Less than 24 hours after giving Apple my FUBAR’d MBA, it’s back – fixed, working perfectly, and with a whole new screen too. All credit to the local store and/or Apple’s internal repair processes. I’m not sure how much we should praise Apple overall for this, given it’s allegedly their […]
fixing your desktop
60 posts
NB: This technique is useful in precisely TWO situations: EITHER: you have a lot more RAM than you need (on OS X / Apple computers: at least 4Gb, more likely 8Gb), and you want your computer to run faster OR: you have an expensive SSD hard disk in your laptop, […]
Is your Macbook Air overheating? Here’s a technique I’ve been using for the last couple of years, works everytime. I suspect it still works on the new models – I *suspect* they have the same basic design flaws as the original, from looking at the case. Problem: vents in wrong […]
I now get to join the (sadly non-exclusive) club: My Macbook Air just snapped at the hinge, and now the lid WILL NOT close and WILL NOT stay upright – it just falls flat on the desk, like a book lying open. I’m blogging this purely for anyone with an […]
IMHO, Flickr/Yahoo has one of the best user-authentication systems I’ve ever seen. I’m sure it’s no accident that Twitter (eventually) moved to a system that is extremely similar. (NB: I don’t know if flickr copied if from someone else, but they were the first I remember seeing like this, many […]
Short note for anyone with my cell number: I’ve finally got my new number working in an iPhone, so within the next day or so I should be running both UK numbers again (my old UK number has been phone-less for about 8 months now). It’s been a long journey, […]
Android 2.2 has a nasty bug where it disables the SD Card on Google Nexus One phones. Fine, I found a workaround. But there’s a down-side – what happens when you only AFTERWARDS remember that it’s got the ONLY copy of several hundred photos, including plenty of uniques that can […]
Google’s Nexus One auto-upgraded a few weeks ago, to Android 2.2 It immediately broke itself. It was no longer able to use the SD card. As a side-effect, it was impossible to install any applications. Making this a very expensive, very heavy, very slow excuse for a mobile phone. The […]
Apple added some of the earliest, best *hardware* support for mouse and trackpad gestures (2-finger swipes, pinch/zoom, etc), but has been very slow to add support for gestures to their *software*. Out of the box, OS X can do almost nothing with them. Previously, I’d used the quick-n-dirty-but-it-works “MultiClutch” app […]
(Google just made a major change to Gmail accounts in the UK, now that they’ve settled a trademark case brought against them. This is great – it will simplify mailing list management for a lot of people, and everyone in the world can (legally) be “@gmail.com”) However … I’ve now […]
Why couldn’t I stop thunderbird from downloading 2GB of files that it is absolutely not supposed to download in the first place? Ah, well, it turns out … there’s a bug in the basic “include folder for offline” GUI, whereby it is COMPLETELY IGNORED for certain folders. One of those […]
The font-settings in ThunderBird are terrible: the default settings are ugly, and the GUI is too broken to let you change them. Fortunately, if you hand-edit the config files, you *can* change the fonts, as much as you like. Sadly, the options etc are undocumented, and easy to get wrong. […]
When you run Thunderbird, and connect to gmail, it downloads your inbox. Then it does nothing, for an hour or so. When you run Thunderbird a second or third time, OR when you first synch a single IMAP folder (I don’t know which of these two events triggered it) it […]
Thunderbird just released an update a couple of weeks ago, so I thought I’d try it out. Day 1: Thunderbird refuses to check email. See this screenshot, note the timestamps, while I’m sitting here waiting for an email that should ahve arrived a few minutes ago, desperately pressing the “get […]
There’s a major bug in Firefox (allthough I left at “normal” severity, leave it to the maintainers to judge) that’s been around since Version 2.0 (maybe earlier). I’m *pretty* sure that Mozilla (i.e. precursor to Firefox) did not have this bug. It’s been bugging me for years, and I’ve seen […]
EDIT: the fix that worked for most (not all) people on the internet … doesn’t work for me. Even with reboot. I have no idea how to fix this now :(. Look what they’ve done to the latest release of Eclipse: (old version at top – rendering CORRECTLY on high-res […]
I had to do some iPhone prototyping recently, and we had a trial copy of Unity to hand. I thought this was a great excuse to try using it. First impressions of the editor/IDE/environment – at least on OS X – are not good. NB: In general, in terms of […]
For some reason, Firefox 3.0.7 force disables the KeyConfig extension (itself a workaround for Firefox bugs that have been around for more than 2 years and gone unfixed). The main problem is that on OS X, the keys for editing in a textfield get overridden by firefox re-binding the same […]
As a quick followup to this article (how to workaround the bug in Microsoft Office 2007 that breaks your fonts in Windows), I had to show someone today what I meant when I said that their laptop was set to “blurry” mode, and realised there was a quick way of […]
(do you have fuzzy text in Outlook 2007? hard to read fonts? System settings for fonts broken in Office 2007? Help is at hand…). You have to do a couple of things to fix the one bug, and I had to find all the different parts of the solution in […]