You may have heard of the new-ish social network (it’s actually more than that, but for most people the distinction isn’t particularly relevant) called App.Net, or ADN (for “app dot net”). I’ve been a member since August 2012, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now.

The new RSS feed URL for this site is now: http://feeds.sja.co.uk/rss

The Feedburner URL will continue to work for the time being, but please update your subscriptions as it will vanish at some point.

To provide a leading browser on Android and iOS, this year Opera will make a gradual transition to the WebKit engine, as well as Chromium, for most of its upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers.

That's quite far up the list of things I didn't expect to read today. Good news though.

Never write a single javascript line anymore to validate your forms FrontEnd. Parsley will do that for you – and do it right –, thanks to its powerful DOM-API !

A simple JavaScript plugin which detects SVG images on your website, and automatically "looks" for a standard image fallback for those older, less capable browsers. Those browsers need lovin’ too dawg.

a handy tool for responsive design testing

MPs have approved legislation for same-sex marriage in England and Wales, despite the opposition of dozens of Conservative MPs.

Common sense prevails. Though how some of these homophobic MPs manage to maintain jobs in the public eye is beyond me.

The ICO said its change in policy was "consistent" with guidance it has issued on obtaining "implied consent" to cookies. It said the purpose of its change in policy was to enable it to "collect reliable information to make our website better".

I wonder if the ICO has any concept of the amount of money they caused companies to spend trying to come up with explicit permission functionality on their websites.

Today we are pleased to announce the release of Sequel Pro 1.0. With this new release comes a beautiful new icon, courtesy of Kenichi and the guys at Panic. We think the new icon is fantastic!

A worthy upgrade, massive change log.

After 15 years, the layout of Apple.com is still the same: prominently feature the latest product, with 3-4 little boxes below that highlight other recent products and company news. The homepage has become more evident and intuitive each year. Bigger pictures, less copy, bolder text, fewer items to click… It’s like a giant billboard. They stuck with a format that worked and continually refined it.

It's amazing how dated the site looks even just a few years ago.

One day while driving home, I thought: "Why don’t I just stop using email altogether?" That night while drifting off to sleep I imagined my email-free life. I liked the picture. Within the same week, I made the decision to cut email out of my life.

Not sure this would work for me, but interesting none the less.

Fixed providers have always given individual addresses to each customer, usually allocated at connection and kept for at least the duration of that connection. But these days there aren’t enough addresses to go around, which is prompting more short term fixes while we continue to wait for IPv6. Unfortunately, IPv6 isn’t ready to implement UK wide just yet as there are applications that don’t work on it.

Let me pick out part of that again...

which is prompting more short term fixes while we continue to wait for IPv6

This annoys me. Why are we waiting for IPv6? Pick a date, however far in the future we feel it has to be, and we work towards a wholesale IPv6 launch. If we wait, nothing happens and progress continues to be painstakingly slow. Any software not supporting IPv6 by that date has to be replaced or patched.

It's called progress.

The aim of this article is to give you, a current user of Laravel, an insight into what's changing in Laravel 4 that you'll need to be aware of, especially if you're thinking of upgrading. Before we crack on I'd like to point out that Laravel 3 is a great product and that you shouldn't upgrade your application just for the sake of keeping up with the Joneses.

During yesterday's visit to the HMV branch, grandson Cian picked out three computer games – Euro Truck Simulator 2, priced at €22.40; The Sims 3 Town Life, at €11.99; and Rail Simulator priced at €28,

The total price for the three items was €62.39, reduced to €46.80 when a 25pc discount was applied. Mr Nolan then made several unsuccessful attempts to get the shop's staff to accept his voucher for the computer games his grandson wanted.

Undeterred, Mr Nolan then marched out the door with the items.

This looks like a really nice alternative for the Mini.

Socialite provides a very easy way to implement and activate a plethora of social sharing buttons — any time you wish. On document load, on article hover, on any event!

If you're selling your soul, you may as well do it asynchronously. Socialite won't cause document rendering to hang while waiting for 50kb of social media.

Deloitte was being lined up to run the 239-store chain following a meeting of the HMV board on Monday evening, the BBC understands.

A formal announcement is expected later.

HMV has been in crisis for months, and in December warned it faced a possible breach of bank loan agreements.

I'm not even remotely surprised. When was the last time you bought a CD from HMV?

