Computers & Tech - Diary Of An ADI

Using The Diary On HTC Desire

24/01/2011

Someone found the blog using the above search term.

Using the HTC Desire’s Diary is easy – just swipe the screen across to the Calendar, then tap the date you want to add information to. Tap ‘Add Event’.

The Diary Entry screen allows you to set:

the event name
the event date (if you choose the wrong one from the Calendar, using a scroll wheel)
the event time (using a scroll wheel)
the event duration
the event location
the event description
when you want to be reminded
email addresses of guests
whether it is a one-off or a repeating event

You just click ‘save’ once you fill it in. Of course, you can also edit a Diary Entry.

PHP 5.0 and 1&1 Internet

23/01/2011

DOAADI

Computers & Tech

My webhost is 1&1 Internet, and this blog is hosted on their servers.

A while back, I wrote about the FCKEditor and how it didn’t try to strip out codes (or put them in) when you were adding raw code to your posts.

As time has gone by, though, I decided to look for something a little better. FCKEditor doesn’t have a very elegant skin.

I found Foliopress WYSIWYG, which sounded like it would do everything I wanted for normal WordPress posts. The only problem was that it requires PHP 5.0, and 1&1 was only running PHP 4.0. I’m sure I’d asked about this a year or two ago, but when I enquired this time there was actually a solution (last time, I’m sure there wasn’t).

Here’s how to enable PHP 5.0 on your 1&1 server.

Using a text editor that will not add headers (e.g. Notepad), create a file with the following text:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Save the file as .htaccess

Upload the .htaccess file to the root directory on your server.

At the time of writing, 1&1 Internet is using PHP 5.2.14. Their Tech Support is very efficient, I have to say.

Orange Maps

19/01/2011

DOAADI

ADI, Computers & Tech, General

One of the less pleasant experiences of my trip to Glasgow yesterday… Orange Maps.

Now, I have a Tom Tom sat nav, but I don’t use it very often. It was great playing with it when I first got it, but I quickly realised that I don’t need the darned thing. It was a pain having to keep setting it up, then keep removing it for security purposes, plus charging it and keep docking it to update it.

And of course, being a bloke means I can find my way anywhere – in the dark, blindfolded, in a coma – without having to ask anyone for directions or use a sat nav in the first place.

However… trying to find an obscure place like the Old Fruitmarket in a big city like Glasgow is what sat navs were created for… but they’re still a pain to have to lug around as standalone units.

Since I got my Android phone, though, the possibility of a sat nav in your pocket became highly desirable. So I started using Orange Maps when I needed to find somewhere or navigate to it. It was OK when it worked, but a few months ago – when I needed to get to Manchester avoiding the motorways – it scared the crap out of me by deciding it couldn’t contact the Orange Maps server after it had dumped me in the middle of Chesterfield’s one-way system during the rush hour. Fortunately, it decided about half an hour later that it could contact the server after all.

Learning Point: the last thing you want is your sat nav telling you it’s lost!

So anyway, last night I’m on the outskirts of Glasgow – Hamilton Services to be exact – and I had to make a phone call. Orange Maps has a habit of terminating when you do that, so you need to tell it again where you want to go. It chose this moment to again refuse to contact the server.

I can see a connection here: both times, it was during the rush hour, so the phrase ‘server overload’ comes to mind. Well, what bloody use is a sat nav service you can’t use when other people are trying to use it at the same time?

The problem was that this time it just would not connect. Period. So there I am, paying £5 a month for a service which doesn’t work at exactly the time you need to be sure it will, literally abandoned 300 miles from home!

Thank God for the Internet (and, fortunately, getting out of the various 3G blackspots around Glasgow to be able to access it). I looked at a couple of sat nav options in the Android marketplace. I downloaded one, only to discover the configuration file… “is downloading…this will take approximately 6 hours… no, wait… 8 hours…” Aaargh! No wi-fi and a wobbly 3G! I briefly toyed with the idea of driving around to find an unsecured wireless network, but decided against that.

