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Posted at 7:54 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in life

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Feb 7
2010

Posted by richard

I had a weird problem tonight, freaked me out.

I hooked up my bluetooth adapter to transfer some stuff to my phone. Everything seemed ok. I fired up my skype and was talking to a friend when the screen froze. I rebooted but when it came back up it gave me a BSOD. I was a bit puzzled but rebooted.

It kept on doing it. Heart rate increased…

I was beginning to think I might be ordering new computer parts but on a webpage I found some guy mentioned removing hardware parts just in case, if you’d added something. I thought that the only thing I had added was the bluetooth adapter, so I removed it, rebooted and it came up fine.

So it was the Belkin Bluetooth adapter, giving me the acpi.sys BSOD, on Windows 7. Watch out for it.

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Posted at 2:44 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in technology

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Feb 4
2010

Posted by richard

Recently in the news, Toyota’s recall of millions of cars because of some fault with the accelerator pedal. It gets stuck in certain situations, and in several models.

On the TV the other day though, they were saying this really damages Toyota’s reputation, how are they going to recover and so on, but that to me seemed odd. I mean, they’re doing the right thing, protecting the public from a fault that has been found. How can that be damaging, in the long run, to Toyota’s reputation?

If they had done nothing, that would have been bad. But instead they’re biting the bullet and coming forward and making sure that profits aren’t the most important thing to them – we are. This kind of “let’s get this fixed before anyone else gets hurt” attitude might do them well in the future, assuming the media can stop hyping this up so much.

I’m not the only one that seems to think that this is being overhyped, Investopedia also thinks that we might want to compare this to other recalls, and not jump on the ‘hate Toyota’ bandwagon too soon.

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Posted at 12:59 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in css

5 comments - Latest by:
  • David
    Macbros: can you use Portable Firefox or Opera Portable? I carry two versions of Opera Portable (one is OperaTOR for ...
  • David
    Preaching to the Choir, Richard. I het at least one call/week from folks who've infested themselves with scareware or other ...
 

Jan 16
2010

Posted by richard

I, like many developers and designers out there, am so damned tired of IE6.

Can’t people move on and get themselves a decent modern browser? It is literally a click away. Opera and FireFox are so easy to install and get running, I installed Opera on a machine the other day and it was as simple as one click to download and one or two to install.

IE6’s problems with css cause so many headaches, it’s a real ball ache.

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Posted at 10:30 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in featured

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Dec 11
2009

Posted by richard

Apparently, the Copenhagen meeting that has been going on about the climate this week has come to a point where the EU has agreed to spend £6.5Bn to help developing nations fight climate change.

Wow. £6.5Bn, that’s an amazing amount. We can spend hundreds of billions of pounds fighting two wars (and I’m just talking about the UK here), we can spend £1.5 -Trillion- pounds on bailing out the banks, but the UK has managed to find a whopping £1.5Bn to fight climate change. The other European countries managed to find £5Bn.

Stunning.

It’s made it perfectly clear where our priorities are, don’t you think?

What makes me chuckle is this though – the western nations, and increasingly China too, fight wars over oil, to preserve the status quo; but if we didn’t fight those wars, and channeled money into developing eco-technologies like solar, wave, wind etc., and really make an effort, those businesses would be worth as much as oil is now, and would be renewable rather than finite…

Posted at 2:33 pm • Trackback Trackback

Posted in technology

2 comments - Latest by:
  • richard
    This one was a different one - Vista. I'm not having much luck with that. Went there today and having ...
  • MrCorey
    I'm so glad that you're having a great time with your new Windows install, Rich! I've found that upgrading any ...
 

Nov 27
2009

Posted by richard

Had an issue arise whereby a friend’s computer, with Windows Vista installed, wouldn’t even run Internet Explorer. The problem is this – everything on Vista runs on IE. Talk about a pain! I tried to ftp to a free ftp site to grab opera or firefox, but no luck.

This all rose because of BT. The install disk, apparently installed something on Windows OneCare Live, and it must have something to do with IE, because it’s stopping it working properly.

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Posted at 12:26 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in life

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Nov 15
2009

Posted by richard

Well I did it, I nearly buggered up Windows 7, or my install of it at least.

On my Windows XP install I had a multiple-IE program installed so I could look at web pages in past versions. I installed it on the Windows 7 install, wouldn’t work so I removed it.

