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www.andysbreakfast.com - Daily weblog on Windows, Websites and Weird Stuff! TODAY on apb - Thursday,November 14,2002
A man is not a camel
Well, yesterday was a pretty weak effort! I didn't write an article for this page, although I sorta have a good excuse. I had to drive 200km to a different office to work for a couple of days. And I was pretty busy... kind of. Anyway, it wasn't a completely tech free day. I helped my mate Damo replace a power supply in one of the computers at work. The only trick was that we also had to replace the case. I had never transplanted a motherboard etc into a new case, and I learned a few tricks. In the end, it works like a treat. Our job was made a whole lot easier by the consumption of some of our homebrewed beer. Damo makes a great ginger beer, and very smooth mead. I stick with English style amber ales and porters. You can learn alot about making beer on the internet. Mailing lists like OzKitBeers, Australian Craft Brewing and the Hombrew Digest are great sources of information. Then there are websites by the zillions, the best of which is John Palmer's online book How To Brew. Or check out your local homebrew shop. Mine is Tasmanian Home Brewing Supplies. Cheers! TODAY on apb - Tuesday,November 12,2002
Better late than never
Well, I almost didn't post an article today, but since I've been mucking around with my home computers for about two hours, I thought I may as well take a break and write something useful. Or maybe not. Anyway, in the mail today I received my new Benq mini optical mouse. It's perfect for my notebook, with USB or PS/2 connection, scroll wheel and the whole thing lights up, which doesn't serve much purpose, but looks cool! I have been struggling tonight trying to get TightVNC to allow connections through my firewall, which is provided by WinRoute Lite. I use WRlite to share my net connection between a desktop computer, and my notebook. It works really well, but is nowhere near as easy to customise as the full version of WinRoute. Of course, the price is a little better! Since the dial-up connection on this computer is decidedly flaky, I needed a program which would maintain the connection, and redial when required. I found one called Online Monitor. Not only will it redial a dropped connection, if it can't get through eventually, it will reboot the computer. Useful if your modem is dodgy. Simple but effective. And it displays the IP address constantly, plus how long you have been online for. TODAY on apb - Monday,November 11,2002
Something to watch when things get boring...
Well, Australia wrapped up the 1st Test against England inside four days. No surprise there! But, of course, the problem then remains - what to do with the spare time? Luckily I received my copy of 'The Sixth Sense' on DVD today. I've already got one of M Night Shyamalan's other films, 'Unbreakable' on DVD, and I thought I should get this one as well. I order most of my DVDs from two local suppliers - Chaos and OzDVDWarehouse. They are both reliable, prompt, and inexpensive. Chaos is also Australia's leading online music retailer. I still get the occasional disc or book from the US, almost always from Amazon. No particular reason, they are just the biggest and most well known online retailer, so you can be fairly confident that the item will arrive safe and sound - eventually! Another site I have noticed only recently is DVDCrave. They are one of the many Yahoo! Australia stores, and their prices seem consistently cheaper than most other places, at least by a dollar or so. The only pity is that their page doesn't render properly in Opera 6.05. Some of the main text is the same colour as the background, making it a bit hard to read! Toggling between author mode and user mode solves this, but I shouldn't have to do that, really... TODAY on apb - Sunday,November 10,2002
Too much sport is barely enough!
An eclectic mix of websites today. But first, I should apologise for not posting yesterday. I spent most of the day watching the cricket, or shopping with my wife, which was not necessarily a bad experience! I picked up a pair of shoes, and some bargain second-hand Nin64 games. Sweet. Today I discovered yet another site with live cricket score updates. It's at the website for Australian Pay-TV operator Foxtel, just go to FoxSport and click on Scoreboard:Live. It's a full scoreboard, which updates every minute or so. I'm a big fan of remote control software for computers. There are so many reasons that you might need to be able to see what is on someone else's screen, and 'take control'. I installed a printer and fixed a local network that was playing up on one of our work computers last Friday. Interesting thing was that the computer was in an office 200km from where I was. For this sort of stuff, we use Symantec's PC Anywhere, which I'm sure many people have heard of. Personally though, I prefer a version of VNC called TightVNC, which is smaller, quicker, and much cheaper. In fact, it's free! With many people having 'always on' connections these days, it's just so cool to be able to log in to your home computer from somewhere else, especially when you need to get that 'must have' file which you forgot to bring with you! TightVNC has a viewer that could fit on a floppy, and even allows access via a Java viewer in a web browser. TODAY'S Tip from Neat Net Tricks TODAY on Lockergnome Windows Fanatics Thank-you for tuning in to Andrew's Psychedelic Breakfast. Please call again... Sign My Guestbook View My Guestbook OzEmail is an Internet Service Provider in Australia, used and approved by Andrew Hogan since 1995! Disclaimer : I accept no responsibility for anything on this page, nobody saw me do it, can't prove anything... Use all advice at your own risk, and always backup your data! Don't run with scissors. Never look at a solar eclipse. No cows went mad during the writing of this site...and no gerbils were bothered too much. This page © AWH Enterprises. Designed by |
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