Archive: 2008-09
How much does a Wispa weigh?
You may recall that a Facebook campaign recently persuaded Cadbury to reintroduce the Wispa chocolate bar. Well, they are now in the shops, a bit before the official 6th October release date, and one of my colleagues bought one last week.
iPlayer downloads: now with radio
Auntie has added radio programmes to the iPhone version of the iPlayer today, so my downloader now supports them too. They are nothing more than plain old MP3 files.
What could possibly go wrong?
I received a spam email in my work inbox this morning. I say spam; maybe the sender claims some tenuous legitimate connection with me, but I couldn’t work out what that might be. It was certainly badly targeted:
How I rescued irreplaceable photos from a dead hard disk
I’ve been fixing a friend’s iBook G4 this week. The computer wouldn’t boot up—it couldn’t find anything to boot from—and emitted an alarmingly loud noise. I suspected a dead hard disk; by booting from a Linux CD, I was able to prove this. The computer worked fine, but the disk didn’t. I ordered a new hard disk, which arrived a few days later.
Barclaycard’s fraud detection sucks
I noticed this morning that someone had tried to call my home phone at midday the day before. I listened to the message: it was Barclaycard’s fraud department asking me to call them. Aha! That would explain why I hadn’t been able to use my credit card to pay a bill yesterday evening.
My browser works just fine, thank you
I’m not deliberately obscurantist or opposed to innovation, but there are a few trends in web design that I don’t appreciate. For example, I don’t like lightboxes. (Yeah, I know we use it at Reevoo for our reviews service, but Befehl ist Befehl.)
How to lose a customer
Backups: a call to action
You’ve got backups, right? If your hard disk fails, you won’t lose anything important. But I bet you know someone who hasn’t.
Signs of recession
I’ve woken up to apocalyptic financial headlines on the radio every day for months, but I haven’t really noticed anything different. I don’t have a mortgage. I don’t own a car. I’ve still got a job. I’m lucky enough not to be living hand to mouth, and I cook most of my food from scratch, so if my food bills have been increasing I haven’t really felt it.
BBC ‘News’
Ever since Ben started pointing them out, I’ve become aware of the frequent superfluous quotation marks in BBC News headlines. (For example: ‘Hundreds’ killed by Haiti storm.) But just how prevalent are they? By way of an answer, I present BBC ‘News’.
The case of the disappearing network interfaces
I rebooted my Eee PC this morning after several weeks of uptime. It came back with networking not working. Since it took me ages to work out what had gone wrong, and Google was no help, I think I should write it up for everyone’s benefit.