Ten months ago – 10! It seems like yesterday – I upgraded my Dell XPS 13 to the latest version at the time and purchased a Dell TB15 Thunderbolt dock to go with it. Although the laptop is great, the dock has been anything but. Let’s put it like this: it took a long while for the drivers to stabilize enough for me to actually use it properly. Where ‘properly’ means some approximation of correctly. (For example, the Ethernet port was incredibly flaky and so I bought a Plugable USB-C dock to help out.) It finally got to the point where I could bring my XPS 13 back from a trip, plug it all in, and have everything working within, oh, I don’t know, 5 minutes. […]
READ MORESo, just before Christmas, I switched to using a client-side library to highlight the code in my blog posts. The library I chose was Prism JS, and it works by marrying up some JavaScript and CSS to specially decorated pre and code elements so that their content (the code itself) is highlighted nicely. […]
Next on my saga of finding the best replacement for Microsoft Money – well, OK, the best for me – is Moneyspire. Actually, I half-heartedly tried this out some 8 months ago, but I wasn’t feeling the urge at the time and I stopped. At that time they produced a free version for a single account (if I recall correctly) but that’s now been dropped: you can get a two-week trial version with limited accounts and transactions, or pony up some cash for the Basic or the Plus version. I Paypaled $75 for the Plus version; in for a penny, in for a pound. […]
READ MOREWell over a year ago, I upgraded my main machine at the time to Windows 10, and the one app that caused install and running issues was Microsoft Money. Since then it’s been pretty stable for me (and I’ve even got it running on a new, totally different machine), but I’m always well aware that one day, I’m going to run into some insurmountable problem with it, and then I’m hosed. So, better to think about a replacement for it while it still works, and what better time for that than over the New Year, when nothing much is going on and I have a long weekend. […]
READ MOREOnce upon a time, I wrote a plug-in for Windows Live Writer that took code that had been copied from Visual Studio to the clipboard and converted it to an HTML pre block for my blog posts. The different colors were maintained during this conversion (in essence VS copies the code as RTF) so that the code displayed here in my blog posts would be nicely highlighted. I even published it to GitHub so that it could also be used for Open Live Writer too. […]
This is a story with many moving parts. It ends with a complete and utter face palm, so stay tuned… […]
READ MORESome eight (!) years ago, I started to learn JavaScript from the viewpoint of a C# programmer. I wrote a series of blog posts here on the subject, and fairly early on I started using Firebug in Firefox for my experiments in coding and debugging this weird yet wonderful language. Yes, I could’ve moved on to Chrome and its developer tools, but I liked Firebug and I could get things done. The JavaScript on this blog site (and others I own) were completely debugged using Firebug. Firebug convinced me that global variables were a bad thing. And so on. […]
READ MOREThere’s a pretty good easy-listening guitar-based album from Dominic Miller called Shapes. He’s been working with Sting for a long time, and one of the tracks on the album is an extremely good re-recording of Sting’s Shape of my Heart song. All well and good as a recommendation, but what’s this got to do with anything? Bear with me… […]
READ MOREMy wife has a small blog for her hobby. I am, for my sins, her IT guy for it. She posts to it about once a week, maybe twice, and of course, after every post there’s a small uptick in views. All nice and normal. […]
READ MOREActually it’s more like a couple of little cautionary tales in one. […]
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