Page 6 of full list of posts


Keyboards, keyboards, keyboards

Look I know, I’m with you: the keyboard you use is of supreme importance to you and your work. Once you find one you like – mine is (still!) the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 – you never want to use another. […]

READ MORE

Webcams? How about a DSLR?

Over the past year, I’ve represented DevExpress on a few virtual meetings with people like Jeff Fritz and Michael Jolley where I needed to show my face. I have a Logitech C920 webcam and an adjustable arm I use to position it, so I thought I was good for these live interviews. […]

READ MORE

2021: time to move into a higher gear

Just before the New Year, Steve Smith, a.k.a. Ardalis, tweeted to ask everyone what their most popular post had been in 2020. […]

READ MORE

403? But the file is there, I can see it!

File this under the “Faceplant” section. Because, when I worked out what the F was going on, that’s exactly what I did. Head, meet desk. […]

READ MORE

Casio PQ-100 clock

OK, I’ll admit, this is a wacky one. Way back in 1988 I lived in a one-bedroom flat in Hammersmith, one that was inside a converted Victorian church. I’d bought it in October 1986, and in fact I was living there a year later when that big storm hit southern England: I remember walking to Stamford Brook tube station the next morning trying to avoid all the broken branches, etc, that were strewn around. […]

READ MORE

Opening QFX files with Microsoft Money

OK, OK, OK, I know. I should have moved on from an over-a-decade-old program to some other personal finance app, especially when it’s time to set up a new PC to run it. But, to be honest, the alternatives are just crap (one, two, three). I tried, but they’re awful. […]

READ MORE

Propagating a DNS change … Slowly

I’ve bought a couple of .com domains recently from Namecheap, essentially as ‘placeholders’ in some sense, and such that I would be hosting them purely as single-page static sites on AWS. Dead cheap, I must say, they were around $45 each for five years. And, to be honest, the ten or so static sites I host on AWS that make use of S3, Route 53, CloudFront, and Lambda only cost around $5 a month from Amazon. So, basically free, and adding a couple more domains isn’t going to make any difference. […]

READ MORE

Microsoft Arc Mouse – the older one

OK, I admit it: I’m behind the times, but my fave mouse ever since it first came out is the Microsoft Arc Mouse. It was replaced four or five years ago by the Arc Touch Mouse and I’ve tried that one several times but it and I don’t get along. The older one, though? Like a house on fire. I’ve worn several out and have just about managed to find replacements: new ones in their original boxes sometimes come up on eBay. […]

READ MORE

Are you a web dev? FFS: update your libraries!

I’ve mentioned this a couple of times: I log 404 errors on this, my blogging site. A couple of valid reasons I suppose: to make sure that the content I upload is accessible, and to ensure that my URL redirections to my older blog (on a new domain) are working properly. […]

READ MORE

Backing up an Azure database

This site uses a heavily-modified version of GraffitiCMS, an ASP.NET blog backend that was open-sourced way back when. I moved it to be hosted on Microsoft Azure about 18 months ago, and, to be honest, haven’t really worried about backing up the data contained within. However, over the past couple of virus-laden months, I’ve been considering updating the whole shebang to use DevExpress ASP.NET controls and layouts, and then writing about the experience over several blog posts. […]

READ MORE