Archive for Tech Stuff

For Some Reason

11/04/2011 / Rich / 2 comments

Over the last few months, this blog (well richard-hickson.co.uk) has been attracting more hits from the US then it has the UK.

Stats

I’m not entirely sure why however seeing the above stats helpded me to make the decision to move to www.richardhickson.com, I believe there to be no issues moving things over to the new domain, however if you notice any problems leave a comment, send me a tweet or send me an email rich(@)richard-hickson.co.uk.

Ive also added google adsense to this site, in the hope of getting back some of the ever expanding bandwidth and hosting costs.

Thanks

Category: Tech Stuff, This Site /

Results – At last!

10/03/2011 / Rich / No comments

I’ve had two massive results this week,

  1. Vodafone replaced my sure signal.
  2. O2 are replacing my sisters blackberry.

Vodafone Logo
The first result was achieved by simply cc’ing in the CEO of Vodafone (guy.laurence@vodafone.com) in an angry exchange with the Vodafone minions on their email support that takes the best part of a week to reply.

The angry email simply explained that after I had first tweeted them they advised me to use their support forum, the support forum then asked me to email them. The email exchange went on and on and resulted in me sending the below when they asked me to then phone them!

Hi Tony,

What other methods of communication would you like me to use? I’ve used your twitter channel, the customer service forum, email, and now you’re telling me to phone them? Shall I send a telegram and a postcard as well?

I shall be contacting watchdog about the rubbish customer service I have received and i have also CC’d the CEO of Vodafone UK.

Kind Regards

Frustratedly Yours

Rich Hickson

Needless to say, Mark Shaw from the CEO’s office called me promptly and within 3 working days of my angry email, I had a brand new SureSignal in my possession.

O2 Logo

The second result was a similar sort of thing. My sister had tried to get her almost brand new Blackberry Pearl 3G replaced under warranty after the charger port came out with the charger. O2 refused to fix it and actually sent it back with a lovely letter saying they basically couldn’t be arsed because it looks like its damaged! No Shit Sherlock!

So I slipped into email writing mode again, and fired off an email to Ronan Dunne – Chief Exec of O2 (ronan.dunne@o2.com) I didn’t have any account details for Liz. All I had was an aim, to get a new phone, a refund or the phone replaced. One politely worded letter explaining my sister’s distress, unhappiness, upset and a very strong feeling of being let down by O2 in the fact that they won’t repair a phone that’s under warranty.

A couple of days later, I received a phone call from a lady in the CEO’s office, who has organised a replacement blackberry to be shipped to my office tomorrow. We shall see if it turns up and they do as they have promised, but so far so good!

Now why does it take an email to the CEO to of companies to actually get a result? If people sorted this first time when it was logged then everything would be fine!

Category: Phones, Rants, Tech Stuff / Tags: , , , , , , ,

Rants

27/02/2011 / Rich / No comments

*Warning* my first post for a month and it’s going to be a big long and full of rant’s! *Warning*

PART1 – Fucking Vodafone Rant

#1 – Vodafone – Where on earth do I start? After posting this http://www.richardhickson.com/2010/06/08/vodafone-sure-signal/ and then following it up with a post here http://www.richardhickson.com/2010/12/04/mobiles/ how much can things change in the space of six months?

My sure signal stopped working almost as I hit submit on the latest post. I contacted Vodafone about this first of all via twitter; they told me to log the problem on the support forum. Which I did, the support forum asked me a few questions, and then they told me to email support using the contact form on the website. This I also co-operated with and did.

I was expecting a quick turn around on this bearing in mind I have been passed from pillow to post. But no! I am now receiving an email from Vodafone about once a week asking me either some more questions or just fobbing me off.

Adding the shit service I’ve received personally to the awkwardness Vodafone gave us at work in moving 150 numbers from Vodafone to o2. I will not be renewing my contract with Vodafone when it finishes in July.

PART2 – IT Rants

Now I am meticulously tidy with my computer, some may even say a *slight/massive case of OCD (as posted here http://www.richardhickson.com/2010/10/23/window-sizes-in-window-7/) However a few things are really pissing me off lately.

