My tip on passwords was published in redmond magazine the other week and is available online. Shouldn’t be too hard to work out which tip I posted. Note to current employers – doesn’t mean that I’m using this function now – especially as Symantec Antivirus is crazy enough to think that certain tools are virus’s and deletes them!
Month: April 2006
When your belkin wireless mouse stops working, press the connect button on the receiver, let go and then press the button on the mouse and let go – hey presto!
The new company car arrived at the office today – they’ve got one of the horrible looking boxes with wheels on – aka scion. Admittedly, with the smart wheels and rear bumper that it has, it doesn’t look that bad – and the advantage of the boxiness is that it has plenty of room for signage on the car. When I looked through the window I was a bit worried as it only had a cd player – no use for my mp3 player, but was then told it would play mp3 cd’s – which was good news. Even better is that it has a 3.5mm jack to plug the mp3 player into AND a cradle to hold it in place – sweet! The car doesn’t have cruise control which was a suprise as nearly every car has cruisecontrol over here but driving around columbus it’s pretty rare that you get to use cruisecontrol anyway. The boot was suprisingly small for a boxy car, but I think thats because there is a fair amount of room for the rear passengers – but the seats can be folded down for storage and carrying servers, printers and the other tech stuff we lug around. I’ve yet to drive it – that’ll be later this week or early next week so I can’t comment on the driving but apparently it is pretty good. It’s white (at the moment) and thats all the important things on a car covered – I have no idea on the engine size, rpm, bhp or any of that other stuff.A while back I decided to get the series 1 of Lost from Amazon from an amazon marketplace seller who had had good feedback. Unfortunately that was March 19th and I’ve still not received anything. However looking at the sellers feedback it looks like I’m not the only person with problems from this user (There was only one complaint when I placed the order). I complained to amazon as the positive feedback looked suspicious as people were saying they had received goods within 2 days but I hadn’t even received an acknowledgement – amazon replied to tell me I had to wait until 28 days before I could claim my money back -the last day for the goods to arrive is tomorrow and then Thursday I’ll be claiming. In the meantime, I’d recommend you stay away from [email protected]
Update I thought I’d delete my feedback and add something else to it – but it turns out that if you delete feedback on amazon then you can’t add another feedback comment – my comment was “12 days from order, no goods, acknowledgement or contact from seller despite 2 emails requesting information” now it’s “Still no feedback from this user – I’ll be claiming against Amazon after tomorrow”
After reading Neil’s post on StarForce I’ve now removed the software from my pc by following the instructions at Boycott StarForce. The company claims to be good but has sent threatening letters to people who have complained about the software – something people are legally entitled to do. My concern (along with others) is that the software is not uninstalled when you remove games and there was no consent or EULA to have it installed in the first place. UBISoft are apparently the biggest culprits for the bundling of the software but strangely it is starforce who are getting the flack not the game company!
I logged a complaint with the better business bureau yesterday and the complaint has been forwarded to Roadrunner for their comments. Today I get a phone call saying that they are going to credit my account with the amount that I had paid them (how jolly nice of them!) and that they are going to write an official letter of apology to me. Not sure if the letter and the BBB is co-incidental or not…..
Then to top it all off, yesterday my roadrunner went down when the cablemodem lost its connectivity to the cable network. It took about 45 mins of fiddling with combinations of cable network, router and telephone adapter to get everything working – initially nothing was working but then I got the cable modem talking to roadrunner (and the pc attached directly to the modem also talking to the internet) but the netgear router would not get an ip from the cable modem and allow outside connectivity.
Therefore I decided to finally get the linksys wrt54g that I’ve been wanting to get for a while now (it’s a late birthday present) and thankfully I was able to find a version4 router on a display rack- all the ones in the normal shelf were version5 which aren’t hackable (apart from late breaking limited hacks). The other good thing was that they were reduced to $50 from $70.
With this new router I’ll be able to play with the different firmware versions and setup a vpn server. I’d also like to see if I can bridge a test and production lan using the wifi on the two routers – but thats a project for later on……
I am STILL having to deal with Time Warner’s incompetent billing system. The check that we wrote and gave to their employee on the 28th December 2006 was eventually cashed by them on the 1st March. They now reckon this cheque did not go through, they credited my bank account with the payment and want me to investigate. I don’t need to investigate as I have the cheque image in front of me and no balance credit for a months bill. On top of that it has taken two web sessions and two phone calls to stop the auto payment of my account at the end of this month. There is no way I am trusting payment via the bank to these guys if they can bill me an incorrect amount each month.
Discovered today (after a lot of hassles) that Backup Exec may have a problem where backups to a disk folder does not work and ends up in a queued status. Eventually discovered that if you drag the “backup to disk” media to the scratch media pool then the backups start working again.
Didn’t find anything on the veritas/symantec web site about this and nothing in google either so hopefully this will help other people out.
Yahoo’s Messenger now has voice calling capabilities built into it with free pc to pc communication – nothing new there, but they also have the ability to call standard phone lines including the UK (rates table). The weird thing is that calling London costs 1cent a minute, but calling anywhere else in the uk costs 1.5cents per minute. Still cheap, but weird how they have different prices. Unfortunately you have to pay a minumum of $10 to start with and the prepayment expires after 180 days of purchase or last use. This slight change to the expiry date is good news as it means you can keep the $10 going for a long time as long as you use it once every 6 months.
You also get free voicemail (something that skype charges you for) which is good – with delivery to your yahoo account or IM window.
They should really give you 10 minutes of free calling though so you can try the service to see if the quality is any good before you lay out your money.
You’ll still need to buy server licences though if you are running MS servers but Virtual Server 2005 is now free. Thanks to Random Thoughts