babbling since 1980

Whilst test-driving my new Razer Lachesis I’ve been digging through my old periphery and uncovered my Logitech G15 keyboard. I stopped using the G15 after an unfortunate drink spillage incident and consigned it to the keyboard graveyard along with my diNovo and a couple of microsoft keyboards.

Today I’ve finally decided to engage in a little belated spring cleaning and before binning the G15 plugged it in to remind myself what wasn’t working after the unhappy incident.

Miraculously the G15 now works fine (well, almost), 8 months of drying out appears to have done the trick, with one exception… Hitting the tab key correctly tabs out of a text field but before leaving the field inserts a ‘9′ - any ideas?

I wasn’t particularly bothered by its loss originally as the screen function wasn’t supported in the games that I play, but today I stumbled on an add-on to provide in-game stats for Battlefield 2142, which would be really handy to work out how badly I’m doing

Technorati Tags: Logitech G15, Battlefield 2142

Apple’s Mighty Mouse is one of those love-or-hate devices. When I got my iMac one was provided in the box, so I have it a whirl and was pleasantly suprised. So much so that I’ve bought one for my work machine and now install them as standard on all the new macs I buy.

A year later and the Mighty Mouse on my home machine is beginning to show its limitations. While ideal for pootling around desktop apps I’ve recently started playing Battlefield 2142 again and needed something a little more serious (or at least reliable in the mouse-wheel department).

Not content with a normal OEM mouse, and having been warned off the Logitech Revolution MX by John I’ve opted for the Razer Lachesis which as you can see from my flickr photostream has just arrived. I was impressed that they have a mac driver. I’ll post some kind of verdict after the weekend.

Technorati Tags: razer, lachesis, mighty mouse, battlefield 2142

I’m posting this mostly due to sheer laziness.

Wordpress 2.3 was recently patched due to a nasty security vuln, but people are still getting caught out and haven’t moved to 2.3.1

So I thought I’d show you how easy it is.

Provided you can SSH to your provider, this is practically all you need to do:

(remember to cd in to the root of your wordpress installation before attempting the below)

• wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
• tar xfz latest.tar.gz
• rm -rf ./wp-includes/
• rm -rf ./wp-admin/
• cd wordpress/
• cp -rpf * ../ (note, some distributions will require “cp -rpf –reply=yes * ../” - mine doesn’t)
• cd ..
• rm -rf ./wordpress/
• rm -f latest.tar.gz

And there you go, a shiny new and upgraded wordpress. This won’t alter your themes or plugins, the usual caveats apply with compatibility of your themes, plugins and haxxies.

DISCLAIMER: I’m not to blame if you break your wordpress with the above, especially if you don’t bother to back up. The above works for me, I’m so confident of it in fact that it’s just a flat script that I run, so even simpler from my perspective… YMMV etc.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, ssh

Well, Safari 3 final didn’t fix anything. Did 2.3.1?

Nothing to see here.This should be a different line.

A small gripe, but that’s never stopped me before.

Despite claims to the contrary, it’s no big suprise that UK tech consumers get a bit of a raw deal compared to our counterparts on the other side of the pond. Occasionally this is justifiable - in the case of the iPhone for example Apple probably needed to get the relationship nailed with one carrier before branching out in to other territories.

Still on an Apple theme, there are less complicated process which i think are pretty straighforward - in this case literally a case of box-shifting. That can’t be hard to do, right?

Having been caught up in the hype for Leopard I dutifully pre-ordered it a while ago, I was impressed to see the below on the UK store site (note the 0800 number which verifies this wasn’t a page on the main US apple store).

I also need this for work, so have two preorders going to my work and home respectively.

Today when calling the Apple store folk to query a different purchase I was told that UK Leopard orders are leaving them on the 26th on a 3-day courier. Logging in to my work and personal accounts I can now see the shipping date has gone from unknown to the 26th.

It’s far from the end of the world but I simultaneously hear of friends in the states who have shipping dates of the 25th with a next-day priority service. A great way to show how they value their UK customers I guess

Technorati Tags: leopard, apple, 10.5, mac os x 10.5

Our November meeting is happening on the 20th at Clarkslegal LLP in Reading. I believe three presenters are scheduled - Ben Pierce and James O’Neill of Microsoft, and Adam Bell. We’re working on some swag for the meeting, more news when we have it.

The plan is to have another crack at broadcasting this via LiveMeeting, I think we worked out most of the bugs last time so this months session should go off without a hitch

I’ll post the topics when Richards confirms them, hopefully this week.Update: Adam has more info here.

Technorati Tags: powershell, get-psuguk

It’s still not fixed, and now I have to go fix all my posts :-/

Since the acquisition of my iPod touch this week I’ve found myself using the built in Safari browser much more than any of my previous mobile devices.

With the exception of sites driven by heavy javascript, or unsupported technologies such as Silverlight and Flash, pages load pretty quickly and render well.

