Ken's Tech Tips

I woke up this morning and recieved an error from AVG Anti-Virus which told me I wasn’t protected. In the “Update Manager” component, there is an error saying “missing .bin file”. I’m sure the same scenario will happen to many more people across the land as they turn their computers on!

After doing a bit of digging around, it turns out today’s anti-virus update is corrupt because AVG failed to provide the .bin file. Annoying it certainly is but don’t reinstall AVG or anything: simply wait until tommorow’s update is released and all should hopefully be well. Besides, it’s nowhere near as annoying as McAfee.

If you go to Google translator and translate “simpaticone” (very funny person) from Italian into English, the result is “Barack Obama”.

I guess it’s to do with the fact Google uses statistical machine translation. Translation Googlebomb anyone?

Via Google Blogoscoped.

Bomomo is a unique and very original technique to create a work of art. It’s hard to describe it – just give it a try! It uses <canvas> so works fantastically in Firefox and reportedly fairly well, in Safari and Opera 9.5 too. It’s been described as an “interesting mix of Spirograph, Etch-a-Sketch, and MS Paint”.

See an example of a Bomomo drawing.

When I upgraded to Firefox 3, I found that the videos on the BBC News website no longer worked. You got the message “Sorry, this content isn’t available at the moment”. If you get this error, you can fix it by deleting your BBC cookies. Go to Tools > Options. On the Privacy tab click on “Show Cookies”. Search for “bbc.co.uk” and delete all the cookies there. Hope this helps somebody!

Many technology enthusiasts recently have really got into “do it yourself” projects. I came across Instructables.com and WikiHow which both contain a whole range of tutorials and projects. Lots of cool things to make or do when you have a few hours to spare!

This story made me laugh. A girl from London was looking to book a cab (taxi) to Bristol Airport. She called up directory enquiries and asked for Joe Baxi (cockney rhyming slang for taxi). When told there was nobody by that name, she said ‘It ain’t a person, it’s a cab, innit.’ and got connected to a supplier of cabinets.

From Metro: “‘Look love, how hard is it?’ she fumed. ‘All I want is your cheapest cab, innit. I need it for 10am. How much is it?’ The sales adviser told her £180. The tantrum-throwing teenager quickly left her address details before ringing off. The next morning, rather than being picked up by a cab, the young woman had the cabinet dropped off.”

The new BBC News website just looks absolutely fantastic. This comes just weeks after the redesign of the BBC homepage. The editors wrote a bit about the new design on their blog. But its a shame that the BBC don’t update the design of old articles on their site although I suppose that it’s nice they’ve kept the old pages as they were originally intended. Congratulations to the BBC News web team.

On the topic of BBC News, check out Bill Bailey’s BBC News Rave.

A reminder for Stargate fans in the UK: SG-1 Ark of Truth premieres tonight at 8pm on Sky One. If you miss it, it’ll be repeated on Wednesday evening. If you don’t have Sky, wait till April 14th to get it on DVD. I’d be really interested to see what everybody thinks.

The US Federal Reserve reduced base interest rates from 3% to 2.25%. Inflation last year in the USA was 4.1%. If you placed money in a savings account at 2.25%, you would actually lose 1.85% of it’s value in 1 year. Not really “savings”. According to The Economist, if you use GDP per head (a more accurate indicator of standard of living), the USA has actually been in recession since Q4 2007 with quality of life falling by 0.4%/year. Just something to think about.

Terminal 5 at Heathrow  is being inaugurated by the Queen tomorrow. Check out the “electroluminescent wall” which shows the time at Heathrow 5. Stylish eh. A really nice spin on the normal “clocks from different cities”. It opens to the public in 2 weeks time.