So I spent a glorious Sunday afternoon puzzling, amongst other things, over a friends broken laptop. It could connect to the internet when plugged in by cable, but not by the WiFi connection.

After a couple of minutes getting connected to her laptop by the ineffable logmein (using it from my iPad now!) and began exploring the problem.

First I updated her entire system, which including the delights of Sony Viao updater took a good long while, for good measure I also added Google Pack so she would stay updated with the essentials.

Then I got down to examining which setting might be wrong. Breezed through the Control Panel Network Settings, all seemed right; ran the Diagnose and Repair Wizard, all seemed right.

Then just as Google Updater was finishing installing the free anti-virus software it ships with, it occurred to me it might be McAfee. Shipped free with her Sony Viao and pestering her to renew via text message (how it got her number she still doesn’t know). So I thought what the hell it’s got to go.

One reboot later and low and behold it could connect to the internet via WiFi again! Now I don’t know if it was just this, or the repairs I ran, changes to the registry or Sony Viao updates, but I suspect it was McAfee.

When will PC manufacturers stop loading their laptops with such s**t? Soon I hope, because I’d like to stop having to uninstall it.

Since updating to iOS4 on my iPhone 3G I have experienced no end of problems with my iPhone 3G it has in short become sluggish at best and frankly unusable at worst, which has made my waiting for @o2′s stock of iPhone 4s to become plentiful enough for me to be able to drive to a store a purchase one seem like quite a challenge.

I have however stumbled across a solution that has certainly eased my problems, if not fixed them outright. Thanks to the wonderful Dan Dilger over at Roughly Drafted for this solution:

In order to force the iOS to rebuild (a step that seems to optimize a variety of things), you have to press and hold the Sleep/Wake button along with the Home button for about ten seconds, which will kill the phone and initiate a reboot.

After doing this twice I have found my iPhone 3G has largely returned to it’s wonderful self and though it is still not without problems it is largely much better.

Check out the full post at Roughly Drafted and comments over at the Apple Support Thread if this doesn’t work for you.

So. I had a problem with one of my customers wordpress sites this evening: when uploading content I kept on getting this error:

Unable to create directory /home/username/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/07. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

As I hadn’t changed anything and had been able to upload images easily enough before so I was a tad perplexed. After a little googling I thought it might be a permissions problem.

The permissions on my wp-content/uploads directory were set to the default setting of 755 but I read that occassionally it might be helpful to change this to 777 to correct such a problem.

Logging in via FTP I changed the permissions to 777 but to no avail + later googling led me to suspect this might not be too good an idea. See here for more info.

So it was back to google and I stumbled across this excellent article, which gave me a few other ideas. It was point three:

3. If this doesn’t work. Check the upload path in the admin – Settings – Miscellaneous and make sure it is wp-content/uploads sometimes the upgrade or server move changes it to the absolute path.

that worked for me too.

But it wasn’t so easy to find the Miscellaneous Settings as they have moved since the upgrade to WordPress 3.0. And WordPress doesn’t make it easy to find. Oh no. But a couple of pages into their help files, I stumbled across this page and found the answer.

The Miscellaneous Settings controlling the upload of Media files are now stored, perhaps more sensibly, under Settings > Media. Just make sure that your setting for the upload path is set to: wp-content/uploads and you’ll be just fine.

This has happened on all my WordPress 3.0 blog upgrades on Dreamhost so I hope this helps anyone in the same position.

Thanks to Paulo Orquillo and Tips & Tricks HQ for pointing me in the right direction.

So I’ve been doing a little more work with Windows XP than I usually do and it’s reminding me of all those small irritations that come with Microsoft products.

The system itself might well be robust enough, but its details that they don’t seem to have an eye for, one of those that particularly irritates me is that the “All Programs” menu isn’t alphabetically ordered.

So whilst I was waiting for a program to install off it was to google, where I found that this is relatively easy to correct (although it’s not sticky, so it needs repeating each time you add a program).

So for all those OCD suffers out there driven mad by this, here is the solution:

• Press the “Start” Button
• Select “All Programs” and navigate anywhere into the list
• Right Click the mouse and select “Sort by Name”.

And you’re done!

To see where I found this and additional tweaks click here.

Now. I love data detectors. It is one of the most unsung and brilliant of Apple’s innovations with OS X. It just works, although I mourn the fact that it’s not spread much beyond a bare implementation in Mail (a very useful one at that though).

Now with the introduction of the iPad data detectors have taken on a whole new form in their beautiful implimentation of the the Mail on the iPad.

Just click and hold on the address details you are given three options:

1. Open in Maps, which finds an address for you in a matter of seconds:

2. Create a New Contact from the information it’s discovered, which leads you to this:

3. Add to an existing contact which brings up a list of your contacts and away you go:

I have over a 1000 contacts in my address book, but even then there are gaps, missing addresses, phone numbers, etc, which I can now easily add from a contact.

