Last month, I wrote about my problems with syncing my windows mobile phone with Outlook 2010 64-bit. I tolerated this, on the hope that it will be corrected/remedied at some point. Added to that it did not directly affect my ability to get my work done. The second issue is a lot more troublesome as it is effecting my ability to get a job done. For some reason, when shipping the 64-bit office, Microsoft decided to not upgrade their common controls to 64-bit (MSCOMCTL.OCX). As a result of t.....

Recently, after upgrading my Office to Outlook 2010 64-bit, I plugged my phone in to my standard weekly sync with my Outlook, and up popped a message along the lines of "wrong outlook client". At the same time the sync (or lack thereof) process deleted all my contacts from my phone. After a very quick search I soon dscovered that this is a known problem between WMDC and Outlook 2010 64-bit. The official statement from Microsoft is this: Question/Issue "Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC).....

My Vodacom contract has recently come up for renewal, and as usual I started the process of searching for a new phone. My current phone is a Samsung i780, which has served me extremely well over the past two years. As I have been very happy with Samsung, I first looked at what new Samsung had to offer me. Their smartphone replacement on the Windows side is not bad, but with no touch screen, is not really useful (why they did this is beyond me). I was initially focusing my attention on phon.....

The idea of carrying a GPS with me to record the Mountain bike routes that I ride and would like to ride has, remained just that until recently. There are some excellent web sites www.mtbiker.co.za from which one can download GPX files for upload and use whilst riding. This adds a new dimension to the weekend ride as it gives those that have restricted riding time, the knowledge of where they are and what remains of the days riding. My sometimes riding partner has tried with limited succes.....

While glancing through LifeHacker feeds some time last week, my eye was caught by the headline "The pomodoro technique fights deadline anxiety with a timer". Not having heard of the technique before (although for all I know it may be old hat by now), and wondering how tomatoes fight anxiety, I read further. If you have not heard of the "Pomodoro Technique" before, I suggest you look at the Pomodoro technique site which gives a full explanation of what it is all about, and provides .....

Over the past couple of months, I have painstakingly avoided any articles related to Windows 7. My daily RSS feed, lifehacker, seemed to be particularly enthralled with all the new features. I did not have the time to "play" on a virtual server, and not wanting to install a beta or pre-release software as my primary operating system I simply ignored all of these articles. The other day, however, we acquired some new laptops and I found myself in a bit of a quandary with regard to.....

With the price of terabyte level storage media coming down significantly in the past few years, we decided it was high time that we setup a network backup server. In reality, the price of a computer and storage is marginal in relation to the cost of losing the data that i am rather embarrassed we have not done it sooner. Not wanting to invest in software, and also wanting to keep OS size down to a minimum, we decided on Linux as an OS. Since we had a copy of Ubuntu 9.04 on disk,.....

EDIT: I see SAGNS has updated and improved their website since this article (edited: 15 September 2009) A while back, while working on a rural settlements database, we were asked to consider the SAGNS database as a reference for settlement names. The data that we received was, to put it mildly, very poor. Locations were in the sea, in the northern hemisphere, in South America and for 50% of the database - nowhere at all. added to that, the alphanumeric data was full of mistakes a.....

a bit late, but I read a very interesting article - the anatomy of the twitter attack, outlining exactly how a twitter employee was recently hacked. Baiscally it boils down to the hacker using the Gmail password recovery which emailed the password to that Gmail account users secondary mail account. When requesting the password recovery tool,  Gmail offers a reminder as to which email account it is in the form of *******@h******.com. The hacker then guessed it to be a hotmail.....

A couple of weeks ago, I read an interesting article about Ekahau Heat Mapper through my RSS subscription to Lifehacker (article here). Ekahau offers a range of features depending on the version you choose (from Free to Survey professional). From their website, the primary features are listed as: "Ever wondered how far your wireless goes, or how far do the neighbouring wireless networks extend to? Ekahau HeatMapper will display the coverage area of all the access points in the .....