A new style of wallets like never before. With Ainste wallets, you will experience a different and creative twist to ordinary things.

Your job is to figure out what aggregate size works best for your audience, not to try and outguess what kind of device or network I’m using. Use image compression to create a payload that keeps everyone happy and as needs change adjust that size accordingly.

So, you can now expect:

• More posts
• Bugs
• Missing features

The bugs are inevitable and will be squashed in time, the missing features will either be dropped permanently (ads), or replaced in due course (search).

The increased post frequency is something I'll work hard to maintain.

Because of Twitter’s recent enforcement of token limits, we only have a limited number of tokens available for Tweetbot for Mac. These tokens dictate how many users Tweetbot for Mac can have. The app’s limit is separate from, but much smaller than, the limit for Tweetbot for iOS. Once we use up the tokens granted to us by Twitter, we will no longer be able to sell the app to new users. Tapbots will continue to support Tweetbot for Mac for existing customers at that time.

The Magazine is for people who love technology, especially the internet, mobile, truly great personal computers, and related fields influenced by technology such as photography, publishing, music, and even coffee.

Netbot is a full-featured iPhone App.net client with a lot of personality. Whether it’s the meticulously-crafted interface, sounds & animation, or features like smart gestures, there’s a lot to love about Netbot.

Internet Explorer 10 launches on 10/26/2012, and as a result, we will discontinue support for Internet Explorer 8 shortly afterwards, on 11/15/2012. After this date users accessing Google Apps services using Internet Explorer 8 will see a message recommending that they upgrade their browser.

It’s nice.

The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions is squatting on an unused block of super-scarce IPv4 addresses. Specifically, they’re sitting on a /8 network with 1.67 million spare addresses. A petition asks the government to sell these off.

People keep asking why Apple didn’t opt for the micro-USB connector. The answer is simple: that connector isn’t smart enough. It has only 5 pins: +5V, Ground, 2 digital data pins, and a sense pin, so most of the dock connector functions wouldn’t work – only charging and syncing would.

On Friday, 14 September 2012, the RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, distributed the last blocks of IPv4 address space from the available pool.

It is now imperative that all stakeholders deploy IPv6 on their networks to ensure the continuity of their online operations and the future growth of the Internet.

This site is accessible by IPv6, is yours?

The next step was to actually fire it. Have Blue started by chambering the gun for .22 caliber pistol rounds, a relatively low-powered ammunition. After firing 200 rounds, he announced to an online AR-15 forum that it “runs great!”

Noti is tool allowing you to easily receive notifications from web applications directly on your desktop. No need to keep a web page open, just run our little app on your computer and you’ll be able to start receiving notifications from supported web applications.

Great stuff, looking forward to seeing web services make use of this.

Knowing that its days as a native iOS app are numbered, YouTube has released a standalone iPhone app just ahead of Wednesday’s media event, where Apple is expected to announce the newest iPhone and a release date for iOS 6.

The core tenets of this mixin library are to avoid output bloat wherever possible (via duplicated properties etc) and to provide flexibile, configurable solutions to the problems that are addressed by the library (i.e. by using Modernizr classes, browser hacks or not, etc). The aim is to give the author the benefits of reusable shortcuts without obliterating personal style and generating bloated stylesheets.

In fact, this decision should lead to more innovation, not less. If Samsung is forced to stop copying Apple, there is only one option left — innovate. Instead of sitting back and making their phones and tablets look exactly like the iPhone and iPad, Samsung will now have to do some work. The hardware and software will have to be different, unique and innovative.

We’ll be adding optional two-step verification for all Dropbox accounts sometime in the next few days. Two-step verification adds an extra layer of protection to your account by requiring an additional security code that is sent to your phone by text message or generated using a mobile authenticator app.

I’ve enabled it using Google’s Authenticator and so far so good. Still in beta, but well worth enabling. Now, if we can just get Apple to do the same thing…

The beta of Tweetbot for Mac will be coming soon, shortly followed by the final release in the Mac App Store. All three versions of Tweetbot are based on the same low level code base, so once that’s out we expect to continue to add new and exciting features to all 3 apps.

Twitter has left themselves a lot of wiggle-room with the rules. Effectively, Twitter can decide your app is breaking a (potentially vague) rule at any time, or they can add a new rule that your app inadvertently breaks, and revoke your API access at any time.

