Watershed’s internet kiosks have 5 special keys at the bottom: www. | .com | .co.uk | :-( | :-). In earlier versions of the keyboards, these keys were actually just F1-F5 (which the computer then had to map to the right text), but it seems the later keyboards are programmed to tell the computer that […]

Incremental backups on unix systems are annoying. For a start, you have to do a “full snapshot” fairly regularly, otherwise it takes rather a lot of time/effort/disk-usage to restore to, say, yesterday (which is the most likely place you want to restore to). You can’t delete older backups willy nilly. You also can’t compress older […]

A quick piece of advice for anyone thinking of purchasing a Netgear GS748T – don’t even think about it until they’ve brought out newer firmware than 1.0.3_10. We’ve been using Netgears as our access and distribution layer switches for years now, and never had a problem with them. Reliable, easy to use (especially the old-style […]

IMAP is a great way of getting at email. All your email stays on the server, and you can access it from multiple devices (and all devices see the same email). This is in contrast to POP, where email is generally deleted from a server, and it’s all but impossible to get a syncronised view […]

Now here’s something odd. I’m changing to new IMAP server software at Watershed (more on that later), and so during the testing phase I’ve got the old server listening on the standard port of 993, and the new one listening on 10993. And I thought I ought to test the new server, Dovecot, on different […]

A lot of things have gotten nicer over the years. Features are added to OSes that make life so much easier, gadgets become slicker and better at knowing what we want to do. We all know that sigh of “ahh, why didn’t they do that before!” Also, most people customise their 404 error pages to […]