How to keep freeloaders off your Wi-Fi connection

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Here’s an ever-so-slightly ingenious way of keeping spongers, hackers and the proletariat off your home or office Wi-Fi connection – just rename your router as follows:

(Image via F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen)

In praise of Spotify

Friday, August 21st, 2009

I had heard of Spotify some months ago but it had washed over me. I only took serious notice of it when I read an Economist article about it and I have become an instant convert.

For those of you who don’t know, Spotify is Yet Another Music Download Service. As far as I am concerned the main difference between it and the others, is that it is legal and it works. I registered with the site, downloaded the application and started listening to music. On my Mac, the application works really well so I would expect the Windows version to work as well — if not better. The search feature works well and it has all the usual playlist features but you can set up a queue of the tracks you wanted played. I find this really useful as I can set up my play queue for what I want in the next hour or so and the application just plays it for me — something you cannot do in iTunes without creating a custom playlist.

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Beck strokes The Velvet Underground

Friday, August 21st, 2009

I’m not writing a series of blog posts entitled “the best thing I stumbled across on the web this week”, but if I was, Beck’s Record Club, would be number four in the series.

As baffling as that opening paragraph may initially seem, it’s a mere tickle of oddness next to the backhanded slap that is Beck covering The Velvet Underground and posting the recordings on his website. They’re part of a larger experiment in which the restless musical waif works with a rotating group of musicians to “reinterpret” classic albums – beginning with The Velvet Underground and Nico. There’s two more planned for the series and if this is anything to go by, they’ll be notable for their kamikaze-like courage and utter failure.

JUDGED! But not really, because Beck has failed at an impossible task – he was trying to erect a monument of mist – which makes the fact he tried in the first place all the more impressive. At the core of this problem is the fact that Lou Reed (lead singer of the Velvet Underground) lived the sort of life that made angels fall from the sky in envy and dread.

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The digital camera that makes babies happy

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

Those clever camera manufacturers will stop at nothing to enhance our lives, and increase the already near-unbearable mirth of the everyday, by means of clever electronics. And so to London’s Imagination Gallery this afternoon, where Samsung was showing off its latest round of cameras. The most interesting of which sports not one screen, but quite literally double that number. Yes that’s right, two screens! One on the back (soooo last season) and one implausibly positioned (hold on to your seats) at the front. And look how happy it seems! (more…)

PC Pro’s top 10 hard disk destruction methods

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

It appears that our investigation into the Bustadrive, a home-made hard disk destruction device, has unleashed the latent violence that lurks within the average PC Pro reader: several folk entered into detailed discussions in our comments section and over on Slashdot about which calibre of bullet would do the best job of ensuring that no-one could get their hands on your credit-card details, and countless other readers have suggested similarly violent methods for disposing of your data.

We’ve been so impressed with the calibre of comments that we’ve compiled a list of our top ten hard disk destruction methods – although, since we’re ever so slightly scared of some of these people, they’re in no particular order.

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Why Outlook 2010’s conversation view doesn’t work

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Let’s be clear: Outlook 2010 is good. Very good, actually. And, certainly, if you instructed me to write an email client I’d come back to you with a white box with “INBOX” written on the front in biro.

But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been driving me up the wall.

Outlook 2010 tries to be all clever by bundling messages into “Conversations”. This is useful for when someone in the office CC’s everyone in on which pub to go to and you spend Friday afternoon battling a deluge of witty put-downs. In Outlook 2010 everything with the subject line “Let’s go to the pub!” is rolled into one conversation and you have to scroll through your inbox less. (more…)

Your Privacy Policy policy

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Does your website have a privacy policy?

It’s very easy for a small site to decide that this is something that only applies to the big boys who are dealing with credit card details and have an in-house legal team ready to draft the required policy.

However this is a mistake on a number of fronts…

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RockMelt: Yet another web browser

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Another month and another web browser. This week, we have been introduced via a New York Times article to Rockmelt. Details are at the non-existent end of sketchy but we do know a little bit about who is behind it.

Back when the web was young, we all used the Netscape Navigator browser. Netscape which was founded by Marc Andreessen and it is he who is funding Rockmelt. There seems to be some hints that the browser could be linked in some way to Facebook but little more.

Do we really need another web browser? As a web developer the answer is a firm ‘no’. In common use we now have three versions of Internet Explorer, quite a few variants of Firefox, at least three versions of Safari, Chrome and if you are really counting, Opera.

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Psst – want to buy some content?

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Last week News Corp reported a $3.4 billion loss. The same week, Rupert Mudoch’s media machine announced it was going to start charging for content in all sorts of places. It had tried the scheme on one site and it had been a great success and as such it was going to start rolling out across the world — the first UK site was going to be The Sunday Times. Every other news organisation carried the story — the BBC suggested people might pay to see the exclusive Michael Jackson rehearsal footage which The Sun’s website had published a few days before.

Oh and last week, News Corp reported a $3.4 billion loss.

I thought I would mention the loss again as no one seems to be talking about it. On the other hand everyone is talking about charging for content. Will it really be the case that some time soon, everyone will be charging for content? Will it be the case that to read this blog post (and other better ones!) you will be getting out your credit card/debit card/micropayments wallet to fill the coffers of PC Pro? I doubt it…

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Will the Radiohead experiment work on gamers?

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Like several other members of the PC Pro editorial team, I pretty much drop all pretence of working/eating/sleeping/human contact for a month or so at the same point each year: when Football Manager is released for the PC. This year will be no different, as I bravely attempt to carry local minnows Bromley from the Blue Square South to the Champions League, ducking and diving in the transfer market and abusing my fellow managers in the press.

But, for the first time in its short lifetime, I am genuinely considering opting against Football Manager. Actually, that’s a barefaced lie – i fully intend to buy FM2010, but this year I’m also going to buy its big rival, Championship Manager.

Not because I think it will have improved to a level at which it genuinely competes with Sports Interactive’s record-smashing masterpiece – although early reports suggest it’s giving it a hell of a go – but because Eidos is doing something a bit different with the CM2010 launch. (more…)