If you have an ATI graphics chip in your laptop or Mac, I definitely recommend you take a look at Mobility Modder from Driver Heaven (since renamed to Hardware Heaven).
Apparently, most laptop manufacturers (OEMs) want control over the graphics card drivers you can install. This means that the latest ATI drivers, cannot be installed. As graphics card drivers typically get more stable the newer they are, you are left running some crappy old version the OEM provides. Sadly the truth is that the latest drivers do technically support your laptops chip, just ATI don’t have permission to let you install it!
I was having some issues with my graphics on my iMac, running Windows 7 via BootCamp. The drivers I had were dated around summer of last year. On the ATI website, you can download drivers for BootCamp, but these are the same old ones I already had. In fact it refers to the drivers being for Windows 7 Beta!
Enter Mobility Modder. It is a simple program that modifies the latest ATI driver package, enabling you to install it on you laptop/Mac running BootCamp. I have tried this and it worked perfectly. I now have what I call the “standard” ATI drivers, i.e. the latest version.
Gladly my graphics problems have yet to re-occur. Even if they do, I can at least know that the latest drivers didn’t fix it, something I would never know had I still been tied to the OEM version.
Check out Mobility Modder at the Hardware Heaven site now.
OK so I don’t really have your password. A spot of journalistic license 
Everything we use with a personal identity online, we create and log in to using a username or email, and a password. The problem with having so many different accounts, is that it becomes all too easy to use the same password for all of them. Your security is only as strong as the weakest link, and if one of those accounts is compromised and someone learns your password, suddenly they have access to your Facebook, your twitter, your email, maybe even your bank account!
Passwords often are based on birthdays, children’s names, your partner’s name, your pet, where you were born, your mother’s maiden name etc. There is a common list of things a hacker could try. Once he finds the right password once, he will often try the same at the other sites mentioned in the paragraph above.
So a good password should really contain an assortment of letters (both upper and lower case), numbers and special characters, as well as being at least 8 characters in length. Something like this would be quite good: /V\Pm!F#,73.$$
But how many of us can remember a password like that? And how many of us can remember a dozen passwords like that?!
This is where Keepass can help. Keepass is an easy-to-use password manager. It allows us to store dozens, or even hundreds of password in a kind of safe. It allows you to store away passwords in a very secure file, one that hackers cannot easily read. It does this with something called encryption. If you were to look at the file in something like Notepad, it would appear as total garbage.
You can securely store any text in the file. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a password for a website. You could use it for your bank PIN numbers, or to keep important software licence keys safe.
With Keepass you “lock” the file with a single password. Just remembering one password gives you access to this safe. This does mean you need to have one good password, but it will stop the need from remembering dozens.
Keepass is freeware. That means it won’t even cost you any money. It is very well written to the highest standards, and is equally as good as anything you would pay for!
It is very simple to use as you can see by clicking on one of the screenshot images in this post. It even has a built in password generator so you can quickly make long, secure passwords in seconds. You can copy and paste passwords when you need them, and it even deletes the contents of the clipboard afterwards so no one else can find out what your password is by pasting it into Notepad.
Keepass comes in 2 versions. Classic (v1.x) and Professional (v2.x). It is a bit confusing, but Professional doesn’t replace Classic, but is more feature packed. Both are being developed in parallel. My personal preference is for the Classic version, but see this comparison to make up your own mind.
There are ports to other operating systems too. Linux, MacOS, iPhone, Blackberry, PocketPC and Java™ mobile phones all have clients available. Check out the downloads page. I use KeepassMobile on my Nokia, so I always have my passwords on the move.
I highly recommend you check it out. Cat and I both use it and she hasn’t had any difficulty in using it. It’s a first rate piece of software, so don’t hesitate to download it now!
If everyone used this, we’ve have far less security issues in the computing world — so maybe don’t get this, or I’ll be out of a job!
I’ve actually updated the other two sites carrying the Jeronimo “banner”, which is a rare occurance indeed.
The Wedding — I realised our posts on that blog stopped a week before we got married, so anyone following it wouldn’t know how it went. Rather than write a detailed step-by-step, I just wrote a brief summary. Maybe we’ll add a post on our first anniversary
ProjectXY — Our baby blog. With the big day fast approaching, I should be nervous, but I’m not. Should I be?
Hopefully people reading this, unaware (uninterested) in my other blog’s, might take a look and make comments there. Then again they don’t make enough comments here! 
I have to start by saying I gave it every chance. I used Mac OS X (Leopard) for over two years since I got my iMac in November 2007. I bought the Mac for a few reasons — not the least of which was a big discount, cashback, and a free iPod. But I also wanted to see what everyone was on about, and why Macs have such a loyal following.