Now just the other day I was looking up a business on the internet and needed the telephone number and I was thinking how great it’d be if this were implemented in Safari on the iPad (or on my desktop too!) then I could just add all this information to an existing contact or a new contact pretty much instantaneously…

Back in September last year I posted about a great program I use to sync my Facebook friends with Address Book in Mac OS X. And I thought I’d revisit the topic this year for all you iPhone users out there, because of a great feature in the Facebook app for the iPhone, you might (as some of my friends were) be unaware of…

If you open the Facebook app on your iPhone and select the friends section it will open up a list of your friends, but hidden away in the top left hand corner or here:

You will see the option to “Sync”, which means exactly what you might imagine… YES! Finally you don’t have to take photos of each of your friends for your iPhone contacts, you can just have Facebook pull down the most recent version of their profile picture:

First you need to turn it on and then select if you want it to replace existing photos, which means it will replace any photos you already have and do this each time you sync, which as you can see I’ve selected (as I like the variety that results each time I sync) or don’t if you prefer.

And then just sit back and let it do it’s thing.

Cool. And hassle free. (After all, would you have ever got round to adding all those photos anyway?)

I was very excited to stumble upon this (recent I presume) development at the Independent newspaper: an abandoning of their old comments system and it’s replacement with the Disqus system of comments I use here at nealandassociates.co.uk and for most of my other clients.

Now I like to comment on stories I read, and I read alot, and before I stumbled across disqus I was constantly frustrated by the login processes normally involved with commenting on a story. The Disqus system, however, makes this a synch and means I can comment, easily and be updated on a story in just a couple of seconds.

The service is free (with a premium version available) and I can’t praise it more highly or wish for it’s adoption on more sites. It’s great to have feedback and it’s great to give feedback and disqus really helps with both of these processes, as well as nesting comments so your readers can keep track of a discussion (yes dear guardian keep track).

I can only hope that my favourite news site (the guardian) implements it soon… (hint, hint) I’m sure there is also a cost saving for them somewhere in there…

If you use wordpress and want to add the system you can grab a copy here.

I’ve been meaning to write an article on the death of flash for quite some time now, I’ve abandoned a number of drafts as the deluge of articles have hit the interwebs on the same topic.

So I thought it would be more interesting to give you a flash death watch tracking the number of sites abandoning flash:

Airlines

Virgin America – Flash Gone Bye Bye! (see here, here and the official statement here)

News & Media Sites

ABC – Official iPad App (see here, download here)

CBS – Reports coming in (here and here) of Flash-free video for the iPad

CNN – iPad Optimised Site (here)

Disney – iPad Optimised Site (here)

The Guardian - @tsmarsh informs me they use Brightcove so hope they’ll follow suit?

New York Times – iPad Optimised Site

NPR

TED – Completely Flash-Free version of their website (see here and the official announcement via twitter here)

Time Magazine

Wall Street Journal – iPad Optimised Site + iPad App (download here)

Video Sites

Brightcove – Supplier for sites like Wired, Slate, Time & NYT so expect to see them go over soon too!

Netflix – Official iPad App (see here)

Youtube – iPad, iPhone optimised sites; HTML 5 experiment for everyone else!

Vimeo

Add anymore sites you know in the comments and I’ll update the list.

So. Dropbox is my favourite file sharing tool. One of the things I use it for, and you can too, is to share Microsoft Word Templates. On Mac this is relatively easy and you can use the following instructions.

I have a file in my dropbox called masters and within that a file named Microsoft Templates or though you can name it whatever you want. So if you want to share your masters folders across multiple accounts, follow the instructions below (for Microsoft Office for Mac 2008):

1. Open up Word and then select preferences:

2. Then select File Locations:

3. Then select Workgroup Templates (this allows you to separate personal local templates and word templates you want to share):

And once you’ve selected the folder in your dropbox you can begin centralising your word templates! Excellent.

Over the years I’ve consulted for a number of start-up and recently established fashion companies, from manufacturing handbags to shoes, and that has necessitated dealing with a lots of suppliers all over Europe and even as far a field as India and China.

As I only speak English this has created, over the years, a whole number of amusing translation issues, and a generated unfortunately a great deal of communication issues. I wish when I was working on these projects on a more full-time basis I had had access to the facilities of google translate to help iron out these problems.

For those encountering these problems on a daily basis there is a better way than google translate, if you use gmail, which is using the google labs feature allowing you to translate emails directly from within gmail. So if you’re dealing with a supplier get them to sign up for gmail and get them to follow these instructions to enable it.

So here we go for the instructions:

1. Login to your gmail account:

2. Then click on settings, which you can find in the top right hand corner:

3. Then click on the labs option in the settings:

4. Then find this option and click on activate:

5. Once you’ve activated the option then in emails you can activate the translation tool by doing the following:

I’d also advise if you are sending an email to a supplier in a foreign country then you should write your email in English and then go to google translate and cut and paste a translation in their language and include it in the email you send with your original English message, thus minimising the likelihood of confusion in sent messages.

Isn’t it great that google is enabling us to communicate better, lets see what the future holds, in the mean time use the above instructions to improve your communications with suppliers abroad.