Monthly Archives: January 2009

Google flags whole Internet as Malware

Posted by stiggyworld on

For a short time today, Google flagged all searches with the message “This site may harm your computer’. You’ve probably come across this message if you’ve ever searched for ‘less reputable sites’, however pretty much every URL was effected. They appear to have the problem resolved now but is seems to be a hot topic of discussion right now…and maybe for a few days?

Link link links

Posted by stiggyworld on

I’ve been messing around with Windows 7 Beta and was going to write a mini review based on my findings. However being a hugh fan of Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows and seeing that he’s publishing a fantastic review (with lots of pictures) I would much rather simply link. Or am i being lazy?

Paul’s site is http://www.winsupersite.com/

You can also catch his podcast ‘This Week in Windows’ on the TWiT network with Leo Laporte – http://twit.tv/

If you haven’t listened to any TWiT podcasts I highly recommend them. I’ve been tuning in for years and find that they’re the best Tech podcasts – For me, my favorites are ‘This week in Tech’, ‘Net at Nite’ and of course ‘This Week in Windows’. I’m not a Mac owner/user however ‘Mac Break weekly’ is also worth listening too.

Through the regular guests on Leo’s show’s I’ve discovered many more fantastic Tech IPTV shows. Ones to look out for are Tekzilla (my fav tech show), DL.TV, and Systm.

http://revision3.com/

http://dl.tv/

All I want to do is connect the thing to the thing!

Posted by stiggyworld on

I had the day off work today so I thought i’d hook up my VCR to the PC and capture the footage from the VHS tapes I found in the garage. Three hours later I’m still nowhere.

It didn’t start off very well because as soon as I’d connected the HTPC (which has the capture card installed) to the VCR, the PC locked. On reboot, no picture at all on the TV. After about an hour faffing I got the PC working again but it would still crash when I used Pinnacle Studio 12 to capture. Right, I thought, out with the capture card and reinstall it in my main PC. Hmm, after another 10 minutes I’d decided this wasn’t a good idea because the only available PCI slot was between the soundcard and GFX card. Bit of a pain if your GFX card heatsink is a rather large. No problem I thought, I’ll install the card in another spare PC.

This was a whole new adventure because the other spare PC didn’t have an OS and very little memory. After a little rummaging around the spare parts box I found x2 512mb sticks so in they went and a quick(-ish) install of XP. Hmm…no sound, that’s o.k, I’ll visit the HP site to pick up the drivers. HP driver site was down :-( that’s o.k. I’ll use Everest to find out what the hardware is and then trawl the internet for an alternative driver source. After another hour i’d got the spare PC setup (with sound!) and was ready to go. O.k…connect the thing to the thing and hey presto…..hmm that didn’t work. Well, in the end I tried all manner of connections between PC and VCR and after a very long afternoon of getting nowhere I gave up and went to make a coffee mumbling ‘I just want to connect the thing to the thing’ :-(

TV Heaven

Posted by stiggyworld on


My three most favorite Tv shows return all in one week :-)

First we have 24 – Season Seven which premiered last night. Although i’ve only seen the first hour, straight from the off – wham!

Secondly, my favorite comedy show The Big Bang Theory kicks off again continuing season Two

…and finally, Battlestar Galactica season 4 (4.1 or 4.5 if that way inclined) starts on Friday 16th.

Fire up the internet and crack out the munchies.

I want one now!

Posted by stiggyworld on


I came across this post on Engadget this evening regarding a spiffy new D-Link router with a few twists. In summary it’s a standard 802.11n router with all the usual trimmings but get this, a 3.2″ LCD screen bolted on top for displaying images and widgets..hmm maybe a useless but cool looking bandwidth monitor. Not only that but a built in BitTorrent client and the ability to plug in up to two USB devices. I’m thinking external drive for torrent files/NAS & maybe a printer for wireless print serving…hmm.

Going to keep an eye out for this one – if it every get released in the UK.

Microsoft sync toy

Posted by stiggyworld on

Whilst chewing the fat with a fellow technician over lunch, we came onto the subject of our ever growing collection of digital images and how we back them up. Ever more so now that i have a shiney new camera and can quite happily shoot 100′s of pictures when out walking or in the garden. In the past i’ve usually burned an archive to CD/DVD and stored in my cupboard.

He suggested that i take a look at Microsofts Sync Tool which, although is quite a old tool, I’d not come across before. Talk about simplicity, once installed you can quite easily set up a simple backup\sync to another partition, external harddrive or network resource. I have an external hdd drive (which is actually a mini media centre i picked up from Maplins way back when before i built myself a proper HTPC…but that’s another story) and have set up a sync job to copy any new images located in my ‘My pictures’ folder over to the other drive.

I’ll still continue to burn the occasional CD but if you’re looking for a very simple backup/sync tool I’d highly recommend it.

Here’s the link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E0FC1154-C975-4814-9649-CCE41AF06EB7&displaylang=en

Windows 7..again

Posted by stiggyworld on

Just a quick update – Well, the install of Windows 7 Beta went very smoothly and the biggest difference i can see to that of Vista is how fast it runs. Bearing in mind that i’m running it on my test PC which is a low end P4 2.4 with 1gb & 80gb HDD. It’s a shame that the onbord Intel GFX chipset won’t run the Aero desktop (like i thought it would anyway) so i’m in the middle of setting it up to dual boot my on main PC and have a really good look at it.

I’ll post my findings over the next few days.