I’ve made the switch!
By: Graham Doel, February 11th, 2007Windows annoys me. The longer you have it installed the slower it goes. It costs a fortune, is difficult to reinstall and has loads of programs that also cost a fortune.
For the last year I have been intentionally switching to programs that are designed to be cross platform (ie you can use them on Windows, Linux or Mac) so that next time my computer needs upgrading I can migrate away from Windows. All these programs are free because they are developed by a community of people rather than owned by a company to make a profit (people do make a profit from them, but that is another story). My three favourites are:
- OpenOffice: A complete office suite that is Microsoft Office Compatible. It does have some minor incompatibilities but I have been using it for over 5 years with no real problems.
- Thunderbird: Thunderbird does e.mail.
- Firefox: Firefox is a web browser.
There are others that I use, but more about those another time. So faced with a slow computer, and in need of a job to keep my mind active I backed up, formatted my hard drive and installed Ubuntu (more from wikipedia, take a peek).
I have played with Ubuntu before, it is installed on Isaac and Alice’s computer and it runs fine. It is free and well supported. Above all it works. I installed it on their computer and never had any problems. However, when I installed it on my laptop I have had two problems.
- I can’t get the wireless network to work (neither can my friend Matt for that matter). I think it is because the card defaults to off and for some reason won’t turn on. I will solve the problem by buying an external wireless card. However, for now I have a wire trailing accross the living room floor, at least it got me to finally wire up the network wires I installed when I rewired.
- The DNS settings seem to (for no apparent reason) reset themselves. I think I have found a fix here, but time will tell.
Live Support?
By: Graham Doel, November 10th, 2006I had to use one of those live support things today. Dabs customer service lives up to it’s diabolical reputation!
Read on …
Permanent Link to: "Live Support?" it has 1 comment,
Please wait while we find an agent to assist you... In the meantime, have you reviewed our help section as most questions can be answered instantly? http://www.dabs.com/help
All agents are currently busy. Please stand by.
You are currently at position number 3 in the queue.
An agent will be with you in a moment. Thank you for your patience.
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The next available Agent will be with you in a moment.
You are currently at position number 1 in the queue.
All agents are currently busy. Please stand by.
You are currently at position number 1 in the queue.You have been connected to Philip .
Philip : Good afternoon, how may we help you?
Graham Doel: Hi please could I progress o/n 8#####
Graham Doel: apparently it is waiting for an e.mail from me?
Philip : We are sorry but we are unable to deal with your query as this relates to part of our Security which needs to be handled by our webaccounts team. If you have already emailed them relating to your query, then we can confirm that they will reply to your query as soon as possible. If you have not yet emailed them, then please do so at webaccounts@dabs.com.
Graham Doel: I have e.mailed them and had no reply. Could I have a telephone number for them.
Philip : As we are an e-commerce company, we do not operate a telephone service for our customers. We prefer that all communication is sent to us electronically, either by email or through our Live Chat service. For more information on this policy, please visit : http://www.dabs.com/contenttopic.aspx?ContentType=Help&ArticleID=125
Philip : Have you replied to the email they sent you regarding this?
Graham Doel: They sent me an e.mail to which I replied. I placed this order and they have not sent an e.mail but have not processed the order either. What should I do?
Philip : The order will be updated when the e,mail is processed
Philip : the webaccounts team are working through emails as we speak
Graham Doel: They have not sent me an e.mail regarding this order.
Graham Doel: They sent me one regarding a previous order.
Philip : Please email webaccounts@dabs.com about this and they will be able to advise
Graham Doel: sigh.... Thank you for your help.
Philip : We are glad to be of assistance. Goodbye.
Thank you for using this service. You may now close this window.
Your session has ended. You may now close this window.
ISP problems causing delay to the incarnate network website.
By: Graham Doel, October 31st, 2006The incarnate network website has caused its own set of problems. I have been using the fantastic open source Joomla which has been an interesting learning curve for me. The biggest problem has been the isp we have been hosting with. He migrated to a new server during the initial stages of the project which caused no end of trouble and delay. In the end we decided to sent our own server and start from scratch. We ordered the server from 123-reg.co.uk who offer unlimited bandwidth at an unbelievable price (the customer service is not so hot though.