So I started wondering, how do Americans really think about “those people” in other states? What are the most common stereotypes? For each of the fifty states and DC, I asked Google: “Why is [State] so ” and let it autocomplete. It seemed like an ideal question to get at popular assumptions, since “Why is [State] so X?” presupposes that X is true.

Upon learning of the Tesla Science Center’s pursuit, Inman turned to fundraising platform Indiegogo, where he previously launched a wildly successful campaign against FunnyJunk. Inman hopes to raise $850,000 through online donations, and has issued an open invitation for additional corporate sponsorship, since building the museum itself would certainly cost more. (The companies on his list include Google, Tesla Motors, and Christian Bale.)

App.net is a different kind of social platform.
We’re building a real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers.
Our team has spent the last 9 years building social services, developer platforms, mobile applications and more.

I’ve always wanted to allow end-users to tinker with their environment, my ability to do this is what got me excited about programming in the first place, and it is why I created the bundles concept, but there are limits to how much a bundle can do, and with the still growing user base, I think the best move forward is to open source the program.

You’d think the 2012 Olympics would prove the perfect opportunity for sports photographers to give something like a new Nikon D4 a workout, but Guardian photojournalist Dan Chung is taking a slightly different approach. He’s keeping a photoblog entirely comprised of pictures taken with his iPhone, covering everything from fast-paced action on the field to colorful portraits of fans.

Two-factor authentication means “something you know” (like a password) and “something you have,” which can be an object like a phone.

- iconmonstr
- NounProject
- Icons4Coffee
- Pixicon
- Crisp Icon Set

Asked if he told anyone at Apple to copy Samsung’s designs, Forstall replied, “I never directed anyone to go and copy something from Samsung. We wanted to build something great. There was no reason to look at anything they had done.”

Burn!

Flip the “Adjust for inflation” toggle to see the real story.

For reference, the results that I collected are from a random sampling of tweets across a 9-hour period, approximately 9am to 5.30pm on the 18th July. In total, I collected and analysed one million tweets. Whilst this seems like a lot, it still pales in comparison to daily tweet volume1.

It’s a menubar icon. If you drop a file on it, it’ll build a nice preview page around it, upload both to your Dropbox, then copy the public preview link to your clipboard. If you drop a folder on it, the folder will be zipped up before uploading.

Actionsteps solves the flagging problem, where every email you know that you need to respond to is of equal importance.

With Actionsteps you’ve a great tool that just complement your existing GTD workflow. Just one click and you added an Actionstep with a priority. Read the full concept for more information about how Actionsteps work.

You can read a bit more about the background and concept in this post.

In my testing, reading the 10.8 review took approximately 128 minutes. But I walked my dog briefly in the middle.

and:

At medium brightness, my iPad (3rd-generation) battery fell from 73% to 56% while I read the review on it.

Patrick Wensink has posted a very nice and friendly cease-and-desist letter from Christy Susman, a Jack Daniel’s company’s trademark lawyer, who were concerned about the cover on his book Broken Piano for President. The JD lawyers offered to help pay for a new print run.

We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did our best to provide you with the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience.

Now we’re joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision — one that we think we can better achieve with Google.

After having an online presence in the United Kingdom for more than 15 years, Apple has finally acquired the Apple.co.uk domain name. Dating back to at least 2003, Apple.co.uk has been owned by Apple Illustration, an illustration agency based in the UK. That company is now located at AppleAgency.co.uk.

Takeout, Google’s mass data migration tool, how lets users merge connections from multiple Google+ accounts. Standard Google users probably haven’t created multiple profiles, but the news could come as a relief for users of business-based Google Apps, who often end up having a separate profile for corporate and personal use.

ISP Claranet is inviting religious groups, schools and child safety experts to set parental controls for its customers.

Claranet is following in the footsteps of TalkTalk with the launch of its network-level content filtering system, Childsafe. However, it’s going a step further than its larger rival by allowing parents to choose content filters selected by so-called “Guardians”.

Tweetbot for Mac is finally available! However it may not be quite as you had hoped. Developing for the Mac is no easy task, especially a full-featured Twitter client. However, we’ve gotten to a point where while not complete, it is useable. We’ve decided to release it as a public alpha to a) motivate us to finish faster, and b) get feedback to help us build the best Mac incarnation of Tweetbot we can make. You can love it or hate it, but rest assured it will only get much much better from here.

