Every week, I have to use six different Office Software Suites: At school: Microsoft Office 2013 At university: Microsoft Office 365 At work: OpenOffice At home: LibreOffice Everywhere: Apple Keynote Everywhere: Google Docs As an expert computer user (former SysAdmin), I’m often asked for help by people with non-computing backgrounds. […]
fixing your desktop
60 posts
OpenOffice is great. It has flaws. One of the most insidious is that the “new document” settings for Word/Letter documents is vile. It has truly awful formatting – ARGH! MY EYES! Today I was writing a doc to put down some thoughts for colleagues, and I realised that the formating […]
The old PAYE tools was bad, really bad – I saw it generate the wrong figures once (i.e. actively costing UK small businesses real money for HMRC’s carelessness). The new one is great – but it hasn’t been tested properly. The install instructions are wrong, it installs illegally on OS […]
We already had to do this a year or so ago when Firefox developers tried to force a bad UI paradigm on us. Now they’ve done it again, and added a new way to turn “new tab” from something that does what it says, into something that does stuff you […]
What is it with Firefox’s developers these days? Every other release of Firefox seems to overwrite at least one existing setting … with a broken feature. Firefox version 22.0 disables your PDF viewer and replaces it with a non-working proprietary viewer from Mozilla Cure is quick: Note: this works because […]
I’m not sure why, but out-of-the-box, WordPress’s excellent TwentyTwelve theme prevents you from putting anything in the (empty!) top-right area of the page. It’s a great place for a “contact” link or similar (and check out the Suffusion theme to see how many widget areas a good WP theme ought […]
http://www.veracode.com/blog/2013/05/executable-archaeology-the-case-of-the-stupid-thing-eating-all-my-ram/ – Doh! Everyone has had that dreaded experience: you open up the task manager on your computer… and there’s a program name you don’t recognize. It gets worse when you google the name and can’t find a concrete answer on what it is and why it’s there. It gets […]
Apple has finally released drivers for Windows 8 (NB: because Apple takes standard PC hardware and then customizes it, Apple customers are reliant on Apple for “custom” drivers; the manufacturer drivers don’t work) Download link for the new drivers (March 2013) Also: the built-in copy of BootCamp has been updated, […]
Apple’s core networking for OS X (Lion, Mountain Lion, etc) is famously poor. One of the (many) unfixed bugs is this: “I go to a webpage (e.g. google.com) and my browser displays a message saying ‘Server not Found’. If I keep hitting Refresh, it never works. If I wait a […]
Here’s the magic URL, that you can’t access directly from the site: http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/gb/bookflightsandmore/bookflights/callme.jsp Huh? In 5+ years of flying with Virgin, their online booking system has always, every single time, failed – and redirected me to a page where I get that link to get THEM to phone ME. (which […]
Unity’s QA dept needs a smack up-side the head. If you get this bug, you’re a bit screwed – the only “fix” is to go into system settings and wipe Unity’s crud. Error message: type == kMetaAssetType && pathName.find (“library/metadata”) != 0 Thanks, Unity, that’s very human-readable and helpful. Not. […]
Prologue: Apple et al recommend you “install new OS’s from USB, not DVD – USB is faster”, but I’ve never bothered before. However, there appears to be a major defect in most Apple iMacs, where the DVD drives fail after only a dozen or so uses (google it and there’s […]
OfficeTime is one of the more popular/higher rated time-tracking apps for iOS / OS X. On the whole, it’s fine. But exporting the data – which is half of the app’s purpose – is extremely difficult. There’s no docs I could find either in the app or on the website. […]
Are you having this problem? “I tell Firefox to ask before quitting, but it always quits without asking” Especially on Macs, where cmd-w (close tab) and cmd-q (close window) are immediately next to each other… Solution It looks as though Firefox won’t fix this. It’s been 3 years, and it’s […]
After trying 4 or 5 things from this several-years-old page on Firefox’s support forums, I finally hit upon one that worked: “For the heck of it tonight I clicked on Gmail in my calendar and it finally went to my gmail inbox.” In my case, I just went to Google […]
At 27″, it’s too big to “simply” take in to the Apple store. In desperation, I followed this support article from Apple that’s for older iMacs and officially no longer supported. Which is a pity, because in typical Apple fashion, they’ve deprecated an article that’s still accurate and useful. Following […]
Beware – latest version of Google Docs has the Gmail bug whereby emails (documents) randomly disappear and become completely inaccessible (this happens a few times a year with Gmail’s IMAP client). With Gmail, you can use the web interface to get around it and see the actual email – but […]
I’m periodically re-trying GitHub’s GUI client, just in case it becomes stable enough for anyone to use on a real project. Today, with the latest version: every time I start the app, it immediately hard-crashes. The app is literally unusable – it won’t run at all. At least with the […]
Firefox … ah, how we love watching you make terrible usability decisions, and then force them upon your users! FF now has this ridiculous page – WHICH YOU CANNOT DISABLE in Firefox settings: Fixing it Since it’s not supported as an user-configurable option, you have to open the magic low-level […]
When you “upgrade” to Lion, be aware that Apple will silently wipe your “auto install / update” settings, and start aggressively downloading every update it can find for every Apple app you use. In my case, this was gigabytes of data – I really don’t care (and don’t want) “upgrades” […]