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It might be time I started thinking about a new laptop. The T Series Thinkpad is more than 8 years old now. It's still going fine but it is getting a bit long in the tooth and today, for the first time, I tried to install some software that I actually cared about which it would not run. (DXO...

G'day all. Mrs Tannin uses Microsoft Access for various tasks. She has zero interest in any of the other MS Office applications and doesn't want to rent: she likes the pay once and own it model. Oh, and prefers that it be a proper Windows program, not a stupid Metro app. Can you buy it? If so...

This is really weird. In fact, it brings out the paranoid conspiracy theorist in me. I can't find any rational explanation for it. Over the last month or so, Youtube has started throwing up right-wing extremist and similar sites in my feed. All the time. Along with my normal Youtube stuff -...

I wanted something small to take with me traveling, essentially just to upload photographs with. (I'm not taking my good Thinkpad: too large, too heavy, too valuable, too hard on batteries for this trip. Thought about my old 14 inch T-Series Thinkpad, which would be fine except it has USB 2...

My ancient dumb phone is getting tired. For reasons unknown, sound quality is getting slowly worse and people often have trouble hearing me. I need to replace it. Now I could get another dumb phone, but I am open to the idea of venturing into the current century. Maybe. Key requirements: *...

Things are different in Australia. For one thing, in an emergency we dial 000. If you ask the average Ozzie what "911" is they won't know whether it's a brand of perfume or a sort of sports car. And we don't drink Coors or Budweiser, let alone that Fosters stuff. (Well, granted, Fosters is...

I want to cancel a landline connection and replace it with a wireless gadget. It can connect up to 10 devices wirelessly. The thing is, I also need to connect desktop computers to it from time to time, so I need an actusl wired connection. i Is there an easy way to connect an ordinary router (5...

I bought a tablet today. Don't laugh! Spent the afternoon figuring out how to drive it. (Never used Android in my life before. Or an i-thing for that matter.) I've had to figure out things like swiping and pinching from scratch. Can't say I'd be super sorry if I never used one again either, real...

You were a good browser once. Sad to see another once-great product drink the let's-bork-all-our-users cool-aid. Hello Steve, is that you? Opera is on life support, with the just-released 12.17 virtually certain to be the last version ever released. Thank God Sea Monkey still exists. Pale Moon...

I have a customer who might be looking at a system to do some serious number-crunching (merging hundreds of photographic images for mapping purposes). This is not the time to spec it out in any great detail as he has to talk to his higher-ups first and see if they are happy for him to spend...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/25/scroogled_leak_video/ Enjoy

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/09/online_forum_comment_study/ ^ This Register article is pretty boring, but read it anyway. When you get to the end, click to look at the comments. (Don't bother reading them unless you feel like it, just look them over.) Effin' hilarious! Be sure to log in...

INTRODUCTION If you want to save a web page simply and effectively for viewing later, or for sending to someone else so that they can view it too, an mht file is the way to go. The Mozilla family of browsers was always mht retarded as compared to Internet Explorer (yes, there are some things...

I have a customer who bought a Sophos Endpoint Protection site licence a little while back. The company which used to do their IT set it up on the various machines in the network such that it was centrally controlled from the dedicated server and workstations got their updates from there. Then...

I'd have thought this would be easy. All I am looking for is an easy way to scroll through a folder of MS Word files, viewing the contents as desired, and managing those files. I have a folder full of invoices in Word 2000 format, I want to be able to sort the contents (e.g., by date), and...

Not really a tech support thing 'cause the system is working, just an odd one to throw into the pot for discussion. As detailed in the Windows 8 thread, I recently built a new home server. Well, upgraded one, keeping the old case, PSU, and most of the drives. Out of the box, Win 8 imposes the...

I don't generally sell Seagate drives these days, but I happen to have a 500GB Barracuda 7200.12 which was DOA and needs to be returned. So I went to the Seagate website and ran through the hoops. Long story short, the Seagate website REFUSES to accept the RMA. It admits the drive exists, it...