This guest playground piece from Adam Fairhead at Fairhead Creative is a great example of resolution-independent, future-thinking iconography. Plus, they’re pretty.

Edit: Official location for this project is on GitHub.

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?
and
What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be?

Marketing-wise, who knows what Apple would call it. I don’t think they’d use the “iPod” brand instead of the “iPad” brand, but anything is possible when it comes to Apple and naming products. But in terms of understanding what it is, if it ships, it’s an iPad, about two inches smaller diagonally.

The Nifty MiniDrive is an easy to use device that allows anyone to quickly and simply increase the available memory in their MacBook computer, as well as providing a set and forget back-up solution.

However, on certain web layouts this can cause problems and may result in an undesired layout.

To prevent this, simply add the following to any element in your CSS:

Safari will now no longer auto adjust the font size.

Today we’re happy to announce that our upgrades are getting a huge upgrade! Dropbox Pro now comes in flavors of 100 and 200 GB, but at the price of the original 50 and 100 GB plans.

There’s also a new 500Gb plan, pricing to be announced.

Edit: According to a Tweet from @dropboxops it looks like the upgrade is due to happen at around 1am GMT

The solution I was touting at the time used a US VPN set up on a secondary router which the Apple TV box was connected to. This worked (and continues to work) well for me, however there is a degree of complexity in the set up and since I posted that article, an alternative solution has been brought to my attention.

Unblock Us

Enter Unblock Us*. Although the word VPN is banded about on their website, this is not a VPN based solution. When you sign up for Unblock Us (there’s a short free trial period available), you are given access to their DNS servers to set up on any device that you wish. When Netflix (or iPlayer/etc) requests a connection, Unblock Us’ DNS servers will return the US (or Canadian/UK, depending on how you’ve set up your account) IPs for the service.

Full “how-to” articles and videos are available for a heap of devices from Apple TV to games consoles, iPod/iPad/iPhone, smart TVs and even some makes and models of router.

It’s simple, quick to set up and at $4.99/month it’s around the same price as a decent VPN connection.

The second router

Since I still have the second router I got for my original US VPN solution, I decided this was the best way to set up Unblock Us for use by multiple devices.

I switched off all the VPN services that were set up previously so that the router was simply passing all traffic straight through to my main ADSL router. Then I changed the DHCP settings so that the router was handing out the Unblock Us DNS server addresses instead of the ones from my ADSL provider.

The upshot of this is that anything I connect to the secondary router (wired or wireless) will show US Netflix content, and anything connected to my main ADSL router will show UK content.

* This is an affiliate link and I’ll receive a small commission payment should you follow that link and sign up.

The .htaccess file is a small text document that generally sits in the same location as your index.php or index.htm pages. It gives you the ability to interact with Apache on an individual domain-to-domain and directory-to-directory basis.

This is the first step to taxing stupidity, and I am 100% behind it.

In an updated version of its advice for websites on how to use cookies – small text files that are stored on the user’s computer and can identify them – the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has said that websites can assume that users have consented to their use of them.

You should (and hopefully are) using salts when storing hashed passwords. A few of you won’t have a clue what I’m on about, so I’ll explain (sorry if this is beneath you).

Edit and run code in any programming language with just a single click. With CodeRunner, It has never been easier to write and test code, run scripts, work with algorithms, or simply experiment with a new coding or scripting language.

gmaps.js allows you to use the potential of Google Maps in a simple way.
No more extensive documentation or large amount of code.

Edit: You can buy them on Etsy.

One slight issue I have with the Mac version of this app at the moment is that there’s no way to tell it to run in the menu bar; so it’s active in the dock all the time. Hopefully this will be resolved in a future update.

Now, Chrome 19 has been officially released as a “stable” version, and with it will come the option to sync their open tabs across multiple computers as well as an Android 4.0 phone with the Chrome beta app installed.

If you have taken a look at the ICO’s website and run screaming from the extreme solution it has implemented don’t worry. Fortunately, the ICO’s will not be enforcing such an extreme position on others.

Although Internet Explorer 8 usage appears to be dropping in favour of IE9, older versions such as IE6 and IE7 remained largely untouched

Yours truly, back in December:

As it is, and as hopeful as I am, I don’t think we’ll see the overnight disappearance of IE6 and 7 like the vast majority of web developers are suddenly all hoping for.