I accidentally found GoogleMaps (weird, because I use that all the time at home for finding out where new pupils live, but hadn’t really clicked that they had a sat nav feature on Android phones (well, it is beta). And so it was problem solved… GoogleMaps got me there without any glitches at all, and home again later on.

I cancelled Orange Maps today and won’t be going back. As usual, their customer service was excellent – just a shame that Orange Maps isn’t.

Nothing Ever Goes Smoothly…

14/01/2011

DOAADI

Computers & Tech, General

My pupil who passed her test this week said that it had been the best week of her life – and she cited a few things that had happened or were going to happen, like getting a pay rise and doing well in an exam she’d just taken.

I said that I knew what she meant, but the only problem with weeks like that is that you can’t keep getting them one after the other. It stands to reason that good things and not so good things average out in the end.

My last week has been a right pain. The one that’s been bugging me most is that I’ve had a few problems recently trying to get a domain name transferred to me! It’s a long story, but although I always controlled it I didn’t actually own it. There was no ill-will or deliberate obfuscation on the part of the previous registrant. It was just messy getting ownership changed.

I’ve had similar problems in the past with other domains that I controlled but didn’t actually own, and then needed to transfer them to the people who owned them. It was never straightforward. Why can’t it be simpler?

Anyway, I finally got control and ownership, so all’s well.

Incidentally, I’ve had quite a few people asking how to set up blogs and incorporate GoogleAds of late. I might do a tutorial at some stage if there’s enough interest. GoogleAds can generate significant income if you get enough hits on your websites.

Apple iPhone Glitch. Again.

02/01/2011

DOAADI

Computers & Tech

Just saw a report on the news about the iPhone alarm not working on New Years Day (and today). It is suggested that the fault just affected Europeans.

However, it looks like those in the Southern hemisphere also encountered the same glitch ( also on ZDNet). This isn’t the first alarm glitch, either.

Apple isn’t the safe haven people used to think it was.

Mind you, it was only ever a safe haven for people who couldn’t use a PC properly, or who put form above function.

It seems that Apple’s programmers are having trouble recognising that countries other than America have time zones which change at various points throughout the year.

The Apple statement on BBC News was typically vague – and I can’t wait to see the one they come up with once they’ve had time to think about it a bit more:

“We’re aware of an issue related to non-repeating alarms set for January 1 or 2,” Apple spokeswoman Natalie Harrison said in a statement quoted by Macworld.

“Customers can set recurring alarms for those dates and all alarms will work properly beginning January 3.”

So that’s OK then.

My HTC Desire doesn’t do this.

‘JSON’ Is Undefined

26/12/2010

DOAADI

Computers & Tech

Oh, wow. Someone found this in 2023! It is an old, old, OLD post and is no longer relevant. IE is no more, of course. And the WordPress editors are nearly 15 years better!

If any of you notice that you’re getting an error when you visit webpages, don’t blame it on the website in question!

I haven’t been able to find out what’s caused it, or how to fix it, but it is obviously being experienced by quite a few people. I suspect a recent Microsoft or other update over the last week or so.

It seems to have something to do with Javascript, but it doesn’t appear to affect how the pages display.

EDIT: Actually, it appears to have screwed up the TinyMCE Editor – the change text colour function – in WordPress. I flipped back to the FCKEditor.

EDIT: 27/12/2010: Still no news yet on a fix. All I can find is references to the error occurring when programming in javascript. But judging from the number of hits I’m getting it is affecting a lot of people.

EDIT: 27/12/2010: Well, I found a way around it. I installed the Internet Explorer 9 Beta.

If you fancy going down this route, ~~get IE9 Beta from here~~.

EDIT: 8/2/2011: It looks like a definite solution has now been identified. ~~Mike blogging~~ – a blog – seems to indicate a bug in DivX software. With hindsight this was probably what was causing it for me, although the IE9 route also solved it.

In-car DAB Radio

22/11/2010

DOAADI

Computers & Tech, General, Music

I’ve been getting more and more annoyed at the radio stations I can receive on my car stereo.

