I just had an idea for Google.  So, naturally, I did a Google search on “How to I make a suggestion for Google?”.  The top page told me the answer – but it wasn’t on Google’s site!  Anyway, turns out that their is where to put it.

My suggestion? Quite simple. I wanted to type “about:config” in the URL bar, but forgot the colon. I thought it would be kinda neat if Google said “Did you mean about:config?”.

Those of you who’ve been reading here a while will know I used to be a huge fan of ClearType. Huge fan! I thought it made fonts really readable.

Then, about two years ago, I started to get headaches. Big, nasty headaches. So I tried fiddling with display options – upped the refresh rate (sort-of worked, for a while), changed the colour scheme… Eventually I found if I turned off ClearType, the headaches went away. Finally, I could get back to the day job.

And then I upgraded my works machine to Windows 7… Read the rest of this entry »

My regular readers (all both of you) may have noticed that Esotechnica has been offline. I’m sure your curiosity has been insatiable, so why the outage?

That’s easy.

I messed it up.

One control panel – many sites. Too much wine, one wrong click…

Safe to say I won’t be doing that again!

What on earth is wrong with the corporate world? People are buying other companies they should stay away from, believe me. Take Oracle and Sun. Oracle bought Sun to get their hands on Java, and to turn themselves into an IBM-style one stop shop. Fail. James Gosling has left, many of the key Sun Players have left, and all they’ve got left is some blue colours and some open source software. And Oracle really don’t understand open source. If they did, they wouldn’t be charging for the OpenOffice plugin…

And there’s more. Hp wants to buy Palm. Read the rest of this entry »

My own personal rules for effective computing:
1. Don’t buy anything with ‘Norton’ written on it, unless the next word is ‘Ghost’.
2. Don’t buy any program without consulting osliving.com. Open source is often faster, more effective, and doesn’t provide features you don’t need.
3. Half the computer companies are brands of another. Check who belongs to whom, then use Google Shopping to find the cheapest supplier. The product and warranty will be the same, just the price will be cheaper.
4. A 2GHz AMD processor is as fast as a 3GHz Intel, but costs less than a 2GHz Intel.
5. Memory is the cheapest, easiest, and most effective upgrade you’ll ever buy.
6. Most users don’t use anything most Linux distributions won’t give you for free.
7. Free antivirus is better than no antivirus at all, but the best antivirus money can buy is no substitute for common sense.