So for the last few days I’ve been fiddling with my Apple TV, routers and VPN accounts to see if I could get access to US Netflix programmes on my TV. A few folk have asked, so I thought I’d share my setup.
This is not a detailed configuration step-by-step, it’s a general overview of the solution I ended up with. Detailed support for each part...
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Note: This is a minor update to a post I made last year, migrated from a previous blog.
One of my pet hates (there are many), is being presented with the incorrect keyboard, or having auto capitalisation forced upon me, when entering information into web forms on my iPhone or iPad. This is something that’s very easy to control and can be done...
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So, if I undersand this correctly, Google paid for a load of blog posts, which broke its own webmaster rules. This was discovered and blogged about by a huge number of tech blogs, providing Google with a load of inbound links. Google then punished itself and removed the paid listings which caused another load of posts by tech news blogs, providing it with even more inbound links.
Or am I just being cynical?
A couple of weeks ago Chris Coyier tweeted the following “You could wake up tomorrow and your main hard drive could be dead. Are you ready?”. This got me thinking; if I woke up tomorrow and my main hard drive was dead, what would I lose?
As it happens, after giving it some thought, I think I’m pretty much as safe as I can be, and I don’t...
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So Microsoft has announced that it’s going to start auto-updating Internet Explorer on PCs to the latest version supported by the Operating System. On the face of it this seems like great news, and it would be, if they had the balls to do it right.
The problem is that all Windows updates, automatic or otherwise, arrive through Windows Update (the tool built into Windows to manage system updates). When a new install of Windows is performed one of the options at the end of the installation is how to handle updates available though Windows Update. One of the options is to download and install automatically, another downloads automatically and installs when prompted to by the user and a final option is to do nothing at all.
I’ve done a lot of IT support over the years, almost exclusively Windows based, and my experience over that time is that by far and wide the most common option to have selected is the second one; download automatically and install when prompted. This is where the problem lies, most end users don’t install anything when prompted, because us technical folk have spent years telling them not to say yes to things that pop up on the screen.
Microsoft should have taken the opportunity with IE9 to roll out a Chrome style background update system that’s not dependant on Windows Update. As it is, and as hopeful as I am, I don’t think we’ll see the overnight disappearance of IE6 and 7 like the vast majority of web developers are suddenly all hoping for.