I used to listen to Smooth Radio, mainly because they used to play some classic rock, but its appalling technical problems drive me to distraction. Smooth specialises in dead silences, songs jumping from one to another, music and news playing at the same time, news just being 60 seconds of dead silence when you were specifically waiting for it (followed by adverts as if nothing untoward had just happened), and many many more besides.

Smooth’s other claim to fame was that it didn’t just keep playing the same songs over and over. Well, that’s only part true. Admittedly, it doesn’t do it like most local radio stations do – a playlist of about 30 songs that just get repeated throughout the day – but there’s really only so much Michael Bublé and Rod Stewart you can stomach. Then they got rid of a load of half-decent presenters when they recently went national and replaced them with people who are not good DJs and who tried to pretend they were “local” – you could hear the joins a mile off as they switched to the news.

As a result of this I started spending more time listening to BBC 5 Live. No music on there, but good for sport (when you want it) and listening to idiots on phone-in shows. But being on medium wave (MW) means you lose it if you go under a bridge, or find yourself listening to Radio Seychelles if you go near an overhead power cable. And it sounds like someone’s shooting at you with a machine gun if you go near a tramline or electrical substation (amazing how many of those there are hidden behind houses and other buildings).

5 Live on MW has a big drawback. It’s run by the BBC, and that means what I consider to be “balanced coverage” (i.e. every Arsenal match live) is not the same as what the BBC does (i.e. golf, rugby, and football matches involving Man Utd., Chelsea, and other teams). This means that 5 Live Extra is a must-have – it’s the place where the stuff displaced by golf and rugby gets relegated to

One other drawback to 5 Live is that once the sun goes down the only station you can’t receive on 693 medium wave is 5 Live! How do those foreign stations get so much power to be able to do that?

Now, I’ve had a DAB radio at home for a couple of years. I don’t listen to radio much except in the car, but the Pure Evoke-2XT is excellent at getting me up in the morning. It is loud, and has an alarm. And it has Planet Rock.

Planet Rock is brilliant. It plays proper rock music, and apart from bands like Pearl Jam or the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, there is no NO RAP. Rush gets played more times in a single day on Planet Rock than they have on all other stations put together over the whole of the last 35 years!

A couple of years ago, DAB was hit and miss. Reception was patchy at best, and certainly not something that would work in the car. But times have changed, and you can now buy DAB radios for cars – some even have it fitted as standard.

I did some research, and in the end plumped for the Pure Highway DAB Radio and an external magnetic aerial (you get a stick on windscreen mounted one with the radio as standard). It also works as a portable DAB radio.

Performance in-car is superb. I’ve got wall-to-wall coverage throughout Nottinghamshire, and when I’ve travelled through the Cotswolds down to Wiltshire I’ve not found any dead areas at all. And it’s already paid for itself by giving me advance warning of the Rush tour next year, which I wouldn’t have found out about for weeks otherwise!

I got mine from Amazon. It costs just over £60. I’d recommend it to anyone (DAB signal permitting in your area). It fits in ANY car.

WordPress Messes Up HTML Code

21/10/2010

DOAADI

Computers & Tech

I’ve recently set up a website for someone, and I decided to use WordPress as a content management system (CMS).

One thing that has always annoyed me with the TinyMCE WordPress editor is that you can’t easily add raw code you your posts and pages – because the editor tries to make sense of them as plain text and strips out all the HTML or CSS tags. So although your initial page might look fine, if you go back to edit it the editor strips all the code out when it loads it up and your design is completely mangled.

I did a lot of scouting and found that the problem is widespread. I found lots of posts on “the solution” – but not a single one with an actual method showing how to implement this apparent solution. If nothing else, you’d think the author(s) of TinyMCE would have fixed the problem by now – all it needs is a setting where nothing gets stripped out of posts.

To make matters worse – and I mean, to make me even more angry over the lack of a clear solution or even a usable workaround – many of the posts and articles are referring to files and code snippets that simply aren’t on your server after installing WordPress and TinyMCE.

Anyway, I found an ideal solution (for me, anyway). The FCKEditor doesn’t mangle your code.

I’m still testing it, but so far so good.

