“So, what do you use?” is a question I am often asked when sorting out PC issues for family and friends.
So, here are a few of the software programs that I rely on to… do my stuff.
Antivirus There are plenty of AV progs on the market, including some very good freebies. Personally, I’ve always paid [...]

This post comes to you from Sunderland. I am working oop north for a couple of days.
It’s currently 2:30 in the morning and I am surfing the internet, whilst I wait for the video server card that I have changed to come back online.
However, I say surfing, but it’s really more of a paddle in [...]

Arggh!
The quest to make my home PC into the computer equivalent of the six-million-dollar man - better; stronger; faster - has hit a major snag that I’ve been so far unable to resolve.
Windows 7 doesn’t bloody well come with an email client! Can you believe that?
Nope, Microsoft has dropped my beloved Outlook Express from it’s [...]

I mentioned a few posts back of how my PC up and died a little while ago.
Well, the new bits arrived in the post yesterday and I hurriedly slapped it all together.
I made a few changes to my original shopping list by getting a slightly more expensive motherboard and a slightly more expensive processor… that’s [...]

My PC died on Saturday morning.
Well, it didn’t actually die, but XP kept rebooting itself and nothing I tried would work (and trust me: I tried!).
I’ve taken it as a sign that I need to start afresh: well, I’ve had this particular setup for a few years now and I feel the need for an [...]

“Oi, Masher… you know about phones and shit, don’tcha?”
I placed my two very heavy bags of shopping on the ground, as my neighbour, Colin, approached me upon my return from the supermarket, where I’d gone to buy just a pint of milk.
“I know many things, Col,” I said, “But yes: phones and shit are somewhat [...]

I mentioned a short while ago, how annoyed I get when I receive emails from friends and family asking me to add my name to an email petition and to then forward it on to all my other friends and family.
I received just such a mail this morning.  I read it and binned it, without [...]

Right, let’s clear this up once and for all, people. Because, frankly, it’s starting to annoy me.
Let me tell you now: there is NO SUCH THING as a Digital TV Aerial.
A chap at work asked if I could fit a digital TV aerial for him, before he splashed out on an expensive new telly. Being [...]

In keeping with my New Year semi-resolution (I still haven’t done my tax return!), I have finally got round to updating my version of Wordpress - the engine that powers this little voyeuristic look into my life.
Wordpress have released many updates since I first installed it and I kept meaning to update it, but… well… [...]

I use a laptop for work and needing the ability to send and receive emails whilst travelling from site to site, I invested in one of those mobile broadband dongles.  Having perused all those available and have mulled over all the different contracts, I opted for the cheapest one available (the ICON225 for fifteen quid [...]

As a scientist, people have often asked me for my thoughts on the health implications of mobile phones.
I usually tell them that there are others that are better placed to answer that question and they haven’t been able to come up with a definitive answer one way or the other. But, as mobile phones operate [...]

It’s a little known fact that I invented the Sony Walkman.
Obviously, that’s not actually true.
But, folklore has it that the highly popular little tape playing device came about when one of the Sony factory workforce was spotted wearing a Sony cassette deck that he’d stripped down to its bare minimum and had clipped to his [...]

The industrial estate where I currently work is very dull. Unlike the last job in Central London, where I could take a stroll along the Thames as I ate my sandwiches, or visit various tourist attractions during my lunchbreak, this place has nothing that I can do or see during the prandial hour.
And so yesterday, [...]

The radio in my car died about a year ago.
Well, it didn’t actually die, as such, but it had a stroke… or something.
We were in France at the time and whilst Mrs M popped into a chemist to get something for the weekend, I was idly fiddling with the radio, seeing what stations I could [...]

Yesterday, I broke the earphones I use with my PEG and so had to buy a new set.
I’d recently seen the virtues of some noise-reducing headphones extolled on The Gadget Show and thought I’d give them a try.
The earpieces fit most snugly into the ear and this is important for reducing external noise. As such, [...]

As I write this, I am listening to the birds twittering and singing. My ornithology skills being virtually nil, I’m not able to tell one bird from another. But I can hear other sounds as well: a horse occasionally blowing through his lips (I have no idea what the correct term for that is!), as [...]

Y’know what it’s like when you see old photo’s of yourself: “Arrgh! Look at my hair! Oh my God! That’s never me… in a cardigan!” Well, it can be the same with websites.
The WayBack Machine at Internet Archive has several copies of the Masher website stored on its servers, dating back to 2001. It’s [...]

Now listen up, ‘cos this is interesting.
This week sees the start of IPv6 addressing being introduced to the ‘net’.
It’s all very exciting.
You see, under the existing IPv4 system, the 32 bit address notation is in the form of 4 groups (octets) of 2 or 3 decimal digits, such as 64.233.167.104 - you’ve all seen them. [...]

We’d put the savages into Kid’s Club for a couple of hours so we could have a little quiet time on our own.
The moon shone brightly, casting shimmering, silvery reflections on the large swimming pool, as we walked - hand in hand, drink in the other - slowly around it.
As well as the moon doing [...]

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that I’ve been ‘offline’ for a couple of days.
Here’s a top tip: if you own your own domain name, it’s always better to put down an administrative contact email address that you are actually contactable upon, rather than the one that you sold to the BBC for a [...]

The last few days have been spent mostly with reinstalling all the tracks on my PEG.
When I first bought it, I just slammed everything on there as quick as possible, allowing the software to basically do everything for me.
This has caused several issues:
1. The track details were automatically downloaded from the Internet (Gracenote, usually) and [...]

On a whim last week, I bought meself one of them big flat screen tellies.
Unlike my old TV, this one didn’t come with Surround Sound, and so this week, I decided to treat myself to one and took me off to the nearest Hi-Fi shop. Unfortunately, I also took Mrs Masher.
Having already done some [...]

This may be of interest to those of you out there, that own a Sony MP3 player. I think there are a few. I doubt it will be of interest to anyone else.
I recently built me a new pooter and I have slowly been adding all the programs that were on the old one. [...]

Warning: this post contains extreme nerdiness
Back in the early eighties, I built myself an atomic clock.
OK, not strictly true: I built a digital clock that was linked to a time signal generated by an atomic clock housed in the National Physics Laboratory in Teddington. This time signal was then broadcast from Rugby at a [...]

Like many nerds of my age, my first computer was the - then ubiquitous - Sinclair ZX81. It had a whole 16K of memory on a wobbly RAMpack that would fail just as you finished an hour’s worth of typing on it’s horrible clicky keyboard. Data had to be backed up onto your own tape [...]

Well, the new pooter is built and is up and running.
It diidn’t take long - a couple of hours to build and a couple more to install the OS and drivers and AV software. For some reason I can’t get any sound out of it, but I think that’s a problem with the driver disc [...]