esotechnica

How to abuse the Digital Economy Act 2010 – for fun and profit

Simon Collis — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:47:20 +0000

I recently wrote to my local MP, expressing my concern about the Digital Economy Act 2010, particularly about the way I was uncomfortable with the “blocking Internet locations” part of the bill, which meant that one injunction could remove a site from the Internet. The Americans have, of course, been doing this with the ludicrous [...]

Installing OS/2 Warp in a Virtual Machine

Simon Collis — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 19:04:33 +0000

I’ve had OS/2 running in a virtual machine for years; specifically, a Virtual PC one. But I’ve always known that OS/2 has idiosyncracies, such that it won’t run in VMWare (although it’s getting better in VirtualBox). By change I stumbled on the excellent site OS/2 Museum. The whole site is fascinating, and if you’re interested [...]

AJAX Control Toolkit – bug!

Simon Collis — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:41:09 +0000

For reasons best not gone into (or at least, not if I want my readers to stay awake), I’ve been working a lot with Microsoft’s AJAX Control Toolkit for .Net recently. If you’re unfamiliar with the ACT, it’s basically a bunch of additional web controls for .Net that do calendars, modal popups… general sorts of [...]

Convert Access 2007 forms to 97

Simon Collis — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 15:38:48 +0000

You might be surprised by this, but you can still back convert Access 2007 forms, reports and modules to Access 97! (Why is another matter, of course, but let’s presume that you need to…) OK, first of all, you need to export them to text, which is explained here in far more detail than I [...]

How not to spam a blog…

Simon Collis — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 02:41:02 +0000

Some spam is ridiculously easy to spot. So, if you’re thinking of spamming this – or any other blog, here are a few tips… Your name is not “real sex lesbians”. In fact, nobody’s name is “real sex lesbians”. I don’t even have to research this on Google to know it. Your name is also [...]

Downtime…

Simon Collis — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 04:02:58 +0000

…was unexpected. Plugin problem *sigh*. Avatars are down until I sort it out. Sorry about that.

Why can’t you call a Windows folder ‘CON’?

Simon Collis — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 09:34:10 +0000

After reading this quite interesting – and entertaining – list of 25 things you didn’t know about Windows to celebrate Windows’ 25th anniversary, I got to wondering… Number 23 says you can’t name a Windows folder “CON”. Try it. Create a folder on the desktop and call it CON, it’ll rename to “new folder”. Why? [...]

Why isn’t there a Spotify for TV?

Simon Collis — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:43:50 +0000

Why isn’t there a Spotify for television? I don’t necessarily mean from Spotify themselves, but why is nobody actually doing it? Before you scream the house down – Hulu! Seesaw! YouTube! MSN Video! iTunes! – they’re not the same. Not the same at all. Let me explain… What makes Spotify unique is not so much [...]

Goodbye Xmarks?

Simon Collis — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 22:33:36 +0000

Two days ago, it seemed that XMarks was going to close, forever. It seems that they’ve had a load of comments saying “oh no, what do I do now – they’re the only cross browser sync in the business” (they don’t – sadly – support Opera, but do support Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari, [...]

WordPress auto-updates again!

Simon Collis — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 08:36:24 +0000

For a while, I’ve not had WordPress automatic updates working. It’s been time consuming to do them manually. Finally, I found this post on “Varun’s Whiteboard on Technology”. Turns out my web host (1and1, in case you were wondering) provides both PHP4 and 5. While useful, it confuses WordPress. The solution? Edit the .htaccess file. [...]

Tweet new posts in WordPress…

Simon Collis — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 21:42:20 +0000

After a long while not bothering to update WordPress, when I finally got around to installing version 3.1, which I had to do manually, as the automated updated didn’t work (it hasn’t worked in months). Immediately after running the (required) database update, I began getting 500 errors on the site. Not good. A little internet [...]

I write like…

Simon Collis — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 20:02:38 +0000

…William Shakespeare. Well, according to I Write Like‘s analysis of my last post, anyway… I write likeWilliam Shakespeare I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing! IWL is quite a nice little site. It analyses your text and compares to well-known writers, and then gives you a code to embed a badge, [...]

Using Getright as download manager in Ubuntu

Simon Collis — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:37:33 +0000

Yes, GetRight. The Windows-only, paid-for, shareware download manager. Running on Linux. But before you ask - why?

DarkSide.Members++

Simon Collis — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 21:07:58 +0000

I’ve reinstalled my PC. Down to four partitions – the Acer recovery partition (the BIOS insists on it, won’t boot otherwise), 32GB for / (ext4), 4GB of swap and the rest for /home. Yep, no Windows. Except I now have two Windows installs… You see, I’ve been using Windows 2000 in VMWare Player for a [...]

A suggestion for Google…

Simon Collis — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:25:54 +0000

I just had an idea for Google. So, naturally, I did a Google search on “How to I make a suggestion for Google?”. The top page told me the answer – but it wasn’t on Google’s site! Anyway, turns out that their