Tag: technology
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The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Of System Tray Icons
What the fuck is that icon for? Despite the best efforts of icon designer to (apparently) make clear and comprehensible icons, and by computer users to learn and understand them, I still remain perplexed from time to time by the plethora of icons in my system tray (sorry, I mean Taskbar Notification Area). Let's take …
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Working From Home
The phone rings. It's clear to me by the sound it makes and by the image on it's display that this is a business call.
"Good morning, SmartData; Dan speaking," I say.
The caller identifies themselves, and asks to speak to Alex, another SmartData employee. I look to my right to see if Alex is available (presumably … -
The Best Mouse In The World
This was one of my most-popular articles in 2010. It continues to be popular in Spain (¡Hola! Mucho gusto). If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy:
Why I believe that it's wrong to lie to children about Santa (2009).
The Ten Weirdest Sex Toys I've ever seen (2009)!
A dirty-looking calendar I found at … -
On This Day In 2006
Looking Back
On this day in 2006 I'd just come to the end of a long weekend of coding and socialising. The code project was, of course, Three Rings, and Bryn and Gareth were helping out with the big push to make the initial release Three Rings 2 a success.
Three Rings is, of course, a project … -
Updating WHOIS Records With Easily
I've recently undergone an ordeal with Easily, with whom a number of my domain names are registered, that involved a process so painful and convoluted that I couldn't help but share it with you. All I wanted to do was to change the WHOIS data on some of my domains, because they were horribly out …
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The 17 Blog Posts That Weren't
It may come as a surprise to you that the stuff I write about on my blog - whether about technology, dreams, food, film, games, relationships, or my life in general - isn't actually always written off-the-cuff. To the contrary, sometimes a post is edited and re-edited over the course of weeks or months before …
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What Not To Do When You Lose Your Mobile
Maybe this is just a pet hate that is exclusively mine, but there's something that really gets on my nerves and it's happened under one of the two scenarios below at least three times within the last month. It's as if the very second you let people loose on social-networking site Facebook they immediately lose …
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ICANN Invent A Whole Universe Of Mess
In case you hadn't heard/didn't care, ICANN have authorised the creation of arbitrary privately-controlled top-level domains. So what does this mean?
Well, the happy hippy theory fun about it all is that suddenly there's the capacity for pretty much anybody (well, anybody with a particularly deep wallet, and - for now - a demonstrable business plan) … -
Firefox 3 "Download Day"
Downloaded your copy of Mozilla Firefox 3 yet to help them make the world record? I've been using Firefox 3 since the early betas and I've got no qualms about recommending it wholeheartedly. The awsomebar is simply that: awesome, the speed and memory usage have become far better than the previous version, and the care … -
My April Fools
I've always had a thing for big, overcomplicated April Fools' gags. Traditionally, we'd always play pranks on Penbryn Halls at the University, but it's not so easy these days to gain access to halls of residence, now that they've installed door locks that don't open by themselves when you so much as breathe hard on …
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Best Bug Ever
On behalf of a client of a client of SmartData, I was responsible this weekend for moving a website over from one server to another. It's a monolithic old custom-written content management system, in Perl, which over the last four or five years has been passed from developer to developer and has begun to look …
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A Quick Play With HTML5
I've been playing with HTML 5 a little this morning. It's really quite fabulous: a lot of smart design decisions have been made and it looks like - given a good few years to get things up to scratch even after the specification has been finalised - it'll really provide a lot of useful tools …
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LiveJournal For Google Reader v1.3 Update
Earlier this year, I released my LiveJournal Atom Feed Digest Authentication Proxy (also known as LiveJournal For Google Reader Users). This tool allows Google Reader users to subscribe to "friends only" posts in LiveJournal weblogs, which normally isn't possible because Google Reader doesn't support the necessary authentication methods.
Thanks to the hundreds of users that use … -
Curious Bug
I was playing the Chess game in Clubhouse Games on the Nintendo DS last night, and I've discovered a bug that can occur in a very unusual situation. Normally, the game quite rightly allows you to only make legal moves. For example, when in check, the only legal moves are those moves which get you …
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10 Computer Games That Stole My Life
I don't actually play many computer games: I'm quite selective. Sure, I try out each and every "next big thing," but in general, I'm left unimpressed. Sometimes, however, a computer game is released that actually steals my life for months or years - something I come back to time and time again. Something that actually …