The one drawback of my redesign to TT is the fixed-width nature, I’ve installed the iWphone plugin and theme from ContentRobot so pages should look a little different when visited from the iPhone/iPod touch. I’m also testing out the iPhone Mobile Admin from Jared Bangs and Dan Cameron although I think I’ll stick to posting from Scribefire for the time being.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPod Touch, iWphone, iPhone Mobile Admin

For some time now I’ve been meaning to write something about our new(-ish) Skype-enabled DECT phones but a combination of other priorities and frankly chronic laziness has meant that any chance of a mini-review hasn’t happened.

The concept seemed fairly simple, unlike the SPH100D which was a WiFi handset (with appauling battery life) the Netgear SPH200D we opted for uses DECT and the base radio unit has an ethernet connection to hook in to a router for Skype.

While the handset claims to be signed in to the service 24×7 (we have a dedicated Skype account for this) I can see from running Skype at work and on Fring that it’s more down than up, so isn’t a great deal of use.

I can rule out the connection or router as being to blame as I host other test kit across the same link, so have conceded defeat and am instead opting to dabble with ‘real’ VOIP using a Sipura device now known as the PAP2T from Linksys. The plan is to set it up with an account from www.voipuser.org and refer everyone to an 0844 number when calling us, the revenue from which covers our outbound calls.

As this sits between the PSTN connection to the phone it can be used with the SPH200D turning the normal PSTN mode into an additional SIP route (potentially using our second broadband link) and still has the fallback of the BT line.

There’s plenty of scope for it to all end in tears, I’ll post when it’s all set up.

Technorati Tags: VoIP, Linksys, PAP2T, Skype, SPH200D

My super.fi 5’s died this weekend - I was disconnecting the cable from an earbud and the connector (attached to the headphone) came clean out, wires attached (see my photostream for the gory details…). Safe to say it put me on a bit of a downer

All was not lost. I’ve emailed to the folks at Ultimate Ears, complete with photo and they’ve agreed to replace them. Hurrah!

Technorati Tags: Ultimate Ears, super.fi

Much like John, I’ve been contemplating an upgrade from my 5.5gen iPod. I might not have the same 4hrs of commute per day to tackle, but the next couple of months will see a lot of jaunting between London and Cardiff, plus the new iPod Touch is a bit too shiny for my magpie-like gadget sense to ignore.

Hearing that devices were pretty scarce (the iPod Touch Locator site is a great resource if you’re curious on stock levels) I made a preorder a week ago, with devices due ‘in around 3 weeks’ only to find that 6 days later a brand new 16Gb iPod touch arrives on my desk. Hurrah!

Am going to spend the next 48hrs faffing with it, providing I remember I’ll write some kind of verdict before the weekend.

So either Wordpress 2.3 is horribly broken for Safari 3 users, or the WYSIWYG editor is b0rken in general and will (hopefully) soon be bugfixed. Either way I need a new way to post to my blog so have been dabbling with MarsEdit, Ecto (I bought this a while back…) and a Firefox plugin called ScribeFire.

Because of the changes with categories and keywords posts I fired up Ecto and edited some old blog posts. Big mistake… Where originally I had preview text with an expanded post on clickthrough I now only have the preview. Thankfully my intial blogging wasn’t too extensive (or for that matter interesting) so I’m just forging ahead with finding something that plays a little nicer with 2.3 for the time being. One down, two to go.

MarsEdit seems to be a similar deal to Ecto, it’s a standalone Mac app, it edits the posts in markup (so I cheat and write blocks of text then use the Humane Text service to convert my posts to XHTML…. But it feels a little more limited than Ecto and is going to cost me to use until they fix Ecto for 2.3, so I’m shelving it for the time being at least.

As to ScribeFire, well I’m writing this post with it, I guess I’ll see what happens when I click ‘Publish’. Hold me, I’m scared

Edit: So I did some tests with FF and Safari, looks like it IS a Safari bug. Ack. Oh and ScribeFire works, so no more excuses from me…

Technorati Tags: ecto, marsedit, wordpress, scribefire, firefox

Pretty handy that WP2.3 drops the week I revive my blog, and thanks to Techtites for reminding me of how simple it is to complete the process via SSH, upgrading was a quick and painless deal.

Just have to repeat the process for Mark, John and Caroline before I can get back to Halo3

My new Thinkpad X61 arrived last week and came preloaded with Vista Business x64

Thanks to the lack of optical drive I’m being forced to think before I blast it flat and start over… So wanted to ask - has anyone else bought a new system lately that arrived with an x64 OS?

This chassis only has 2Gb RAM so it was more likely for the added security features Lenovo have taken the machines up to 64-bit - doubt I’ll be fitting the max supported RAM for Vista Business @ 128GB

Thus far it’s all running quite nicely, although I’m having to work around rather a lot of issues with 32-bit apps being relocated to a ‘Program Files (x86)’ folder - any thoughts?