Have you ever had your website’s domain name expire? How do you know when it is time to renew your website’s domain name? Perhaps you’ve set a calendar reminder, or maybe you rely on an email from your domain registrar to notify you.
What if your reminders fail for whatever reason and your domain name doesn’t get renewed?
Recently the University of Queensland found itself in exactly that position.
Does your internet connection speed sometimes seem so slow that you might as well be communicating over two tin cans connected by string?
Every now and then you might find that it is taking an unusually long time to load a website. Is it the website, is it your connection, or is it something else?
Testing your Internet connection speed can help troubleshoot any connectivity problems that you may be having.
(Read More »)
Have you ever visited your own website only to find it won’t load? If you have you’ve probably panicked and wondered if it’s just a problem with your computer or is the website down and inaccessible to the whole world. Perhaps you’ve then tried another computer or contacted a friend to ask if they can access the website to confirm your fears.
Before you contact your web host to enquire why your website is down you can use some free online tools to determine whether the problem is at your end or if your website is really down for the whole world.
Try some of these free online tools, there is no need for download, just type the URL of your website into one of the following online tools:
If you find that your website is down for everyone then it might be time to contact your web host, or or perhaps even a sign that you should consider moving to a more reliable web host.
If your old iMac is getting long in the tooth it might benefit from a hardware upgrade. Wouldn’t that be expensive, I hear you ask. Not necessarily. Although Apple are infamous for tightly locking up their hardware and making it difficult to get inside to upgrade, the iMacs are an exception…of sorts.
The one thing that Apple make very easy for you to replace is the RAM. I recently found that my ageing iMac was suffering from a lack of memory. I was often having to close down programs in order to have enough free RAM to open other programs and thought it time to look at an (affordable) upgrade. Purchasing RAM from Apple can be expensive, but other manufacturers are available online and cost very little if anything for postage. I found one that delivered two 2GB sticks of RAM to me for $118 all up.
Have you ever worried who’s looking at you through that little camera built into your computer’s screen? It’s easy to tell when the camera is in use because that little light comes on…right? What if that light was able to be disabled by a hacker who then turns on your webcam and spies on you without your knowledge? Without the ability to simply unplug the camera that question troubles some users.
Technology writer John C Dvorak has mentioned that he takes some fairly unusual precautions for ensuring his privacy while online. Worried about not having any sure way to turn off the built-in iSight camera in his Mac, Dvorak sticks gaffer’s tape over the lens of the camera while not in use.
While you might find this amusing and perhaps a tad overly paranoid, after having my camera turned on automatically by a hacker while on GooglePlus I have seriously considered doing John’s trick. Recently, however, I accidentally discovered a less sticky solution.
Why read text when you can get your iPad to read it to you? I often get my iPad to read back to me my important emails before I send them, it gives another perspective. It’s essentially Siri’s voice, but did you know that you can give it an Australian accent, or any other accent?
I shared this little tip with Leo and Sarah on iPad Today:
WordPress 3.4.1 was released a couple of days ago and introduced a few new features along with some maintenance and security updates.
Some of the new features include the ability to preview customisations to a theme before activating it on your website, but only if you’ve first installed the theme. This feature might be more useful as a way of previewing customisations of your existing current theme.
Customisable headers will be well received by some who might be running the Twenty Eleven theme, which has a large header by default. It is now very easy to tweak the height of that banner, or width even.
Embedded tweets is another new addition providing an easy way of embedding of single tweets into your posts – simply paste the URL of a tweet on one line.
Captions have been improved too with the added ability to use basic HTML, allowing links in captions!
Here are some of the maintenance fixes in the WordPress 3.4.1 update:
- Fixes an issue where a theme’s page templates were sometimes not detected.
- Addresses problems with some category permalink structures.
- Better handling for plugins or themes loading JavaScript incorrectly.
- Adds early support for uploading images on iOS 6 devices.
- Allows for a technique commonly used by plugins to detect a network-wide activation.
- Better compatibility with servers running certain versions of PHP (5.2.4, 5.4) or with uncommon setups (safe mode, open_basedir), which had caused warnings or in some cases prevented emails from being sent.
Read the full post at the WordPress blog: WordPress 3.4.1 Maintenance and Security Release
Vintuitive:
Three University Projects Use Twitter to Understand Happiness, Hate and Other Emotions in America
It turns out that the fleeting pronouncements we post on Twitter are catnip for academics and others eager to find the elusive pulse of American society. Since Twitter launched in 2006, researchers have been hard at work figuring out how to turn those 140-character musings into tea leaves with something meaningful to say about us all.
Read more at Open Culture: http://bit.ly/13LRDub
