Still on gadgets, yesterday I met my former boss, and we were talking about the Blackberry device which he was recently issued with (I think Simon also has one). He was last seen walking away from the MTR station where he was supposed to be going, engrossed in reading his latest emails on this toy.…

My son called me this afternoon whilst I was at work, complaining that his DVD of ‘Spy Kids’ was in Chinese and our helper couldn’t switch the language to English. This is true – for some reason, the normal method of pressing the ‘language’ button the remote control does nothing on this DVD. Instead you…

I subscribe to a few email lists, and you always find a few people on them seeking help. Mostly the requests are reasonable and others try to help, but this guy seemed to be asking rather a lot: Hi All,Would you be kind enough to help me to understand the functionality and technical flow regarding…

This is a belated follow-up to my earlier post about emails. Another thing that idiots do with email is forward messages with all the earlier messages still attached at the bottom. Lotus Notes does have separate buttons for ‘Reply’ and ‘Reply with History’, whereas all that Outlook offers is a global option to do one…

I found this Dilbert cartoon quite amusing. Anyone who has ever supported a computer system will be aware that users really do keep doing the same thing over and over again in the hope that eventually it work. Amazingly, sometimes it does! If it doesn’t (which is the expected outcome) they will probably give up…

Is spam (junk e-mail) really a big problem? I have a Hotmail account which I almost never use. The main reason I stopped using it was that 99.9% of the messages were ‘spam’, to the tune of 20-30 per day. I briefly tried using Hotmail’s Junk Mail facility, but it limited the number of email…

I have a theory about the humble PC, which is that it is still caught somewhere between being a toy for geeks and a consumer device. I speak as someone who has no wish to understand any more than is strictly necessary about operating system (or at least the ones that people won’t pay me…

I have to admit that the latest developments in TV technology interest me, even though we are still talking about very expensive products. There are three different options apart from the traditional CRT screen: Plasma, LCD and projection. Ever since I first saw a plasma screen I have believed they are the best option, but…

Interesting story from The Guardian about Kazaa. Apparently they have done a deal with an Indian film company to make films legally available for US$2.99. The idea is that the file cannot be copied and will self-destruct after being watched. Following on from the news last week of DVDs being available a few days after…