The hard drive on my laptop was getting so tight for space I couldn’t even carry out some of the simplest tasks because there was only limited room for a swap file, temporary files were not being written properly, and…

Is your GMail/GTalk contacts list getting out of hand, is it a burgeoning list of all and sundry with whom you just happened to have had a minor IM or email exchange. As you probably know, Gmail/talk automatically adds correspondents…

Some time ago, I noticed that Google Desktop Search (GDS) was no longer indexing my Thunderbird emails. It suddenly dawned on me while trying to find a whole bunch of messages that I knew for a fact I had received…

NGC Active 2.4 is a Hacker Tool! No it’s not! I thought it was for a moment. ZoneAlarm reported that there was a malicious piece of code residing in my Windows system32 folder going back the name of DartSecure2.dll and…

This neat little video explains the importance of significant figures, rounding, accuracy and precision. Find out why adding a single drop of water (of about 0.05 ml) to a cup of coffee that is about 200 ml should never be…

On 27th September 2007, this site told of the re/ocurrence of search-engine hacking by spammers [see Hackers Shanghai Google, Warning]. Although this nefarious activity was known to the more savvy members of the Internet community, it had remained relatively unpublicized…

Some websites don’t look the way we want them to look, they don’t have the functionality we need, and sometimes they do stuff we really don’t want them to, like displaying stacks of ads or spawn popups at every move.…

Some time ago, I discussed how to move from a system like Blogspot to your own web address and the option to do a 301 redirect from that Google-owned system to your blogger custom domain name. It’s definitely worth the…

TechCrunch alerted me to an interview by Thomas Crampton with Ogilvy China’s Kaiser Kuo and others. The interview discusses the current state of web 2.0 development in China. Of particular note is Kuo’s description of Chinese P2P file network Blin.cn…

Now, I’m not staking any claim on being a significant figure, but if you’re here, then you might as well know that I’ve added a “Find Me Elsewhere” section to this blog. It’s over in the right-hand column, towards the…

Want to view and perhaps even control security cameras on the web? What about finding sites that are not spidered (simple trick using robots.txt)? How about spying on a webmaster’s Frontpage user information or their VNC info, easy with some…

These days, I seem to do almost all of my reading online, I bet you do too. When was the last time you picked up a print magazine, or perish the thought, a book that didn’t have an “e” in…

Did you think you bricked your iPhone by installing third-party upgrades or unlocking it? An Apple firmware upgrade may have rendered it unusable. Shame on you Apple! There may be salvation thanks to the latest version of AnySIM, as reported…

Want to attract readers to your blog and make them stick around? The first stage is to write magnetic headlines. In the olden days, when we used to take a morning paper rather than scanning Google Reader and importing newsfeeds with…

Still not sure what to do with all those little orange icons that seem to litter web sites and blogs these days, including your very own Significant Figures? This little video explains the ins and outs of blogs, rss, feeds,…

Wondering whether to opt for free email from Google or Yahoo? You could use both of course, forward one to the other and fall into an endless spam-free loop. Or, you could check out this CNet video in which the…

In July I made a decision, over on Sciencebase, to restart the old podcast. Originally, I’d recorded half a dozen using microphone and soundcard. I even did a little guitar jingle. They’re all still available as mp3 files, but the…

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net has saved me an awful of time and energy by producing this amusing short video, imagine a guy of similar stature without the glasses, no facial hair, and perhaps a trendier light fitting in the office and…

If you run a blog, you’ll have probably checked out your incoming links either in technorati, or if you’re using Wordpress, in the Dashboard. If you’re like me, you will have been puzzled by some of those so-called incoming links,…

If you have ever wanted to know what Google really thinks with respect to searching, SEO, and web spam, then no doubt you will have come across the name Matt Cutts on your travels. Here’s Mr Cutts, - or is…

I once ran a Wordpress plugin on the Sciencebase site that used the translation engines of AltaVista’s Babelfish and Google to generate an international version of the site in any of more than a dozen languages. It worked very well,…

How many times have you come across this annoyance when you are posting a comment to a blog? The form entry boxes are just too narrow, you cannot check that you typed your email address properly, and what if you’ve…

Did you read the headlines? Apple has issued an iPhone update that could disable the device permanently, they claim. Maybe you have unlocked your iPhone to use a different cellphone network to the one you were tied to when you bought…

Most of us connect to the net without a second thought, we switch on machines, boot up modems and let our internet service provider do the job of routing our browser’s requests for web pages etc. As you know, behind…