Just say that you were part of a Private Investigation company.. And also suppose that you decided to create a different branch to your business.. And let’s just say that this new company used social engineering techniques and trojans on emails to get information from people! What would you call it? Of course you would choose a name that attracts the most attention to your wrongdoings - Hackers Are Us - apparently the perfect name according to “Active Investigation Services.” If they use the same amount of acumen to solve cases it’s surprising they have any clients at all! [SHOW ME]

If you do any sort of web design, your own website in particular, you’ll need a decent resource for CSS. Quite rightly, there’s a comment on this post that mentions if they see another CSS post they’re going to die (a bit extreme I know), but thankfully with the help of this article you shouldn’t ever need to read another! [SHOW ME]

If you’ve ever used notepad in windows, you’ll know how basic it really is. It’s fine for amending the odd file, but can’t be used for anything longer than a few minutes without frustration seeping in!

Well now is your chance to change your habits in favour of this open-source alternative. Notepad++ has a lot going for it - it has the ability to be installed onto a USB stick - ideal if you carry your website around with you (such as myself). It is also context sensitive (depending on the file type you load into it, it will colour code functions/variables/braces and adjust spacing and tab sizes accordingly). There is also in-built functions for common text operations - such as changing case, swapping double quotes for single quotes and even converting binary to decimal or other bases within the editor. Notepad++ can also be used as a hex editor (for you serious coders out there), has support for macros and has the ability to talk to web browsers to display your latest coding creation.

All in all, notepad++ is a vastly superior successor to Windows notepad - and best of all it is open source, free to download and has a tiny footprint of a meagre 2.5Mb. [SHOW ME]

See? Apple aren’t “hacker proof” as many mac users will have you believe. Being an IT professional, I’m not dumb enough to assume an OS is free from holes and security flaws, I guess it’s just a shame that Mac fan-boys don’t see the potential problem of their blind trust. Back on topic, a flaw has been revealed in quicktime (affecting both OSX and Windows) that allows a hacker to gain control of the machine it’s running on.

A quote on C|net News (the source of this article) details that an apple spokeswoman stated “Apple takes security very seriously and has a great track record of addressing potential vulnerabilities before they can affect users,”. Does that mean they’re good at supporting their product, or just good at not telling people about the bugs? Hmm, interesting spin.

Also, the security hole means that people with Macs and safari (or firefox) are more likely to be subject to the hack than windows users because quicktime is pre-installed with the OS. This is what happens when your OS becomes popular - the idea of it being targeted by hackers becomes more attractive. This in turn creates more publicity to find security holes, that weren’t known of before because of the lack of enthusiasm to find them. Oh it’s all too obvious… [SHOW ME]

Suggested by a friend (thanks Deano) this is probably one of the cheapest ways to boost your wi-fi connection - An asian cooking oil strainer and a USB wireless dongle. Just make sure you take your spring rolls out before you build it. [SHOW ME]

At last a true replacement for iTunes! I know I touted the virtues of iTunes, but just recently I’ve become frustrated with my iPod and iTunes. It always seems that at that critical moment (when you’re about to leave for work) your iPod decides to kill itself, where only a factory reset will do to get things working again!! Damn, that’s annoying..

So here is the true replacement for iTunes.. It’s called Songbird. It’s current incarnation is 0.2.5 but supports iPods, other mp3 players and playlists too, which you can synchronise at will. The podcast section still needs a bit of major tweaking, but if you’re prepared to do that manually it’s not too much of a hardship.

Apparently the program takes up a quarter of the footprint as iTunes (which is definitely a good thing) whilst retaining all the functionality. Of course, there’s no iTunes store, and the radio stations are different. And unfortunately, being Shoutcast, they tend to stall quite a bit during streaming - which I’ve noticed with Winamp also.

Also, did I mention that the code is Mozilla code? More importantly that makes it GPL, but also it makes the look and feel very familiar. You’ll notice also that when you go to the options section within the program it looks very much like Firefox. Then there’s that nice black skin.. Very Vista and very anti iTunes! [SHOW ME]

Yeap I’m still alive.. I’ve been out of the scene for a while helping with the day-to-day runnings of the birth of our new baby daughter Kayleigh. But during a routine scour around on the internet, I found this rather useful make project. Take a stuffed animal, remove the stuff and stuff in the guts of a PC to make compubeaver!! If anybody else knows of other novel ways to make a case for a PC, let me know! [SHOW ME]