I don’t think there is a god, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that’s fine with me. It’s when belief starts infringing on other people’s rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a god. I would just rather you didn’t kill people who believe in a different god, say.

Despite the sensationalists claims made by some, the truth is that the threshold for monetary fines under UK data protection law is so high, that fines for this type of breach (in the UK!) are extremely unlikely.

Award-winning New York filmmaker and photographer Randy Scott Slavin will present his surrealist photo works from March 22-25 at Artexpo New York, the world’s largest fine art trade show for over 33 years at booth #1147.

A new EU law makes most websites illegal without intrusive popups and banners. We object, and you should too.

An industry source today told .net Opera will imminently implement WebKit prefixes, largely due to being “terrified of being outdone in the mobile marketplace” and the “large number of [mobile] websites designed exclusively for WebKit”.

I find this all very odd; if we’re all going to commit to using WebKit prefixes can’t we all just agree to use no prefix at all?

Thanks to your amazing support, we feel confident that Apple might revise its position on the Push API. We’ll submit a first version of Sparrow 1.2 including it. This might delay Sparrow 1.2 validation but we’re already working with some partners to include Push in future versions of Sparrow without needing Apple clearance.

Push is coming. If Apple can’t help us yet, we have other ideas.

Shitter will take one or more feeds from your Twitter account and turn it into four rolls of toilet paper, delivered straight to your door.

Apple has begun upgrading portions of its website, such as the iPad section, with high-resolution images that are large enough to fit on the third-generation iPad’s Retina Display.

So I decided to see what life is like in internet hell, running at 56k speeds, in Internet Explorer 6, on Windows ME, at a resolution of 1024 x 768. (For reference, that’s about 25 percent more space than an iPhone screen.)

Here are some numbers to blow your mind: The original Macintosh, released in 1984, had a monochrome 512 × 342 pixel display. That was 175,104 points. Today, the icons on iOS are 512 x 512 pixels, drawn from a 16.7 million color palette plus 256 levels of transparency.

After being asked if anyone had penguin allergies (is that a thing?), passengers of a Delta flight from Atlanta to New York were treated to something about 100 times more entertaining than reading SkyMall. This isn’t even fair.

So penguins can fly…

Here we have a 500x200px photo at 72 DPI:

Here we have the same image, this time at 300 DPI:

And finally, here we have the image again, now at 1 DPI:

All three are identical in file size, at around 40Kb and all are exactly the same quality. Feel free to download and check them in Fireworks, or your image editor of choice, to make sure I’m not lying to you.

If you’re being specific about the dimensions of an image in pixels, then DPI is completely irrelevant; a 20x20px image is a 20x20px image at 1 DPI or at a 1000 DPI.

So for the last few days I’ve been fiddling with my Apple TV, routers and VPN accounts to see if I could get access to US Netflix programmes on my TV. A few folk have asked, so I thought I’d share my setup.

This is not a detailed configuration step-by-step, it’s a general overview of the solution I ended up with. Detailed support for each part of this process is available from your VPN and/or firmware supplier.

You’ll need the following:

• an Apple TV
• a Netflix subscription
• a VPN account with US servers
• a VPN capable router

The VPN account

I did a bit of searching around to come up with a list of providers and ended up for various reasons with StrongVPN. There are plenty of other VPN suppliers out there, you just have to make sure they’ll support connections by router, rather than desktop software (and have US servers).

The router

Thankfully StrongVPN had a page on their website with supported routers, so I ended up simply choosing the cheapest of the bunch. The Cisco Linksys E2000 came in around £60 from Amazon UK and seemed to do everything I needed, you can read the full list and decide for yourselves.

The routers listed don’t unfortunately work out of the box as the firmware on them doesn’t support VPN connections. You’ll need to flash the router with either DD-WRT or Tomato USB firmware and in doing so you’ll likely invalidate any warranty. I went for DD-WRT as it seemed to be a little more feature-full than Tomato and updated more regularly. I should warn at this stage that DD-WRT is not an immediately straightforward thing to flash onto any router, so you really need to be comfortable with this process before tackling it. I accept no responsibility for any bricked routers, explosions or unwanted pregnancies as a result of this process!

The setup

Assuming you’ve managed to get your router up and running with a suitable firmware the rest of this set up is quite simple.

