History has already shown us the better way, so why ape an outmoded market leader?

A friend had his Gmail hacked, and, much like an Atlantic article I read in the print edition a few months ago, the hackers deleted his entire mailbox. Google says these hacks only happen a few thousand times daily.    I’m concerned for him because he has to deal with the Google forums, and we […]

Read More… from History has already shown us the better way, so why ape an outmoded market leader?



Thoughts from a thoroughly modern machine

After I got back from India, my desktop computer went into meltdown. This was Nigel Dunn’s old machine, which I took over after he went to Australia, and it gave me excellent service for over two years.    I wasn’t prepared to go and buy a brand-new machine, but having made the plunge, I’m glad […]

Read More… from Thoughts from a thoroughly modern machine



Fifty minutes to file a bug report at McAfee

Being a helpful netizen costs too much sometimes.    I found a very tiny bug in McAfee’s latest version. In Eudora, instead of ‘McAfee Anti-Spam’ in the menu bar, the latest update has caused those words to read ‘%COMPANY_NAME_NEUTRAL%Anti-Spam’.    To be a helpful netizen filing a bug report (and I am used to that […]

Read More… from Fifty minutes to file a bug report at McAfee



Tumblr says: death to Pokémon haters

There was an interesting graphic on Tumblr today: which is an opinion. I don’t see anything wrong with it. I do not care for Pokémon, but it’s not as though it’s a reality TV show with whining contestants, the Wellywood sign, or Arial. Still, it’s not the end of the world.    The abuse that […]

Read More… from Tumblr says: death to Pokémon haters



Archæological evidence that QuickDraw GX existed

Here’s a glyph inside JY Integrity that never got used beyond the original publicity in the mid-1990s.    Before there was OpenType, there was QuickDraw GX, and I was part of the consortium trying to sort out the character set, along with Allan Haley and others. We were using this newfangled collaboration tool called the […]

Read More… from Archæological evidence that QuickDraw GX existed



Why I removed Chrome, and the six basic things that it can’t do

I write this not long after another Firefox crash (Atomic Decrement being the signature) and wiped three quite well worded (if I say so myself) paragraphs. To vent, I Tweeted, and received (again) the suggestion of switching to Chrome.    I appreciate the kind motive but Chrome is so severely lacking that last night, I […]

Read More… from Why I removed Chrome, and the six basic things that it can’t do



McAfee did good: a software company that didn’t jerk me around in ’10

A new computer arrived at the office, Firefox 3·6·13 was installed on it. Boom goes the dynamite (thanks, Jen—since I watch very little television I had no idea of this reference). It wasn’t the ‘unmark purple’ bug, either (sample size so far: 1).    It’s a different set-up to the rest. For starters, it has […]

Read More… from McAfee did good: a software company that didn’t jerk me around in ’10



Jack tries another Firefox beta—we all know what happens next

Title says it all. Except this time, it’s not just the fonts. No link in a Google results page is clickable: in fact, Google hangs the entire browser (though I can still scroll up and down—yay). The program, after clicking on the close icon, stays in the Task Manager for at least 10 minutes (I […]

Read More… from Jack tries another Firefox beta—we all know what happens next



Chrome’s dramas continue as it hits version 8

It looks like Chrome has updated by itself, and as with all improvements to software, more bugs have been introduced.    You can blame our programming skills, but here is how the home page of Lucire now looks (and it had looked like this on Chromium a couple of months ago, too): Below is how […]

Read More… from Chrome’s dramas continue as it hits version 8



How do you take a screen shot when Alt-Print Screen stops working?

This is an error that happens to me at least twice a week for years, and no one seems to have a solution. I’ve read some of the help pages on this in web searches, and none of them help.    As far as I can tell, only one case of this has been reported, […]

Read More… from How do you take a screen shot when Alt-Print Screen stops working?