Farnarkle me! That was a shock! Where is the huge thread discussing Western Digital's takeover of Hitachi's storage division? Why wasn't I told? (And, frankly, why don't I really care all that much anymore/)

The quote below is reposted from My Opera forum. This was my post, it was one of a great many similar ones. The place is going ape over the new Opera 10.5; there are many, many unhappy Opera users posting there, and the mods are ruthlessly deleting all the threads. We are not talking about...

Am I right in assuming that "real estate taxes" means the same thing as what I would call "council rates"? I.e., the tax charged by the local government body (city, town, district-level government, I mean) from which they provide services like mending the roads and collecting the garbage. If...

Lunar, you mentioned in another thread that you have a Sigma 150mm macro. I'm selling my TS-E 24 (the mark 1) and plan to use some of that money to finance a second macro lens. I have the EF-S 60/2.8 (which I love) but I'm after something longer as well - not least because if I'm out with...

I've always said that the western world in general and the US in particular has gone totally stupid with the post-911 security panic (is it still a panic when it goes on for years and years?) but this absolutely takes the mega-stupid security screw-up of the year award. It might be only January...

For reasons that I won't bother going into in any detail right now, I need to temporaily reduce the amount of free space on my C: drive. Yes reduce the free space, but only for a short while. Obviously, I could just do a massive great copy of some big folders to a temporary folder, and then...

Tea and I are surfing after a hard day's work - of which more in another thread. Among other places, we are (of course) visiting StorageForum. Everything is pretty normal for me. SF and various other sites load exactly as expected. SP is maybe a little sluggish tonight, but OK. Nothing unusual...

This may well be the worst, slowest-loading, most Javascript-ridden major commercial website in the entire world. I certainly cannot think of any other in the same league of poxiness. I'm not sure what their budget is, but we are talking serious dollars. This is a big organisation with thousands...

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/03/17/netgear-storage-central-kills Enjoy

No, not the post, the program. I need something to do a specific, quite well-defined task. Easiest to explain the "why" first, then I'll try the "what". WHY I take a lot of photographs, sometimes several thousand in a week. Some are taken in both raw and JPG, some JPG only. They all end up...

Doug, you probably know about this already, but just in case .... On one of the wikis I run, spam was a problem until I installed recaptcha - http://recaptcha.net/ - whick killed it stone dead. Free, good cause, very easy to use, recomended. If you want something to lock the bots out, this has...

For no particular reason, I just wasted/spent an hour posting in a different place, with the topic, of all things, yet another variation on that hoary old perennial theme, raw vs JPG. This one was a little different, however, insofar as it was less vague than most and focused on the question of...

One of my new cameras has an SD card as well as a proper CF card. I don't use the SD slot much (CF is so much nicer to handle) but I keep an 8GB SD card in there for emergencies (such as running out of space on my CF cards). I have now been through THREE different USB card readers and none of...

Let's spam the brewery with yet another photography thread! I've poisted this elsewhere, but just for Dave, thought I'd repost it here. Up until a few months ago I was running a pair of 20Ds: one for bird work with the 500/4 or the 100-400, the other for everything else, mostly landscapes, with...

I can make that post a bit shorter for you, Chewy. Trend 2007 is, in a word, a complete effing disaster. I have had at least 8 customers bring systems in to me to be repaired/formatted/virus cleaned/ de-toxed after they "upgraded" to TMAV 2007. I'm not kidding: people are happily running TMAV...

Bloody Lenovo have pretty much completed their overhaul of the Thinkpad line. It's more or less impossible to buy a Thinkpad with a normal screen now, everything is 15.4 shallow-screen and useless to me. Or (worse) 14 inch shallow-screen. There are a few remaining 14 inch standard screen models...

Looks very nice. much better controls (yes! one-hand to change stuff!) ISO 3200 native, 6400 with expansion, said to be very clean 14-bit raw 10 frames per second 10MP 1.3 crop even better auto-focus Live view for macros and remote tethering Decent battery at last They are taking...

