Archive for the ‘howto’ Category

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 […]


I’ve been meaning to try this out for some time, and my recent trials with Amazon’s US Kindle Store prodded me into action. The theory Popular SSH clients (like OpenSSH and Putty) have features that allow tunneling. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) normally have some way of being administered over SSH. So… start up an EC2 […]


I’ve been a keen fan of DivX for many years now (though I must confess that I still mostly use the long deprecated Dr Divx in favour of the newer DivX Converter). One recurring annoyance is that transcoded files can sometimes have issues with lip sync. Having never found anything useful online about fixing this […]