This morning I rebooted, then tried to access things like, My Computer, Control Panel etc and I got an error – No such interface. Uh oh. I searched around and there were these long winded processes, but one guy just simply said, let Windows 7 repair it. I thought, hmm, ok I’ll try it.

Whaddya know, the Microsoft boys did a really good job on this OS. It repaired it, fixed issues no problem, here we are all shiny and brand new. Windows 7 really is a good package, far better than any other OS they’ve produced.

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Posted at 8:21 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in life

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Nov 7
2009

Posted by richard

I just read an interesting article on The Independent, about an ethical travel company who has decided to drop their carbon footprint offset scheme. His company responsibletravel.com used a company called Climate Care to let customers purchase carbon offsets; that company would use schemes in the developing world to offset carbon use.

The thing that bugs me isn’t that his dropped them because he was worried customers would just take it as a cost, and not really do anything about their carbon footprints, but that that company (and presumably others) used schemes in the third/developing world to do so.

What is wrong with this country? We have oodles of space where trees can be planted. If you take a look at the moors, our mountainous areas, Scotland, islands off our coast, these all have places to plant trees. What about other schemes like providing literature to small/medium businesses on how they can reduce their carbon use? I heard a few weeks back of a company that produces no waste because the owner recycled everything, and in the course of that got fined by the local council because they thought he was doing something wrong (read: illegal?).

Perhaps this is the problem with carbon offsetting. We get used to dumping our problems on the third/developing world, so we do the same with our carbon problems. Supposedly the market for carbon in Europe is worth £81Bn – I wonder how much of that the third/developing world actually sees?

If I could get the funding I’d create a company to do just that, buy land here in the UK and plant trees, or plant trees on government (unused) land. No doubt our lovely government would consider that a waste. Anything less than a few billion is useless, after all. If they can afford £1.5 Trillion (yes, that’s a ‘t’) for bank bailouts and the economic mess, surely they can afford a few Billion to plant trees?

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Posted at 3:02 pm • Trackback Trackback

Posted in technology

4 comments - Latest by:
  • richard
    Yeah definately worth getting it. So far so good. I'm thinking of upgrading the motherboard and chip though, so I may ...
  • Justin
    Wow wish i could get the windows 7, however I prefer other people test it out before deal with the ...
 

Oct 28
2009

Posted by richard

So I’m at the late stages of installing Windows 7 – the updates are now loaded up.

All the other stuff is now getting put on, winamp, tor, firefox, opera and so on. This is the part that takes forever, and then you have to get updates for some of them, restart, get something else, restart and it goes on and on.

Nonetheless I’m happy I’ve done it, Windows 7 looks good. It acts well, and looks like it’s a well put together OS.

Posted at 12:14 pm • Trackback Trackback

Posted in humour

3 comments - Latest by:
  • richard
    Ha! I remember the pagers too. When I first got the states, I got given a pager for tech support ...
  • mel
    Can I think of a time without mobile phones???? REALLY????? I didn't think I was THAT much older than you. Isn't ...
 

Aug 20
2009

Posted by richard

Smartphones are all the rage and to be hones with you, it’s a bloody good job they are smart, because without all that technology … I just would forget to recharge it! This thing beeps at me when it’s getting low on power.

Honestly though, can you think of a time before mobile phones? God what a horror that would be! Not being able to phone someone or even text someone when you wanted, or not having a camera with you at any time. These days of course, GPS and maps too.

So to all those people who took the plunge and bought massive bricks in the 80’s because it was cool, you know who you are, god bless you!

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Posted at 9:49 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in technology

6 comments - Latest by:
  • mel
    LMAO @ Diane!!!! I never heard that word. Rich, I think it was the US dollars that broke your paypal.
  • richard
    Yes actually I am! Hmmm I'm not sure, it means idiot, don't know where it comes from though.
 

Aug 3
2009

Posted by richard

Had a very strange happening tonight.

I was getting on the path to getting a new site registered, got the site looked up, found it was free, and needed some cash to make it happen. I use my Paypal account to fund it. I went there and for some very strange reason, got an Internal Server Error page when visiting www.paypal.co.uk!

How odd! Never seen anything like that especially for a site as well known as that. For a minute or two on reloading it wouldn’t go, and on the third try it just left me with a white page! It’s still doing it now, wtf is going on?

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