The network web site seems to have three main purposes:
- To act as a social networking site for people who are involved it front line mission or church planting in Europe.
- To provide a magazine of regular stories and information to the church planting community.
It also gives of my first opportunity to start pod-casting. All i have ever done is post the odd MP3 to my site and link to it through my Blog it will be interesting to do something a bit more regular and intentional.
Permanent Link to: "ISP problems causing delay to the incarnate network website." you can add a coment to this post,Online Video’s
By: Graham Doel, May 23rd, 2006I have watched some funny (and some naff) videos online recently.
The best ones are:
Alien Song
http://www.navone.org/Media/Movies/AlienSong_mp4.mov
(Which is far better than the naff one with Jesus in!)
Mario Brothers Level One.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D4ymdpkCXI
Lassie Remix.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNWXWTb2fpw
(Thanks Stella, the kids loved it.)
I also watched this one which is a kind of meditation on Jesus. I often wish there were more pictures that made Jesus look like a real person.
http://33whitehall.video.blip.tv/uploadedFiles/ ReasontoBelieve-KingOfGloryVideo697.mov
Drupal, PDFView and FPDF
By: Graham Doel, August 9th, 2005I have been experimenting with Drupal as a content management system (this is my way of playing, some people play golf, I play with computers).
There are a few things I like about Drupal
- It is open source so it is developed by the web community.
- It has countless modules, which are easy to use and means you can get it to do what ever you like.
- It has themes so changing the look and feel of the site is very easy.
One of the modules I have tried is pdfview which allows people to generate a PDF of what they are reading.
It generates the PDF file from the content that the user is reading at that moment, by generating the file from the database (Buzzword: on the fly). It uses the freely available FPDF files to achieve it.
The problem I found is that it is not particularly easy for a non programmer like me to modify the output of the PDF file. The set of files that comes with it doesn’t generate a line break between the paragraphs.
Matt was round for his lunch and I picked his brain about it and he explained that there was a line missing in the module.pdfview file.
If you add
$pdf->Ln(5);
After line 89 it works fine. Which I thought was good news. So if you are struggling with line breaks in PDFView that is all you need to do. Alternatively you can just download my hacked copy!
Permanent Link to: "Drupal, PDFView and FPDF" it has 3 Comments,Cheap, legal MP3 music downloads
By: Graham Doel, June 22nd, 2005Fantastic!
I have been put of from downloading loads of MP3’s mainly because it is illegal and I had a hunch that eventually someone would get round to prosecuting a serial downloader, and they have.
I started to use iTunes because it was easy, but it was still fairly expensive. If you want a whole album, it’s not much cheaper than going to amazon and buying it, and getting a proper disck and a cover.
This week I have descovered www.allofmp3.com. It is amazing and really easy to use. They charge for bandwidth rather than for the song and have a huge range of downloading options. If you were really clever I am sure you would work out which format has the highest quality with the lowest file size, but I just download MP3. I downloaded 13 songs for $2.40 which is about £1.32 or just over 10p a track! That beats buying them from car boot sales.
I initially thought it was a scam, but apparently not.
Thanks to the forums at moneysavingexpert.com for the tip.
Permanent Link to: "Cheap, legal MP3 music downloads" it has 1 comment,Hutchinson 3g have their head in the sand!
By: Graham Doel, April 4th, 2005I have had the most unbelievable exchange of e.mails this weekend, read on:
>—–Original Message—–
>From: My3@three.co.uk [mailto:My3@three.co.uk]
>Sent: 31 March 2005 07:39
>To: customer.services@3mail.com
>Subject: My 3 Miscellaneous enquiry, PartyId 48838485, Msisdn 07888733975,
>
>From Graham Doel
>
>When I visit the My alerts section of the my3 website there is no style and
>the add alerts section does not appear to function.
>Thank you
>Graham Doel
Contact Centre wrote:
>Dear Mr Doel,
>
>Thank you for your e-mail.
