1. In the Firefox address bar, type about:config
2. Then, in the Filter box at the top type keyword
3. This should show up a Preference Name called keyword.url. Right-click on this and select Modify
4. Update the value to reflect the search engine of your choice. In my case I’ve changed it to http://www.google.co.uk/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q= to point me at Google UK.

That should be it. Now when I type some words into my address bar, firefox will search for those terms in google.co.uk if I’ve not entered a valid URL. I hope this helps someone!

You may also want to look at the keyword search feature built into Firefox bookmarks, also available through the new del.icio.us bookmarks too. This allows you to type things like google iphone 3g to search Google for the term ‘iphone 3g’, or flickr unboxing to search Flickr for photos of people unpacking their new gadgets.

I started out wanting to add some aliases for the mysql and mysqladmin commands as I’ve just decided to have a bit of a play with django. On linux I used to edit my .bashrc file to do this, but the version of bash on Mac OS X (10.5.2) doesn’t seem to support this. Hunting around I realised that I should just add the path to these commands to my PATH environment variable, but again: not quite so simple.

I want these commands to be available to everyone, so it turns out you have to edit a file called paths in /etc:

sudo vi /etc/paths

And that was it. Easy when you know how! Oh, and remember to run vi as root using the sudo command….

As you can see I’ve now got it sussed, but it took a bit of messing around. The keyboard is on a Mac Book Pro, and to get a hash you need to press Alt-3 (or ‘Option’ as I think they call it, and the key with the pound (£) symbol on it). Those funny Americans…

I’ve been having all sorts of problems getting my networked attached storage working too. I have two of these devices: and old LaCie Ethernet disk mini and an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. The ReadyNAS works fine if I set it up as a Windows share (ironic, I know…), but it just wont work at all if I set it up as an AFP share and enable ‘bonjour’. However, the LaCie device (and I always had the impression that Lacie were more of a mac shop than a windows shop) just won’t work at all. I can try it as a windows share or an AFP share with bonjour, and neither setting will work. It’s very frustrating!

The next hurdle has been screen calibration. I’ve been trying to get the laptop screen and my 19″ LaCie 319 set up the same so that I can run both displays at the same time and have images on either look the same. I set both to the same colour temperature, gave them the same luminance and gamma setting and ran some calibration software that came with my monitor and the Blue Eye Pro colorimeter. No matter what I do they just won’t look the same. The curious thing is if I measure the response of either screen (using the colorimeter) they both report to be the same! Very perplexing!

At the same time I’m playing with Adobe Lightroom, and although I think it’s pretty good software, neither the laptop screen or my LaCie is big enough to make it ‘nice’ to use. I really need to close the laptop lid and use an external display, but have you seen the price of a LaCie 324 Monitor with hood?! They don’t come cheap!

So what other issues am I having?

Well there is mouse that goes exactly where I want it to on my Windows computer, but seems to have a mind of it’s own on the Mac.

And then there is the terminal/shell that doesn’t automatically copy selected text to the clipboard and paste on a right-click.

Talking of shells, the backspace key seems to want to do a forward delete instead in some circumstances. I’ve not worked out the pattern yet, but it’s a very strange thing indeed. And trying all the combinations of Ctrl-Backspace, Alt-Backspace and Cmd-Backspace don’t seem to help this time around. Again, a small annoyance on it’s own, but taken along with all the others it’s getting to be a major irritation!

Finally we mustn’t forget the lack of support for automatic window focus (where the cursor focus follows the mouse). This is a real pain indeed! Most linux window managers that I’ve used over the last 10 years (in fact all that I’ve ever used) have done this without a problem, and you can even do this on Windows, so why on earth doesn’t OS X support it?!

So despite being praised for it’s usability, I’m still having some issues using my Mac.

On the positive side, I discovered is that Safari (which I previously couldn’t stand) supports embedded colour profiles in images. This means that when I look at my photos on flickr, they look exactly how I meant them to look (assuming the viewing monitor has been calibrated). I don’t know if Safari does this on Windows, but it makes my flickr experience much nicer. So much so in fact that I now won’t use firefox to surf flickr! So that’s a good thing.