The Mac “package” is very impressive. Apple making the hardware and software gives them total control over the Mac experience — something unique in the personal computer industry. The Mac look and feel is delightful to the eyes — such consistently high presentation serves the platform well.
However they say beauty is only skin deep. To be fair, Macs do have much more depth than that — it’s a solid dependable OS that only crashed on me once or twice. I’ll even miss some things as I return to the other side — easy drag and drop application installation and Exposé are just a couple.
Since I have been working permanently from home, I have been using my iMac on a full-time basis. I have a Sammy netbook which runs Windows 7 and is great, but I cannot honestly recommend crouching over a 10″ screen and trackpad all day long. So I needed to use my iMac which provides me a glorious 24″ screen, and a real mouse.
To begin with, things were OK. Browsing the web is much the same on any platform. I started to get annoyed though with Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. I bought it soon after it was released, expecting it to provide much of the same functionality that I had enjoyed on Office 2007 on Windows. I could dedicated an entire post to it but to summarise, Office for Mac is dire, dire, dire. AVOID! The people who wrote it, need to sit in the corner of the office of the Windows Office team, shut up, and learn everything they can, from scratch if they have to. Going back to Office 2008 after using the “older” Office 2007 is painful.
Sadly OpenOffice, for all its freeness, still pales in comparison next to Microsoft’s offering. If you say otherwise, you are lying. Deep down inside you know it to be true.
The final straw came the other day. Cat made me see the light. I was sat swearing at Office on the Mac. Cat could see how frustrated I was getting. She said I needed to just get a Windows desktop and be done with it. As annoyed as I was, I started defending the Mac, saying how it was fine and I would carry on using it. I suddenly realised I was becoming a Mac user and had to change before it was too late.
Allow me to explain. Most Mac fanatics allow themselves to be blinded by the platforms inadequacies and refuse to listen to anyone who says otherwise. Here I was, clearly struggling with a failing of the system, yet I completely turned on Cat when she pointed it out, and not my anger at the system.
It would be unfair to give up on the OS for one program — certainly there is some irony that I return to Windows because a Microsoft product on the Mac is pathetic. But there is more to it than that. Windows offers me everything I want and need in a computer. For all Apple’s greatness, as a power user, trying to do something is like doing it with one of my hands tied behind my back.
The Mac platform lacks the great range of applications on Windows. iPhone users know this feeling. The iPhone has the largest number of apps on a mobile platform by far, and for that reason, I think it is the leading mobile device bar none. I think the same about Windows. Simple things, like burning an image to disc. ImgBurn is the greatest app for that, it’s freeware and exclusive to Windows. I use Keepass for password storage — the Windows version is better than the Mac version. Some of the Wii tools I use are Windows only. Windows is not perfect, far from it, but it is better supported, and an order of magnitude more people use it, so any solutions to problems are just a Google search away.
VMWare’s Fusion product only partly solves the problem. It’s great, but still lacks the feel of the real thing running natively.
So last night, I fired up Boot Camp and installed Windows 7 Professional. The process was actually pretty good. The only issue is that the sound drivers provided by Apple are beyond pants. The speakers hissed when playing a sound, when setting the sound to mute!! I got the latest drivers from Realtek and the problem is much improved — still the sound is not as good as when running on Mac OS, but it’s OK.
One thing I do have to critisise is that Boot Camp comes with the OS, therefore I cannot get the latest features (such as reading my Mac OS hard drive partition in Windows) without forking out money to Apple. Plus they are still to officially support and supply drivers for Windows 7 — not really acceptable considering the OS has been out for a few months, and had over a year in beta. Sadly I suspect a certain amount of arrogance from Apple is partly behind this.
Technically I can still boot in Mac OS whenever I want, so it’s not the end of the road, but I will need a good reason to, especially when I can do everything and more in Windows 7 — the greatest OS available today.
It’s been a fun ride, but the time has come to admit defeat, the Mac is dead, long live Windows!!
Cat and I went to see Her Majesty in her Revenue and Customs office in Derby. We had signed up to a workshop on Paying Expenses and Benefits to Employees. Basically we wanted to learn what did and did not class as a valid business expense etc. All useful stuff when you run a business.
There were about 6 people in the workshop, and I have no idea how useful they found it, but certainly Cat and I thought it was a waste of time. The guy running the course was a tax man, who had no presentation skills, who worked from his own notes which bore little or no reference to ours. So the notes we have are either useless, or what he was telling us was not important.
We arrived about 5 minutes late due to an accident on the dual carriageway so I thought that was why nothing made sense and it seemed like we’d turned two pages at once. However it soon became clear that was not the case. I really was disappointed as some of the other courses we’ve attended, including the most recent one on email marketing, were absolutely superb.
It did tell me one thing though, and that is that I want to teach something, or present a course of some sort. If only to do a better job than the tax man