Flash Amiga game remakes galore

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Moles in their midst

The PR entourage of the western world's political heavy-weights were sure they had their taskmasters' backs covered from all possible angles. They were wrong. While the spin-doctors were monitoring the brutally omnipotent paparazzi and pundits, a spy operating much closer to home had been surreptitiously recording and podcasting to the masses the nefarious schemes and mortifying goofs of the likes...

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Salvage Slashdotted or erm... Diggdotted (?) articles

Post a link to a web page on an immensely popular tech news site such as www.slashdot.org or www.digg.com and you may as well start digging (see what I did there? Ho ho, hmm) its grave. Most servers aren't robust enough to cope with such an unexpected spike in bandwidth and so soon become inaccessible. As a result you don't get to read the article, and the author doesn't get to revel in their five...

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Spice up your putie's TV diet

It's not often that I purchase a piece of computer gear and find that it works exactly as described without having to spend hours devising elaborate workarounds to counteract its infuriating design flaws, Apple kit exempted of course. This is why I feel it's my duty to recommend the Cinergy T2 digital TV Freeview receiver from Terratec. The diminutive device is clearly inspired by the silver-sided,...

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Google launches bootleg search engine

Three and a half seconds ago (if you could arrange for your jaw to drop in awe of my finger-on-the-pulseness it would be much appreciated, thanks) search engine monolith, Google, unveiled the latest widget in their web-taming repertoire. Google Swag Bag (TM) allows users to locate no-nonsense index listings of illegal booty such as MP3 music files and movies. The service operates by tapping into...

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You what?

I'd hazard a guess that you know at least one person who responds to everything you say with "what?", "huh?" or "eh?". In each case they heard you perfectly well the first time, though still insist you repeat yourself before commenting or answering a question. They know it and you know it. I could cheerfully strangle them to death when I start to repeat myself and become tongue-tied, stutter or get...

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Personal Password Policies

With phishing, social engineering scams and hacking on the rise, it has never been more important to give serious thought to how you generate and manage passwords for your online accounts. The system I use involves using an online gibberish generator to create lengthy alphanumeric character strings and saving these in an Excel spreadsheet, which is subsequently password protected. I've memorised...

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An A-Z of mainstream and 'underground' computer and internet terminology

I began writing this article late in 1999 when something called 'warez' first piqued my curiosity. For a long while I was fascinated with its intricate modus operandi and associated culture and this is what led me to set about documenting as much of it as possible. I'm no longer such a keen observer, but have in any case revamped the entries below to keep them current. I will continue to supplement...

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Throw them away; the future's legless

Last week I visited Monkey World in Dorset, as you do when nothing else can slake your yearning for simian-based entertainment. You know what the first thing which occurred to me upon walking into the park was? (I mean besides, "gosh, what a lot of monkeys there are"). The sheer number of people scooting about in motorised wheelchairs. I stopped dead in my tracks and scratched my noggin in wonderment...

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Geeks are doing it for themselves

Blogs gave we the little people a soapbox from which to preach, prophesise and disseminate information. These rapidly evolved into more intimate, full-bodied podcasts, and yet this development marks only the beginning for homebrew, digital creatives. As subscription-based, audio-on-demand approaches its first anniversary, independent bedroom broadcasters are once again raising the stakes by turning...

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Identify and zap rogue background processes

If you open up your Windows task manager and take a peek at the list of programs running in the background you might be surprised to see how much memory they're sucking up. Are they all absolutely necessary? Are they malevolent or benign? Often it's difficult to tell because Task Manager only displays their truncated file names. Rarely do malware authors label their wares, 'enormous memory-hogging...

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Dyslexic eBayers bag the best bargains

Pudgy digited sellers are rife on eBay. They hammer out their listings' titles and descriptions faster than the speed of light and submit the resulting gibberish without proof reading it first. Unless you're as stupid as the sellers * you aren't going to find these auctions, and they will predictably end with no bids. Fat Fingers has the solution; type in a smattering of keywords and the site will...

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Google fills in the blanks

I couldn't tell you if this search refining feature is new, or just new to me, but it's one well worth adding to your info mining arsenal. If you want Google to forage for a particular phrase, though can't bring it to mind in its entirety, you can replace the tip-of-the-tongue, missing words with stars and let Google fill in the blanks. This might be a useful way to look up song lyrics, amongst other...

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Gmail gets even more bettererer

With every newspaper and mainstream media outlet covering the story, you can't have failed to notice that today Google unveiled their shiny new instant messenger software. While this is great news, there's not a lot more I can say on the subject which you haven't already heard, so instead I will focus on a lesser known improvement to have sneaked in Gmail's backdoor minus the fanfare. 'Send mail as'...

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When full blast isn't loud enough

My Creative Rhomba MP3 player came loaded with European firmware (so I'm led to believe). Because some EU directive or other dictates that the volume of portable audio devices has to be restricted (presumably because some people are too feeble-minded to turn it down when their ears start to bleed) I'm unable to listen to certain audiobooks without editing them first. The problem is that music files...

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