Recently read: Peter James – Not dead enough

Posted on December 30, 2007 by Simon

I’ve just finished reading “Not dead enough” by Peter James. It’s a crime thriller set in Brighton and Hove in the UK, and has plenty of twists although a few of the events were obviously going to happen. It was a very good read though.

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Firefox and some useful add-ons

Posted on November 2, 2007 by Simon

Although I use Safari for much of my browsing, I still use Firefox for a number of things. I find that playing Shartak with anything other than Firefox is painful because the Greasemonkey scripts for Shartak make it so much easier to find out where my character is. I also use Firefox whenever I need to dig into some HTML/CSS problems – the Web Developer add-on makes it easy to find out which styles are being applied to an element.
Here is a list of some of the Firefox add-ons that I’ve come across and would recommend.

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Leopard + Firewall + Skype = broken

Posted on October 30, 2007 by Simon

It seems that when the firewall option is enabled (apparently it’s disabled by default) you can only run Skype once without reinstalling it. The second time you try, it bounces a couple of times and stops.
A Skype forum thread about it can be found at http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=100329

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synergy2 on Leopard

Posted on October 30, 2007 by Simon

Having upgraded to Leopard, I found that synergy2 wasn’t working. It’s an application that lets you control multiple machines from a single keyboard and mouse and I use it quite a lot at work.
More information about Synergy2 can be found at http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
After the upgrade to Leopard (and even after a fresh reinstall) it would start up and then a crash would be logged in /var/log/system.log; searching in Google resulted in a hit that mentions using launchd to start it up and having set it up like that I found that it actually works fine!
The forum post is at http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1848423&forum_id=199580
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Leopard (Mac OSX 10.5)

Posted on October 28, 2007 by Simon

Like most Apple users we pre-ordered a copy of Leopard and took delivery of it on the 26th October. I upgraded Tiger to Leopard that evening and despite the initial horror of having some fairly big changes to the UI, I’ve decided it’s not so bad.
Something I didn’t like was the new style dock – it has a shiny effect on it (see image below) which makes it harder to see what’s running. I figured that it wasn’t too much of a problem since I have the dock set to auto-hide and if I need to see what’s running, I can always use Cmd-Tab.

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yum reports bad marshal data

Posted on October 28, 2007 by Simon

I’ve been trying to check for updates on one of my CentOS machines using yum and got the following error.
root:~# yum upgrade
Loading “installonlyn” plugin
Options Error: bad marshal data

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MacLive Expo, London 2007

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Simon

We just got back from the MacLive Expo in London – it seemed smaller than last year although I could be mistaken. Here are some pictures of various parts of the expo.
Various stands at the expo
More stands at the expo

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Talk Like A Pirate Day

Posted on September 16, 2007 by Simon

It’s nearly that time of year again – Talk Like A Pirate Day is this Wednesday, September 19th.
To learn more, please use one of these links:
International site
UK site

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It’s Mac Expo time again

Posted on August 29, 2007 by Simon

I’ve just found out that it’s time to register for the London Mac Expo for this year. Seems it’s now called Mac Live Expo – more details can be found at http://www.macliveexpo.co.uk/

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Fridge water filters

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Simon

Just recently our fridge water filter needed replacing and because the recommended supplier (some place in Birmingham) was out of stock I decided to look around. After a bit of searching, I found this site -American Fridge Filters.
They were about 20 pounds cheaper than the place in Birmingham, replied to my enquiry quickly, had the filter in stock and shipped it promptly. All in all, excellent customer service and I’ll be using them in 6-9 months when the filter light comes on again.

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