Category Archives: Tech

Plusnet – spam friendly ISP

Posted at 11:38 am, Tuesday March 1, 2011 by rich

Looking to send out lots of spam? Just use Plusnet. Provided you stick an opt-out link at the bottom of the emails Plusnet don’t consider it an abuse issue.

Posted in Tech | 3 Comments

Virgin Media installation summary

Posted at 7:33 pm, Saturday February 19, 2011 by rich

The new Tivo box is in and up and running, the software seems fairly buggy but that’s one of the downsides of being an early adopter. Hopefully things will improve as more boxes get rolled out. The engineers who turned up had never seen a Tivo box before and hadn’t had any training on them yet, but that didn’t prove to be too much of a hindrance.

The 50Mb broadband is working well after a few hiccups getting connected, however the router is festooned with overly bright LEDs, but a few bits of gaffer tape soon cured that.

As for the phone line, somewhere during the order process someone forgot to set up the transfer of my landline number, a quick phone call later it’s scheduled for transfer in 10 days time.

Posted in Tech, Virgin Media | 3 Comments

That’s better.

Posted at 9:54 am, Saturday February 19, 2011 by rich

Posted in Tech, Virgin Media | 5 Comments

Place your bets

Posted at 7:03 pm, Friday February 18, 2011 by rich

A Virgin Media engineer is due here between 8 and 12 tomorrow to install my new phone line, broadband, and TV gizmo. What are the odds that after getting up ready for 8, they actually turn up at 12, and then fail to get everything working properly leaving me electronically isolated for the next week or two?

Posted in Tech, Virgin Media | 8 Comments

A good reason to stick with the Kindle

Posted at 6:26 pm, Tuesday February 15, 2011 by rich

Macrumors: iBooks 1.2.1 Detects Some Jailbreaks, Disables iBookstore Purchases in Response.

Fortunately I use a Kindle and the Kindle app on my iPhone.

Posted in Tech | Comments Off

Bye Bye Mozy?

Posted at 5:48 pm, Wednesday February 2, 2011 by rich

For quite a while now I’ve been backup up my important data to Mozy, their unlimited storage cost me a fiver or so each month. However they’ve decided that unlimited storage is no longer the way forward, and my bill will increase by 150% or so from next month. So it’s bye bye to Mozy, although I may stick with their free service just to piss them off.

First port of call for a replacement was Backblaze. I don’t know if it’s my ISP or whether they are being overwhelmed by new customers, but uploading is agonisingly slow.

Second choice is CrashPlan, so far it seems a lot faster than Backblaze.

Update: My Mozy account has now been cancelled, and I’ll pay for a CrashPlan account sometime this week.

Posted in Tech | Comments Off

12 Days of IT Christmas

Posted at 5:54 pm, Thursday December 2, 2010 by rich

Posted in Tech | 1 Comment

Pop goes the telly

Posted at 5:20 pm, Saturday November 20, 2010 by rich

In between bouts of moving mailboxes and virtualising application servers I was sat downstairs catching up on last nights telly. Midway through NCIS the TV made an odd "pop" sound and shut itself off. I turned it back on and it did the same thing. It did this quite a few times leading to a diagnosis of "it’s broked".

Fortunately we have a newish Richer Sounds on the other side of town and in the email newsletter yesterday they were advertising a 50" LG for a decent price, and it turns out that they had one in stock. Even more fortunately it fitted in the back of the X-Trail with about 2mm to spare.

It’s up and running and looks stunning. It’s not actually much bigger than the 42" unit it’s replacing, the only issue is that the stand isn’t as tall so the centre speaker sits above the base of the screen, but that can be cured with a few bits of wood. I’m now giving it a good workout with a copy of Toy Story 3 which arrived this morning.

Posted in Tech, Television | 6 Comments

Silent Running

Posted at 10:05 am, Sunday October 31, 2010 by rich

My Macbook Pro is due to celebrate it’s first birthday on Tuesday, so as a present I decided to buy it a 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD. Installation was slightly complicated by the desire to maintain my existing Bootcamp partition, but after a bit of research and installing a couple of tools it proved to be fairly simple:

Use Winclone to image the Bootcamp partition to a file
Use Winclone to shrink the Bootcamp image to save space (must have been an NTFS partition for this to work)
Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the internal HD to a USB drive (I had this anyway)
Boot from the USB drive to check it works.
Replace the internal HD with the new SSD
Boot from the USB drive
Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the USB drive to the SSD and reboot
Go into System Preferences – Startup Disk to set the SSD as the boot device
Start Bootcamp assistant and create a partition for Windows, but cancel out without installing.
Use Winclone to copy the image to the new Bootcamp partition, it’ll expand it as necessary.
Boot Windows a couple of times to sort out the Bootcamp partition
Boot back into OS X and run VMWare Fusion to recreate the VM running from Bootcamp
Turn off the HD Sudden Motion Sensor using sudo pmset -a sms 0

And that’s it. I did try sticking the SSD drive into a USB caddy and cloning to that, but it failed a few times most likely due to the cheap shoddy caddy I had borrowed.

My Macbook Pro now boots in under 15 seconds, applications load much faster, and without an HD whirring away it’s virtually silent.

Posted in Tech | 4 Comments

Kindle time

Posted at 7:35 pm, Thursday August 26, 2010 by rich

A day earlier than expected, and in fact a day before the official release, my new Amazon Kindle arrived along with a leather case to hold it.

First impressions are good, it’s fairly idiot proof, very slim and light to hold, and the screen seems very easy to read from a quick play around with it. Even the web browser works, well, sort of works given the limitations of the black and white e-ink screen.

I’ve left it charging for the moment, I’ll take it to bed for a proper read later.