Category Archives: nördig

I bought a freecom USB hard drive, on sale at Morgan Computer for £70 to have backups of everything while I was away (and most of my music collection, for later transfer to the Zen micro). It would not work … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The Diebold voting machines used in at least three states in the USA — California, Pennsylvania and Iowa — boot Windows CE off PCMCIA cards, in slots accessible to anyone with three minutes and a phillips screwdriver. They will also … Continue reading → Continue reading →

this should be an entry on the sqlite backend. Ha ha! Movable sodding type: consider yourself pwnzed. I strangle Mena Trott in the intestines of Larry Wall and I dance! Continue reading →

It occurs to me that there is one very simple adjustment could be made to any spam filter: if a message contains “u” and “ur” as separate words, it’s not from anyone I know or want to know. How to … Continue reading → Continue reading →

They are two wholly loathsome bits of software. I’m sure it’s possible to run a Movable Type blog on sqlite if you start from scratch, but once you have a couple of thousand entries, it’s impossible to copy everything over. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Is there any way to convert a sizable MySQL database containing this blog to sqlite? Here are some of the ways that don’t work: Using the mt-db-convert.cgi script: this ought to work, but is killed by the reaper at Pair. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Apparently the reason for the intermittent errors that people have been getting on this blog is that Pair doesn’t like mySQL as a backend for MT blogs. Pair support suggests using sqlite instead, a database so fast and simple it … Continue reading → Continue reading →

To round off a week of minor disasters, my ancient HP deskjet broke on Sunday morning. The print head jammed, and when I reached around to see if anything was blocking it, a long strip of plastic came away in … Continue reading →

Dear lazyweb, (may I call you lazy?) When I hook my mother’s imac up to a broadband connection next week what kind of security measures should I take? I assume there is a built-in firewall in OSX, which will be … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The latest gadget is ["a little Nokia phone,":http://www.expansys.com/product.asp?code=119374] which I bought because I was exasperated with the Motorola clamshell losing the power of speech: often the only way to hear the person on the other end was to turn on … Continue reading → Continue reading →