Starting about three days ago, Windows Update no longer offers Internet Explorer 7. This is weird. Let's follow the sequence through, OK? 1: IE 7 is in beta: you need to be part of the beta program to get it. 2: IE 7 is released, sort of. It's on Windows update, but only available to a small...

Yes, really! https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3751/ Handy Xtra Stuff is very small. It adds the ability to configure Firefox's "view source" function to a button on your toolbar (the real toolbar, not one of those space-hogging crapfest extras you can add, nor the dorky bookmarks toolbar...

I just got spammed by microsoft through my browser. Yup, fair-dinkum spamming, by Micro$oft themselves. (I usually avoid $pelling the ba$tard$ with a $ sign, but thi$ late$t bit of $cum-peddling make$ my blood boil.) Here is the sequence: IE 7 suddenly, for no reason, popped up a message...

Yesterday, I built the first Red Hill Technology computer ever to ship without a floppy drive. (Not counting one or two in the past done that way by special request.) Yes, it's the end of an era. As of 1st January, we no longer include a floppy in our new systems as standard equipment. And...

It's a fairly simple matter to have both IE 5 and IE 6 on a system, if you know the trick (which I've probably posted a link to here already somewhere), and that used to be an important thing to have if you write web pages, though I stopped supporting IE 5 in my pages some time ago and don't...

Phone rings this afternoon. "Do you fix computers?" "Yes, madam. What sort of problem do you have?" Long rambling explanation follows, essentially describing the classic symptoms of a severe spyware and virus infection, coupled with the usual major performance hit that Norton Anti-virus...

Clearly there are some broken systems out there on the web right now. OK, you get outages now and then, and sometimes (not very often) you get a whole big area down - typically, the United States is out, presumably because of a problem with the trans-pacific links. But this present one is a...

Cross-posted from another place because I thought some people here might be interested. Some homespun rules of thumb, passed down from father to son for many generations in my family. Or possibly some rules that I make up as I go along - you decide. Rule 1: For long-lens work, primes are...

Working normally and all of a sudden capslock is on, but the capslock light is off. Press shift to switch off capslock (or capslock, depending on which you you have the keyboard prefferences set) and the alpha keys work normally, but the capslock light goes on! Worse: * a: the number keys...

A minor one this, but it's driving me nuts. In Windows 2000, you can tell the OS to always assume user ABC with password XYZ is logged on. You do that through changing the properties of "my computer". You can't do it that way in XP. Nor, so far as I can tell, can you do it in any of the other...

Readers of my other thread will remember that my Thinkpad had a weird problem - viz, it would only start up off batteries, not i it was plugged in to the mains adaptor. The moment it had fired up, you could plug the power back in and it worked fine. Well, two days ago it died completely and now...

I've done this before and can't remember how to do it 'cause it's been a while. How do you get a "special" icon up onto the system tray? For example, My Computer. You can drag and drop a shortcut to My Computer anywhere you like (such as to the system tray) and all you get is an ordinary...

No biggie this one, but it bugs me a little. My IBM Thinkpad refused to switch itself on if it's plugged into the power. If I disconnect the AC power adaptor, it powers up no worries off the battery, and you can re-plug the power right away. But with power supplied, it flashes a few lights, the...

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=127 Read it and laugh Read it and weep Do not read it if you are eating, drinking, or have weak bladder. Don't say I didn't warn you. (Perfectly work-safe link. Enjoy.)

I've almost decided to upgrade my laptop drive again, this time from 80GB to 120GB. (Don't trust Seagate, so a Samsung 120GB is the biggest available.) I'm wondering whether to just do a clean install on it (Windows 2000, obviously) or if I should transfer my existing, still pretty functional...

Met my first rootkit detection and removal job earlier this week. Yuk! A seriously difficult thing to get rid of. It took me ~8 hours to figure it out and clean it up. (Would have been quicker to backup, format, and reinstall, of course, but I chalked that one up as a useful learning experience...