First thing is to connect the WAN port of your VPN router to your main broadband router, and the Apple TV to one of the standard network ports. That done, connecting your computer via one of the other network ports or wireless on the VPN router should give you a working internet connection (via your VPN router and out through your broadband router).

The reason for using the wired connection to your Apple TV is to provide you an easy way to switch between US and UK connections. If a wired connection is present the Apple TV will use it (US - VPN router), otherwise it will fall back to wireless (UK - broadband router). No reconfiguration needed.

Once you’re connected up, log into the VPN router and change any settings you wish. The LAN IP and DHCP for the VPN router should be set to a different range than your broadband router (for example, if your normal network is 192.168.1.x then use 192.168.2.x). You’ll also likely want to either disable wireless or set a network name and security.

The last step is to get the VPN itself up and running. Full instrictions for doing this should be proivided by any VPN supplier worth their salt; e.g. StrongVPN list a range of instruction pages.

One final word on the set up, I tried both PPTP and OpenVPN and eventually settled on OpenVPN. PPTP was much easier to setup (it’s basically just a username, password and server address) but I found it almost unusably slow through the router.

Enjoy the show

Once you have the VPN set up and running, you can test from your computer by browsing to any page that displays your geo-location. StrongVPN’s website has it displayed at all times in the upper left hand corner. If you’ve done it all right then you should be showing as from a US connection.

Fire up the Apple TV, log into Netflix and you should now have a much wider range of programmes and films. You may notice a delays whilst browsing around the Netflix screens, however once you hit play you shouldn’t have any issues streaming at all.

Give me a shout on Twitter and let me know how you get on.

To His Holiness: your words are deplorable, and all the more so for being spoken in this age. To my dear, conflicted friend, and to everyone exposed to the religious virus: evidence and reason are indeed, as you suspect and know, the king of justifications for a belief - and the very minimum you have a right to demand.

And to religion, I offer the language of my own ‘faith’, that of science: evolve, or die.

DING DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD. For now, at least, the “ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation” known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is no more

The public outcry over the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act seems to have gotten so loud that even members of Congress can hear it.

Let’s hope this is just the start.

Flash sucks on the whole the iPad is simply beautiful another point is that dicknose whose profit not marketshare however nice, in spite of Steve Jobs because get your popcorn where but what do I know until iOS, before I think the iPhone is the best when noted, in my opinion definition of open what is more Apple, and the iPhone is a “flop”, since this sucks next but it’s open, so that’s OK.

Awesome.

For example, we were told that descendant selectors were slow, especially when the right-most selector matched many elements on the page. All this was fantastic information when we had none, but as it turns out, times have changed! Thanks to some amazing work by Antti Koivisto there are many selectors we don’t need to worry about anymore!

One of my pet hates (there are many), is being presented with the incorrect keyboard, or having auto capitalisation forced upon me, when entering information into web forms on my iPhone or iPad.  This is something that’s very easy to control and can be done so with a little sprinkle of HTML5.  You don’t even have to worry about old browsers - I’ve tested this to work perfectly well even in IE6.

The screenshots used in this post are from a UK based iPhone 4S running iOS5; previous versions of iPhone OS and the iPad will differ.

Text keyboard

Your standard text input field code will look something like this:

Telephone keyboard

In order to display the telephone keyboard, use this:

URL keyboard

For URLs you want this:

Email keyboard

For email addresses, you want this:

Numerical keyboard

And finally, for a simple numerical keyboard (similar to the telephone one but with no +, * and # key):

Other options

It’s also possible to control auto correct with the use of the following paramater:

Last, but by no means least, turning on or off auto capitalisation:

So the next time you’re creating a login field that takes an email address, use something like this:

Microsoft Corp. today issued proceedings against Comet Group PLC for allegedly creating and selling more than 94,000 sets of counterfeit Windows Vista and Windows XP recovery CDs. The alleged counterfeits were sold to customers who had purchased Windows-loaded PCs and laptops.

This is pretty bad, if true.

Or am I just being cynical?

IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away. In fact, we launched the IE6 Countdown site last March to help accelerate the process. Less than a year later, I’m thrilled to say that the United States has joined the ranks of Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway in dropping below 1% usage of IE6.

It looks like the UK isn’t far behind, certainly less than 2% on average it seems.

I wonder how much GoDaddy paid for this post on Mashable.