>
>If this problem continues, it may be a fault with the handset itself. In
>this case, please contact our customer services number to book the handset
>into a repair centre. The repair centre will endeavour to pick-up the
>handset by courier, find and fix the fault, and return the handset back to
>you within 3 working days. Alternatively, if you are trying to add/take
>away alerts you can contact us either via e-mail or by once again contacting
>our customer services on the number below or 333 from your handset.
>
>I hope this is of hell and clarifies matters for you. Thank you for
>contacting 3.
—–Original Message—–
From: Graham Doel
Sent: 31 March 2005 14:00
To: Contact Centre
Subject: Re: 3 response~
Hi,
Thanks for your reply. I was, however using the website on my PC, not on my handset. All other areas of the site displayed the style correctly but the alerts section. It looks like a web design error to me.
Thanks again
Graham
—–Original Message—–
From: Graham Doel [mailto:Graham@1stmorecambe.net]
Sent: 01 April 2005 15:28
To: Contact Centre
Subject: Re: 3 response~
Hi,
Thanks for replying.
> Dear Mr Dole,
It’s usually spelt Doel, but I’m quite used to people getting it wrong 
> Thank you for your quick reply. I apologise for the misunderstanding as to which equipment you were accessing the alerts. This problem I have not come across both personally, or with other customers. As far as I can make out it is not an error at our end. May I ask if you are using any firewall/anti-virus/pop-up blocking software? Are using the most up to date version of Internet Explorer with 128 bit cipher strength? Are you using Windows-based software, or any other Operating System software to access our website?
I see. I am using Firefox. It runs faster and is generally more compliant with industry standards than I.E.. Unfortunately some people choose to target their sites at a specific browser. May I ask if you have any plans to make your site compatible with any browser, or are you intending staying I.E. specific.
Thank you for your help, I will use I.E. next time I use the site.
Thanks
Graham Doel
Hi Mr Doel,
I apologise for the incorrect spelling, unfortunately it was a Friday afternoon J.
Firefox is a program, I am sorry to say, I have never heard of but shall look into purely for knowledge – keep the old grey matter oiled.
Unfortunately, IE is the only supporting browser and as far as I know there are no plans for future developments with regards to other browsers. I will however, put forward some feedback regarding the usage of other browsers, such as Firefox.
Good luck using IE, and thanks once again for contacting 3.
——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Re: 3 response~
Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 12:09:49 +0100
From: Graham Doel
Organization: Stanley Road Baptist Church
To: Contact Centre
References: <316A24323A64B24BACB7DEA440276E939BAF2D@W104CS009V01.corpuk.net>
Hi,
Thanks for your reply.
> I apologise for the incorrect spelling, unfortunately it was a Friday afternoon J.
No worries.
> Firefox is a program, I am sorry to say, I have never heard of but shall look into purely for knowledge – keep the old grey matter oiled.
Goodness. Where have you been!
Here are a couple of links to help you with your research:
http://news.google.co.uk/news?q=firefox&num=30&hl=en&lr=&safe=active&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=N&tab=nn&oi=newsr
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
It is unfortunate that you only support I.E.. Perhaps you could urge your website development team to take the current trends in web browsing seriously.
Thanks again
Graham Doel.
Permanent Link to: "Hutchinson 3g have their head in the sand!" it has 1 comment,Money Saving Telephone Calls
By: Graham Doel, March 17th, 2005I remember the days when VOIP was new exciting and very expensive. How things change. I got very excited by skype the other day. But now it gets better…
I use 1899 combined with an auto dialler to re route all my calls away from the clutches of BT. But now thanks to 1899 I can call landlines from my PC for nothing, via their VOIP. ACE!
http://www.call1899.co.uk/voip.php
Permanent Link to: "Money Saving Telephone Calls" you can add a coment to this post,Laptop Batteries
By: Graham Doel, January 20th, 2005I just bought a new battery for my lap top for only £35. It seems to be working fine at the moment. It is a reconditioned battery from Hong Kong. The casing is battered and you can see that it has been prized open and repaired but it is working a treat!
I thought that with the current exchange rate being quite good that I would be able to buy a battery from America much cheaper than I would get one here. I found it on Ebay, paid by PayPal and it was shipped directly from Hong Kong and arrived in less than a fortnight.
The user I bought from was: pcglobe
You can visit their Ebay items.