But I’m nearly there. I’m trying to reduce my clutter so if I can decommission my old NAS and sort out the display problems then I should be able to get rid of some old and bulky hardware and free up some well needed space!

So enough rambling. In conclusion maybe I need to think about installing Ubuntu linux on this laptop instead…. at least things would be more predictable… wouldn’t they? I’m dreading the thought of actually becoming a fan of Windows (XP, not Vista), so perhaps if I avoid installing Linux I’ll never know if it’s better or worse and I can live in the vague hope that it simply must be better, and one day if I ever need it I can switch over… That day must never come.

Right, I only started this post so I had somewhere to check back to when I needed reminding how to get the hash symbol…. so that’ll be Alt-3 then. Remember?

We’ve had over four years of fun with this project, but after a recent hacking incident and with the constant battle against spammers and spam blogs, I have to admit that I just don’t have the time to put into the project that it needs (and deserves).

Long-time members will be aware that the site has changed little since we went live, and although a great deal of preparation, research and investment went into plans for
a new version of the site (”BritBlog 2.0″ so to speak), I’ve just not been able to find the time to actually put them into action.

I would like to thank everyone who helped make the site a success, especially Nancy, who spent literally hundreds of hours checking out new signups.

Perhaps one day the site will return in a new guise — and I really I hope it does — but in the meantime I’m left with no option but to take it offline.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause to anyone. Feel free to discuss this announcement below if you like, or contact me if you need any further information.

Despite all the concerns over the security of OSX lately, I think this will be a good move (providing I can get used to the new interface and the one-button mouse). This is going to replace my ageing desktop (a very old Dell Precision 530 workstation running Windows 2000 Pro) for image processing/photography and work, so it should free up a lot of desk space and get rid of a lot of cables. I have an old laptop running XP, so I’m going to nuke that and install Ubuntu Linux on it for sofa-surfing, so then apart from my XBOX 360 and work laptop (when it’s at home) I’ll be a Windows-free zone!

The best thing will be being able to pull up a proper command prompt on my local machine without the need to SSH onto a server somewhere. Sad I know, but it’s little things like this that change using a computer from being a pain to being (almost) a joy…. I’m hoping to see a decent speed improvement on image processing too. I’m going from a single 2.4GHz Xeon with 512KB cache to a two-core 2.6GHz processor with 6MB cache! The jump from a 128MB graphics card to 512MB shouldn’t be all that stressful either

No doubt I’ll post more about this when it arrives… which will be sometime mid-next week

Tags: apple, apple iie, apple mac pro, bye bye windows

It’s a miracle! A leaf cutting I made last year has finally started to grow shoots!

I took two at the same time; one grew into a nice little bushy plant, and the other one (above) just grew this big lump. I kept it out of curiosity, and it has finally started to grow some little shoots

Tags: kalanchoe, cutting, plant, leaf

Just filling out my tax return and got to this question. You need a bit of light relief when you’re doing this!

Perhaps is should read:

“Do you want to claim blind person’s allowance for married couples?”

What a beautiful day! My M&S vase and M&S daffodils were a lovely sight to see in the morning.

Tags: spring, daffodil

Typical! I only got around to listening to theJazz about a month ago, and already it is going the way of Jazz FM and shutting down.

I’d even been looking into DAB radio choices over the last couple of weeks so I could listen to it in the Kitchen and the Bedroom, but now it seems like there will be no point in buying one. Ah well, I guess it’ll save me some money…

The only option I’m left with now is listening to TSF Jazz, which is a French jazz radio station that you can get via internet radio (or on my squeezebox…). It seems like a reasonable station - I just have no idea what they’re talking about!

Tags: thejazz, jazzfm, tsfjazz, gcap media

So this was the menu:

As you can see, there was quite a lot to choose from! We made a rather feeble attempt at getting through it all, so if you know me and fancy coming to the next ‘event’ then let me know!

Tags: beer festival, real ale, camra, bottled ale