Category: Miscellaneous

  • Making Spell Checking Work in Firefox

    I can’t believe this doesn’t just work out of the box 100% of the time but apparently spell checking doesn’t work in Firefox unless you have more than one setting correctly configured at the same time. This does not seem like the simplest thing that could work! In settings under the general section there is…

  • Tabs Outliner Backup and Restore

    I use a browser extension called Tabs Outliner and it’s absolutely great for organising your browsing. You can simply create a window full of tabs and close and then restore it later. I have literally thousands of tabs stored this way and have given up on bookmarks entirely (other than for the toolbar). The only…

  • Applications

    It occurred to me that I use a lot of different applications but I keep a mental note of them rather than writing them down. I thought it was about time I stopped relying on my memory and started keeping a list as I’m sure I’ve started forgetting some great tools that I use. Listing…

  • Building a Media Centre

    I enjoy a good film and in my youth I used to love going to the cinema but as I got older I found the cinema became far too expensive for the reward and I just didn’t have the time anyway. Since I enjoyed watching things on the big screen the natural answer was a…

  • Digikam Tagging

    I’ve recently switched from Picasa (which has been retired) to Digikam for photo management and I’ve noticed a few quirks that I need to document to or I’ll forget them. For the most part Digikam is a massive upgrade over Picasa but a few things in Digikam don’t necessarily work quite as I’d expect them to.

  • My List of Useful Utilities

    I hate to think how many computers I’ve built and installed over the years. I’ve found that there are a core set of utilities that I keep coming back to that I’ve found really useful on most installs. As I only use some of them infrequently I thought I’d put together a list so that…

  • Reading Your Ebooks Anywhere

    I wouldn’t normally stick my head above the parapet and write a post like this but DRM on ebooks really annoys me as it impacts my enjoyment of the books I’ve bought. I personally find the default option of black text on a white background a little difficult to read especially if there isn’t a…

  • Reading Material

    Over the years I’ve read my fair share of books on various aspects of computing from operating system design through to test driven development and for the last few years I’ve also been taking MOOC’s as I like the learning style. It occurred to me that I should probably keep a list so that I can see what I need…

  • Panasonic HC-V750 Metadata Files

    I recently bought a Panasonic HC-V750 camcorder and I was intrigued by the additional files (.cont, pmpd and .tmb) it produces along with the video files – do they contain useful additional data?. A good googling didn’t turn up anything useful but a lot of people have wondered about them. 

  • XMarks vs Chrome Means You Lose

    Yah, I’ve just managed to lose all of my important bookmarks thanks to a fight between Chrome and XMarks. To be fair this is a known issue but it’s easy to accidentally cause the problem and the only loser in the whole mess is the end user.

  • Test Credit Card Numbers

    A while back now I had to write a system to process credit cards. Since the software was capturing the card number itself it could perform some initial checking on the number to ensure that the user hadn’t made a trivial typing error.

  • Converting a List into a Quoted List

    I recently needed to convert a simple list of strings into something that could be used in a SQL IN clause. The format for the IN clause that I needed was quoted strings with commas between each value.