forget Dramatic Chipmunk, Diet Coke+Mentos, Numa Numa, Star Wars Kid or All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Not to forget 2 girls, 1 cup.

But by their very nature [...]

AppleTV Take Two

Drew — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:36:52 +0000

So I wrote way back when about my purchase of the Apple TV and how for me it was exactly what I needed. In my original assessment I didn’t think that the original lowly 40Gb hard drive was going to be a problem but as with all things storage related the amount that is available [...]