#2 – iTunes – Thee most annoying heap of shit software on the planet. Really fucks me off that you have to manage an iPhone using this software. When you update iTunes it changes your shortcuts (for example try pinning it to the start menu) Once you run the update its gone, now I don’t have only a few apps installed on my machine so to try and find the application again is a complete pain in the arse! Pinning a program to the start menu is just another fucking shortcut. Why not leave it there?

#3 – Adobe – This includes Reader and Acrobat! They are both a complete c*nt. Why on earth would you create programs that automatically create a shortcut on your desktop? Who on earth loads up adobe reader and then opens a pdf? Next to nobody I bet! That’s not to mention all the start-up entries and services they put into MsConfig.

#4 – Microsoft Word 2010 – Now this is one that is driving me mad when writing this post especially (I write all posts in MS word for spell checking.) The zoom, if you have word maximised and want the zoom at 100% it shows you two pages at once side by side, which I find very distracting. To get one page on its own at 100% you need to shrink the word window down. This is equally distracting if you have something open in the background that changes on its own accord – For instance TweetDeck, Facebook or even the windows 7 Wallpapers set to change of their own accord!

Now I know the first two may only be small rants, but when you’re so meticulously tidy with your computer, they need to be sorted out before I can carry on using it!

*Delete where appropriate

Category: PC, Phones, Rants, Tech Stuff / Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Mobiles

04/12/2010 / Rich / No comments

Now it’s coming to that time of year again, when I can allow myself to start thinking about my next mobile upgrade. I currently have the iPhone 3gs 16gb. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great phone. However apples reluctance to let you do anything with it that they don’t want you to do, as well as the crap battery life is driving me insane!
I honestly have to charge the phone up every night, sometimes even twice a day.

This past week due to snow I have barely been out the house for longer than an hour whilst I fight with the crowds at Swanley station to get on SouthEastern’s non-existent Contingency service. Yet, despite having full Vodafone signal, and not using the phone due to being in front of my pc the whole time, I’m stull charging the phone twice a day!

Now; I close all my apps when I’m finished with them, I never Ever leave anything running. I run the battery down (not through choice I might add!) at least once a week so it’s completely flat as they recommend. It’s always running the latest version of IOS as soon as it’s released.

Ok, yes, I do have 3g on the whole time, but I have a Vodafone SureSignal in the office and at home, so I do have full mobile signal. I also have Wi-Fi on the whole time as well, although I will add Wi-Fi doesn’t appear to be doing anything until you unlock the phone.

But what’s the point in having this technology on a phone if you have to switch them off for the phone to last longer than six hours? I mean I have been out of bed since eleven o’clock, I’ve sent four text messages and taken one, two minute phone call and the battery is now down to 50%!

So the way I’m looking at it, I need a phone with:

• Fairly decent battery life (or the ability to change the battery)
• It needs to be on Vodafone with 3g
• I use the GPS/Google Maps a lot when I’m out the office.
• Wi-Fi is a must.

From what I’ve read on different sites and from what’s available. I think I’ve managed to whittle this list down to a few handsets. The choices are mainly HTC and Blackberry. But I’m almost certain that it will not be another iPhone.

• Blackberry Pearl 3G – Nice Size, weight. And I loved the original pearl! Although not as feature rich as the others.
• HTC Desire – Nice size, nice weight, running android. So very feature rich.
• HTC Desire HD –higher spec then the HTC Desire although it I feel it’s too big.
• HTC Desire Z – Don’t know an awful lot about this phone, Looks to be lower spec then the HD but higher than the Desire.

There are some others which I will read up some more on. Still I’ve got 2 months before I can upgrade. There may be something out there that I’ve not seen coming out!

Category: Phones, Tech Stuff / Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Ever had a “J” at the end of an email?

16/11/2010 / Rich / No comments

Today a Lady was emailing me, An at the end of every email there was a “J”. Her name did not start with a J. So i was a bit confused…..

It turns out that “J” is displayed when a Smiley gets lost in different email systems.

