Archive for the ‘howto’ Category

The title for this post comes from an old naval tradition, where a ‘make and mend‘ was time given to fix up clothing. These days sailors get their uniform from stores, and personal clothes from shops like the rest of us; so a modern day ‘make and mend’ is simply some time off. With the [...]


Arduino Simon

11Jan12

I My son got a great Xmas present in the shape of a Starter Kit for Arduino  from Oomlout. After doing some of the basic projects I decided we needed something that we could get our teeth into. After a little pondering Simon came out as a worthwhile challenge. Back in the 80s I’d written a version [...]


OpenVPN

22Nov11

For some time I’ve used SSH tunnels as a means to pretend that I’m somewhere else to avoid geography filters, or to otherwise sneak past content filters. This is fine for regular HTTP(S) traffic from a browser, where it is easy to define a proxy server, but doesn’t work so well for other applications – [...]


I run a bunch of Linux (mostly Ubuntu) VMs on my main machine at home, which happens to be a laptop. I use VirtualBox, but what I have to say here is probably applicable to most host based virtualisation environments. My requirements are pretty simple: The VMs need to be able to access the Internet [...]


After switching to using my tablet PC as my main machine I was missing the local storage and optical drive from my desktop. The solution was to get another HP Microserver to be a sort of sidecar when I want the extra drives. As the HP cashback deal is still on this is a surprisingly [...]


My Galaxy Tab came from the US, and is AT&T branded. As soon as I got it I installed a stock firmware as I didn’t want to live with the various restrictions AT&T had imposed (and I also wanted to use a UK data plan). For my holiday in the US I wanted to get [...]


For quite some time I’ve run my main PC as a hybrid workstation and server. When I built the machine (over 5 years ago) I got a fancy motherboard with onboard RAID5 and popped in 4x300GB drives. It got a mid life upgrade to 4x750GB (which gave a usable 2TB volume), but that was bursting [...]


I live in the UK, and I feel like I’ve been waiting for Google Voice for way too long. I also travel frequently to the US, so I could get some use out of the service as it stands and it’s been frustrating that I couldn’t sign up. Disclaimers Google only offers it’s Voice service [...]


One of the big tech news items today is the launch of the much anticipated Google eBooks. Sadly the service is only available in the US at the moment, so I thought I’d have a poke around and see what the hurdles were. US Browsing Browsing from my regular connection at home I could only see [...]


The old joke There used to be a joke that people who didn’t ‘get it’ would send an email and then call the recipient up to check if it had been received. Now the joke’s on us Now, I am that joke. I think we all are. Email has reached a point where it’s just [...]



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