We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.

I wonder how much longer Google will continue to do this, given what appears to be the start of a noticeable decline in Firefox use.

As it happens, after giving it some thought, I think I’m pretty much as safe as I can be, and I don’t even take any backups. Unintentionally, I’ve got myself into the situation where I’m working almost exclusively from “the cloud” with almost zero reliance on local data… and I figured I’d share my set up.

I’m very fortunate when it comes to data; I really don’t have a lot (in terms of data size) to store, so I know my story is not typical and won’t apply to everyone. None the less I think it’s quite interesting how I’ve ended up at this point without it being my intention.

I’m a full time web developer/IT manager for a local design company, and a freelance hosting & IT support guy. These two hats mean I’ve got a wide variety of data to store, I’ll briefly run though these.

Email

Easy; as a Google Apps user I’ve got 6 to 7 years worth of email stored with Google. No local mail client, I work solely through Google’s web interface, so that’s as safe as I need it to be.

Browser Data

By this I mean bookmarks, etc. As a Chrome user I have my browser set to sync back to my Google account using the native Chrome Sync facility. Aside from keeping everything constantly backed up, this also means I have the same data on all of my many computers.

Web Development Files

Thousands of images, HTML/CSS files, ExpressionEngine installers, ExpressionEngine add-ons and so on, all sitting in my Dropbox account. The second I save any file or make any changes they are instantly modified (with roll-back file history) in my Dropbox account and rolled out to my other computers. I have the Pack Rat add-on, so I can go all the way back to my first day of using Dropbox, years ago, and recover or roll back any lost or overwritten file.

Music

My music, which doesn’t account for a lot, is almost all through iTunes. I can log into iTunes and re-download anything I’ve purchased.

Photos

Anything I’ve ever shot that I’m at all precious about has a high-res version stored in public or private folders on Flickr. Again, as safe as I need it to be. Yes I might lose my RAW files, but I can live with that.

Passwords/Secure Data

1Password to the rescue; anything that’s sensitive is stored there and synced using Dropbox.

Applications

I can’t remember the last time I bought software on physical media. Between the Mac App Store and various software company websites (serial/activation codes in 1Password, Dropbox or my inbox) I can re-download what I need.

I believe that with all of the above, I could put this laptop in the bin right now, go out and buy a new one, and within a few hours be back up and running pretty much exactly where I left off, even half way through posting this.

How would you fare?

The problem is that all Windows updates, automatic or otherwise, arrive through Windows Update (the tool built into Windows to manage system updates). When a new install of Windows is performed one of the options at the end of the installation is how to handle updates available though Windows Update. One of the options is to download and install automatically, another downloads automatically and installs when prompted to by the user and a final option is to do nothing at all.

I’ve done a lot of IT support over the years, almost exclusively Windows based, and my experience over that time is that by far and wide the most common option to have selected is the second one; download automatically and install when prompted. This is where the problem lies, most end users don’t install anything when prompted, because us technical folk have spent years telling them not to say yes to things that pop up on the screen.

Microsoft should have taken the opportunity with IE9 to roll out a Chrome style background update system that’s not dependant on Windows Update. As it is, and as hopeful as I am, I don’t think we’ll see the overnight disappearance of IE6 and 7 like the vast majority of web developers are suddenly all hoping for.

EDIT: I ordered one, received it within a couple of days and it really is excellent.

Our home—Earth—is in trouble. VW opposes key environmental laws we need if we’re going to stop our planet going the way of Alderaan (bye bye). But all is not lost. We feel the good in Volkswagen.

The State of Nevada has become the first to legalize driverless cars.

Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Republican from Buffalo who had sought office promising to oppose same-sex marriage, told his colleagues he had agonized for months before concluding he had been wrong.

A worthy u-turn.

Dot Scot Registry was set up in 2009 to try to establish and operate a new generic top-level domain (gTLD) to represent an online identity for Scots at home and abroad.

Do we want a four character TLD? I can’t see being popular; a ccTLD would be a far better option.

From computing to cooking, we all have a set of favorite items for doing what we love. Bagcheck is a fun way to share what’s inside our “bags”.

Even Zeldman’s on it.

One example is the word “berk” a mild pejorative, widely used across the UK, and not usually considered particularly offensive, although the rhyming slang origin is as a contraction of “Berkeley Hunt”...