Real World Computing

(warning... this is rant - I know you're not supposed to blog about things when you're irritated but I've been irritated with McAfee for ages and it's not going away). My irritation with McAfee's Anti-Malware technologies has slowly been building for the past six months. For a start, I find myself disabling their firewall more often than I leave it enabled. The thing constantly tries to chew up 90+ percent of my systems resources. What's the point of having security software if, for usability reasons, you have to constantly turn it off? Whenever I start Lotus Notes 8.0.2, I have to remember to stop the McShield service (from the services part of control panel) before I double-click the icon. If I forget, my PC slows to a crawl and I can make filtered coffee and still get back with plenty of hourglass watching time. It would be easy to blame Notes for this but it performs so well when McAfee is off. In addition, several of my other bits of software perform mu

I've had quite a few people ask me about the call log on the Blackberry Bold but as yet, I haven't found it. I did get this little tip from Craig Wiseman's blog ; Blackberry Call Log - Can anyone help? http://www.wiseman.la/web/cpwBlog.nsf/dx/blackberry-call-log-please-help Apparently the calls really are there in with your emails but they're almost impossible to see. To see all your calls do the following; Go into your main mailbox Press the Blackberry button to open the popup menu Scroll all the way down (past the bottom of the screen) to highlight Search and Click on it. Scroll to the bit at the bottom that says type and click on it Change it from Email to Phone Press the Blackberry button to open the popup menu Click Search Your blackberry will now be showing you all of the calls. When you push the Esc/ Back button, it will return to normal. Thanks Craig, not only for helping me to find the calls but also because he highlighted a very useful set of Blackberry featu

So... you've got yourself a nice wallpaper background but those icons on the front screen are spoiling it. Wanna get rid of them? Here's how. A Warning The procedure described below will move your desktop icons around a little, change your existing blackberry wallpaper and move all non-standard applications back to the download folder. If you can't handle this, then don't proceed. Also note; this procedure gets rid of the icons on the front page of the blackberry but it doesn't remove the shaded bar at the top of the screen. PART 1: GETTING THE THEME ONTO YOUR BLACKBERRY First we need to obtain a theme that doesn't contain those icons Here's a link to one on Crackberry.com . I'm not sure if you need to be logged in to get it or not. http://forums.crackberry.com/attachments/f83/6737d1228167408-any-way-make-home-screen-totally-clear-all-icons-com_plazmic_theme_no_icons.zip Download and Unzip the files - there should be an .ALX file in the archive. Nex

Over the years I've made quite a few tests on Ubuntu to see whether it was ready for general consumption. Until now, it's never lasted more than a few hours on the device I've loaded it on because I've either had no time to test it properly or I've become too frustrated with driver setup problems to continue. This time, I loaded it on a laptop which just didn't seem able to run Windows XP. The results were astonishing. The Good For a start, the laptop which has 512 mb of ram runs quite well now. On XP SP2, it took literally about 5 minutes to boot, under Ubuntu, it take about 15 seconds. Google and Firefox Similarly, Firefox was already installed and all of my favourite google apps and bookmarks worked a treat. VPN and Remote Desktop I found some instructions for VPN setup and was remote desktopping onto my work PC within a few hours. Between Remote Desktop (to Windows) and the web apps that run in firefox - and of course Open Office which was also already i