May 2006 Archives

I was about to install Norton Antivirus 2006 from my Acer install CD when the software prompted me after I clicked on "Install Norton Antivirus": "Are you sure you want to install this module?" I mean come on! It does not even show the name of the module so what use is a message requesting confirmation of something you just instructed it to do, if it provides no useful decision making information?

Do not be too jealous as I am (pretty sure) that I am the first South African to own a 17" MacBook Pro. :)

Do you know what a CAPTCHA is? It is one of those small graphics people (like me) use whenever a turing test is to be performed - i.e. a human be told apart from a computer. Typically this is used in blogs to allow only human commenters, registering for email/online accounts etc. The idea is to display some warped text on a distracting background so that OCR programs have difficulty recognising the characters from the noise, but not humans. The primary use is to fight SPAM. But...........

I had this problem since long ago when I started using Mac OS X 10.2 - iCal imports .ics files from Outlook just fine - however the entry always gets saved with the wrong time. In specific - it is always moved out by 2 hours. Needless to say this can be detrimental to punctuality. Here is how I fixed the issue...

For the first time in my life since I got SPAM (and I have received literally tens of thousand junk mail in my lifetime), I had a laugh at the wit of one of the spammers...

(WARNING: Adult content following - only read rest of article if you are older than 30).

Cool Apple Buddy gave me a refund for the notebook - even though they said they could not reproduce the error. I guess the screen shots I presented helped my case.

Now it is just the frustrating wait for South Africa's resellers to get stock...

I am no expert in the optical branch of physics, but I am very confident that I am correct in stating that a very common myth among amateur/novice photographers is just that - a myth.

I recently upgraded from a Nokia 9300 to a Nokia 9300i - so after I transferred all my data I wanted to give my phone to my wife. Obviously not wanting her to see all my naughty appointments, I needed to format it. It was not intuitive... But finally I figured it out:

* Take out battery for 10 seconds
* Reinsert and open device
* At blue NOKIA text, press and hold Ctrl+Chr+Shift+F until the Format dialog is displayed
* Select Format.

Your device will now be reset to factory conditions.

I bought a new MacBook Pro 15.4" from Cool Apple Buddy on Thursday. Needless to say I was extremely excited since a significant upgrade to the ageing G4 processor was long overdue. I actually wanted the 17" since I currently own a PowerBook 17" 1.67GHz model, but none are currently available. Unfortunately this was the biggest mistake I made in a long time...