I thought I had it figured out, and so I went looking to see & I was right. Have you ever typed a smiley :-) , and whatever program you were in automatically made it into a smiley? Well, sometimes the code that makes that happen gets lost as it goes through the various email programs and ends up as just a "J"

Update for precision:
- Office use MS Word as HTML e-mail editor
- The "smiley" is replaced by a Winding font character.
- The uppercase "J" is a smiley in the Winding character set.
- The "J" will appear each time the text is kept but the font info is lost.
Source: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_do_people_put_a_J_at_the_end_of_email

So there you have it. Its a smiley face, lost in translation!

Category: Mac, PC, Tech Stuff / Tags: , ,

Window Sizes in Window 7

23/10/2010 / Rich / No comments

I am very OCD about my Computers. Almost everything is setup how I want them to be. Yet one thing bugged me and I’ve just found the fix. Whenever i opened My Computer/Doc’s etc. it always opened at the bottom of the screen in the middle like the attached screenshot (click the image for the full size).

Window Sizes

The way around this I found after googling for a while, was to set the window where you want it and the size you want it. Hold down the left ALT key and close the window. This seems to save the size and location of the window. So that the next time you open it, it’s where you set it to be, not where windows 7 thinks it should be!

Category: PC, Tech Stuff /

Projects

14/10/2010 / Rich / No comments

Right…In my spare time I need something to do. Therefore, if you have an unhappy pc send me an email, No backups drop me a line, want a website designed? let me know! will take on all work! All times of day/weekend/evenings covered!

Category: Mac, PC, Tech Stuff /

End of the Road for Xmarks

30/09/2010 / Rich / No comments

So here I was on this very blog raving about Xmarks back in July.

Yesterday I started up Firefox, got told there was an Xmarks update so I ran it. Once it installed, up pops a page on Xmarks.com with some bad news. There closing the doors, switching off the server’s and closing the service.

The blog goes on to basically say that they have explored every avenue to try and make the add-on make some money. Yet they can’t due to there being so many other good free add-ons that do the same.
At the same time there is not one that has such good cross browser compatibility and is more importantly as fantastic as Xmarks.

The password and bookmark sync is brilliant, I use it across my five different machines (one Mac, two laptops and two desktops) using all different browsers. It has also saved my life on various occasions when hard drives have died, without it I would have lost all my links that I have built up through 8 years of working in IT.

Although it’s not all bad, it does appear that the Firefox sync will still work if you use your own web server. I will investigate this and find out and post back in the future.

However, I and many other people commenting on the shutdown of xmarks have said that we would be more than willing to pay a yearly fee to keep the service going. Fingers crossed something will happen!

Category: PC, Tech Stuff / Tags:

Migrating from one pc to another…….quickly

13/07/2010 / Rich / No comments

Yesterday I received my new work laptop. Luckily it took me less than half an hour to move everything I needed across to it.

I use dropbox for all my documents. Installed this on the new laptop and BAM five minutes later I had all the documents on the new machine. The other fantastic thing I use is Xmarks which sync’s all Firefox bookmarks and passwords.

The only thing that took the time was installing all the apps, programs and utilities. However I have seen this as a good opportunity to have a clear out and not install any that I don’t use!

Category: PC, Tech Stuff / Tags: , , ,

iPhone OS4 (or IOS4) Follow Up

29/06/2010 / Rich / No comments

Ok, I’ve been using IOS4 for a week now. I’m not overly impressed with the fact the battery life seems to be far worse than it was before and that’s with the so called “task manager” empty.

The task manager is more like a recently used program list, as when you load up an app from there it seems to start it from the beginning. This maybe that some apps have not been updated to work with the task manager though. Time will tell!

The good side is I like the red squiggly spell check line when writing emails which is identical to MS Office (fig1). Then if you click on the line you get a list of possible options. (fig2)

The folders is the most obvious addition and I love it! It took a while to get used to after I OCD’D them. However know I don’t understand why they wasn’t an option in previous versions.

The camera changes haven’t really been used, as I very rarely use the camera at all!

As for the problems I mentioned in the first review, Google fixed these the very next day. So my email, Calender and contact sync’ing is now all back up and running flawlessly.

That is about it for my thoughts on it!

(fig1)
IOS4 Fig1

(fig2)
IOS4 Fig2

Category: Phones, Tech Stuff / Tags: , , , ,
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