May 26, 2006

More valuable advice

If you're going to be giving a computer to someone else, either for repair, or because you're selling it to them, it might be prudent not to have any personal or embarrassing data on the hard drive. See, for instance, the kiddie porn types who get caught when they take their machines to PC World for a checkup.

Or better yet, this guy who sold a broken laptop on ebay. What an interesting life he seems to lead...

Posted by James at 18:29 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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March 28, 2005

Nildram++

Despite being bought out by Pipex, it seems Nildram (who provide my ADSL line) still have some clues about them.

I rang earlier to get my password reset, because somehow in the years since I last bought a new router, I've managed to forget it. Bear in mind this is on a bank holiday, and the time was around 6.30pm, so I didn't expect much joy. The first guy I spoke to gave me a reference number, and told me someone would call me back "probably within 15 minutes" on either my recorded contact number (which turned out to be a number I no longer use), or if I preferred, on the number the ADSL was provisioned to. This suited me fine.

So I went back to what I was doing, and, when half an hour had passed, rang again to see what the score was. I gave the guy who answered my ticket number from the previous call, he quickly got up to speed with what was going on, asked me to hang up, and called me back. I told him what new password I wanted, he told me to give it up to an hour to propagate through the system, and all was once more right with the world.

So, they dealt with my problem promptly, even on a bank holiday evening. They took sensible steps to verify who I was (I had to confirm my name and address, as well as being called on the line they provided the ADSL down), before resetting my password, and they let me choose the password, without objecting to (or even sounding surprised by) the fact it was a random alphanumeric string straight out of pwgen. Rock.

Actually, I suppose it's quite sad that I was impressed by this, but I've had crap responses from other customer service departments recently, so was pleasantly surprised. I've actually been waiting for Nildram to screw up, so I have some motivation to switch my provider to Black Cat, but they've certainly not done so today. Anyway, having all my hosted services on a machine on a separate network to my ADSL link is probably no bad thing :)

Posted by James at 19:09 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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March 01, 2005

Budget laptops

My laptop, emerald, is dying. The screen isn't very well connected to the graphics card any more, the case is flaky, the keyboard ropey, and the battery completely useless. It's going to get replaced. Luckily, I have in the region of £700 kicking around ready to spend on a replacement...

An iBook, through the Apple Higher Education Store, will cost me £681 with a 60GB drive, 12" screen, 256MB RAM and bluetooth module, plus I'd want to some extra memory (£27 from Crucial for 256MB extra). But I'm wary about buying into the whole Apple thing, and so I'm wondering if there's anything in the current x86 world that would serve me as well.

So my dear readers, the question is this: where can I get an x86 laptop for no more than £700, which won't fall apart within 2 years, is designed to be portable rather than a mostly-static "desktop replacement", and will happily run an OS other Windows? Built in wireless stuff would be nice, too, although I imagine that's standard these days...

Answers on a comment :)

Posted by James at 17:14 | Comments (9) | TrackBack
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February 11, 2005

IDN support

All browsers supporting even vaguely modern concepts (so, anything but IE...) these days seem to support IDN. Which I suppose is nice if you want to register a domain name with a biohazard symbol in, or you want to use the vast wealth of characters available outside of ASCII for your domain names, perhaps because your native language uses some other alphabet. Great, sounds really useful, and every credit to the people rushing to support it. Unfortunately, domain name registrars are pretty slack about checking what they let people register, it seems, and the cunning people at Shmoo.com have found a clever trick which would let phishers exploit this.

If this worries you, and you don't generally need to use sites with fancy schmancy unicode characters in their names, consider switching off IDN support in your browser. In firefox, this means going into about:config, filtering by "network", and disabling "network.enableIDN" (thanks to Chris for pointing this out). Unfortunately, this setting won't stick across restarts of firefox, in the stable released builds; according to boingboing the latest builds fix this.

This has been a public service announcement.

[Update: The nice people at Mozilla seem to have found a third way. (via Hacking for Christ)]

Posted by James at 12:07 | Comments (2) | TrackBack
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