esotechnica

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

The Trouble With ClearType (and WPF)

Simon Collis — Mon, 10 May 2010 19:39:35 +0000

Those of you who’ve been reading here a while will know I used to be a huge fan of ClearType. Huge fan! I thought it made fonts really readable. Then, about two years ago, I started to get headaches. Big, nasty headaches. So I tried fiddling with display options – upped the refresh rate (sort-of [...]

…And we are back!

Simon Collis — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:10:14 +0000

My regular readers (all both of you) may have noticed that Esotechnica has been offline. I’m sure your curiosity has been insatiable, so why the outage? That’s easy. I messed it up. One control panel – many sites. Too much wine, one wrong click… Safe to say I won’t be doing that again!

Another day, another rubbish takeover…

Simon Collis — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:16:51 +0000

What on earth is wrong with the corporate world? People are buying other companies they should stay away from, believe me. Take Oracle and Sun. Oracle bought Sun to get their hands on Java, and to turn themselves into an IBM-style one stop shop. Fail. James Gosling has left, many of the key Sun Players [...]

7 rules for effective computing

Simon Collis — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 23:10:55 +0000

My own personal rules for effective computing: 1. Don’t buy anything with ‘Norton’ written on it, unless the next word is ‘Ghost’. 2. Don’t buy any program without consulting osliving.com. Open source is often faster, more effective, and doesn’t provide features you don’t need. 3. Half the computer companies are brands of another. Check who [...]

Watch classic era Dr Who online

Simon Collis — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:00:39 +0000

Out of a sheer sense of boredom curiousity, I thought I’d compile a list of where you can see classic era (i.e. pre-1980s cancellation) episodes of Dr Who, preferably for free (video providers are listed in alphabetical order, by the way, no preference implied!). You might need to be in the UK for most of [...]

Video on demand

Simon Collis — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:00:01 +0000

Video on demand services seem to have sneaked up while I wasn’t looking and implanted themselves all over the web. First of all, there’s the disarmingly simple-looking Seesaw, a recent launch from the broadcast services company Arqiva (by “broadcast services”, I mean they own/run transmitters, digital radio multiplexes and so on). Seesaw perhaps doesn’t have [...]

Flock 2.5.6

Simon Collis — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 20:00:48 +0000

I haven’t looked at Flock for a long time, so I thought it was time I did. If you’ve not heard about Flock before, it’s a social web browser, which means that it’s designed to integrate with all the social networking services such as Facebook, MySpace, bebo, Twitter, Digg and all the in-crowd. But it [...]

Eight things I’d like to see in Office 2010

Simon Collis — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:00:29 +0000

It may be a bit late for this, but here’s eight things Microsoft could do NOW that would dramatically make my – and judging by some of the web searches I’ve done, lots of other people’s – experience of Office better. 8. An option to stop Outlook formatting phone numbers Outlook really is dreadful at [...]

DON’T buy a TopUp TV branded digibox…

Simon Collis — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:10:15 +0000

I warn you, it’s a real mistake unless you plan to subscribe. We made the mistake of buying one without meaning to subscribe, and the programme guide just got smaller because there’s a new channel “TopUp Showcase” that is ALWAYS on screen. It makes me annoyed enough to want to destroy the box… Worse, the [...]