Update 20/5/2011: I should have done this while back, but I’m not using FCKEditor anymore. Although it doesn’t screw up HTML code, I found that it was unsuitable for me in other ways – most notably, it wasn’t WYSIWYG. So it wasn’t as ideal as I suggested above (though it might be exactly what others are looking for).

I am now using Foliopress WYSIWYG, and this one really does work the way I want it to. It is true WYSIWYG in edit mode, plus it doesn’t mangle code. Look:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />

Parents

04/10/2010

DOAADI

Computers & Tech

I am installing a second Sky box in my dad’s house – the cable and LNB are already there from a previous multi-room installation, I just need to route the existing cable from downstairs to upstairs.

The Existing Sky Cable

Here is a schematic of my dad’s house.

The red line shows the location of the existing Sky cable going neatly down the side of the house and into the front room through a hole in the wall.

The cable is neatly pinned to the wall using suitable cable clips, parallel with other neatly pinned cables for the Virgin Media facilities and a standard roof-mounted TV aerial. Overall, it is a pretty tidy job all round.

Anyway, I explained to him that all he had to do was drill a hole in the same horizontal position on the house – but into the upstairs bedroom just above the skirting board. We could then unclip the existing cable as far as needed up the wall, thread it through the hole, and then I would route it neatly along the skirting board inside the house to the planned location of the second Sky box in that room.

The Proposed Cable Routing Plan

This schematic on the right shows the simplicity of the planned cable routing operation. Red line = cable outside the house, yellow line = cable inside the house.

Now, at this stage of the story I should also explain that the wall above the door and ground floor windows of my dad’s house is pebbledashed – small white and terracotta/red stones embedded in mortar. You’ll see the relevance of this in a moment.

I saw my dad this morning and he was getting ready to drill the hole. I went off to work, and when I went back around 4.30pm I saw that he had finished the job. As I went in he said “we might need a junction box because the cable isn’t long enough”. I wasn’t sure what he meant, because I knew that there would be enough cable to reach the location of the Sky box.

The Finished Job!

This third schematic shows what he had done. He had decided to drill the hole close to the place where the Sky box is located. This meant that outside the house there was a sagging arc of cable from the point on the house where it was properly routed and pinned into the hole he had drilled the other side of the upstairs window.

It looks a bloody mess! I told him he may as well get a few old cars to dump in the front garden and buy a Staffordshire Terrier.

One thing that just doesn’t work is a solid, geometric shape or line cutting across the random surface of a pebbledashed cladding. It sticks out like a sore thumb, whether you’ve pinned it or not. And to make matters worse, where I said to drill the hole just above the skirting, he misjudged it and went straight through the bloody skirting.

Anyway, cutting a long story short – and without detailing the argument which ensued – he is going to do it the way I told him to tomorrow.

Microsoft And WordPress

28/09/2010

DOAADI

Computers & Tech

I saw this story today in PC Mag. Microsoft is ditching Live Spaces and moving to WordPress as its default platform for Windows Live.

Strangely, the Guardian version of the story seems to suggest Microsoft is giving up on blogging altogether and paints a rather more negative picture.

Even more strangely, this post on ConceivablyTech on the same story seems to suggest that Microsoft is about to take over the company that owns WordPress. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I use WordPress to run this blog, and I host it completely independently on my own web space. However, you can get a free hosted WordPress blog quite easily. In fact, I’ve had quite a few people say that they wish they could set up a blog as well. I try to explain how simple it all is – even the way I’ve done it – but they never seem convinced.

Creating a free blog is as simple as signing up and starting to write!

It doesn’t even have to be with WordPress. There’s blogger, blog.co.uk, and dozens of others. However, I’ve tried several in the past and quite honestly WordPress is the best by a million miles! It’s best if you self-host.

One thing I do notice when I am reading peoples blogs is how fast – or rather, how slow – they are, and what they look like. You get some nasty orange ones and they load really slowly. Navigation is also a bit flaky – at least with WordPress you have thousands of themes to choose from with different navigation schemes attached.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this Microsoft/Wordpress alliance develops – and to see who is right about what is actually happening.

Category - Computers & Tech