Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

We’ve been using the Brand New Day theme for years now and we love it. It has a big happy picture of the sun, which is just the pick-me-up when your down because something is broken and needs fixing.

However, it does not work well on mobile devices. This is a real problem for us because if you’re on our site, it is often because your computer is broken and you are trying to fix it. So there is a good chance you are searching around on a mobile device to work out how to get it to turn back on again.

Our new theme works much better on mobile devices and provides a cleaner way to access the information. We hope you will like the change too!

CentOS does not always have VIM installed on it. This is easy to fix though:

yum install vim-common vim-enhanced vim-minimal

Run as sudo.

Recently I registered with the new Virgin Money credit card service. They have just taken over the running of their own credit cards from MBNA so everyone has to re-register on their new system.

I selected a 14-character password containing a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.

Five minutes later I was changing it to a simple easy-to-remember phrase. Why? Because every time I log in to my account I have to enter a set of certain digits from my password.

The problem is that I have no idea what my password is. It is safely secured away in 1password; I never look it at, I never know what it is. But thanks to Virgin Money’s so called security measures, much like other financial organisations do, I am instead forced to use a far more easily crackable password.

If you attempt to run php.exe on Windows you may get an error involving the following DLL.

MSVCR110.dll

The resolution to this is to install “Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 4”. Note that you should install the 32-bit version even if you are using a 64-bit operating system!

This can easily catch people out first time, however you can just install the 32-bit version over the top.

If you use self-signed certificates on cPanel and WHM, they will still expire each year. You may find yourself getting an email such as:

The SSL certificate for ftp on host.example.com will expire in less than 30 days.

Your server’s SSL certificate for ftp will expire in less than 30 days. You need to install a new certificate as soon as possible. You can install a new certificate using WHM’s “Manage Service SSL Certificates” interface: https://host.example.com:2087/scripts2/manageservicecrts (Main >> Service Configuration >> Manage Service SSL Certificates).

To resolve this, click the link as suggested by the email. Then, next to each service, click “Reset Certificate”. This will generate a fresh certificate and automatically install it.

Google Chrome is not the only application struggling with OS X Yosemite’s file dialog. When saving files in Coda, the dialog will continually fall off the bottom of the screen.

Currently the only known workaround for the issue is to switch to the simple view by clicking the up arrow next to the file name box, and then click it again to re-expand the dialog and then it will be probably sized again. However, you need to do this every time you save a file.

There is a bug in Apple’s OS X Yosemite in which the file dialog boxes grow larger than the screen. However, it does not seem Apple are in a rush to fix this.

The workaround is different for each application but for Google Chrome you can temporary solve it by running the following commands.

defaults delete com.google.Chrome NSNavPanelExpandedSizeForSaveMode
defaults delete com.google.Chrome NSNavPanelExpandedSizeForOpenMode

The box will continue to grow each time you use it, so you will have to run these commands again every time the box gets too big again.

After years of waiting, after every single tiny village around Leeds getting fibre, the city centre finally has fibre! What a glorious time we live in. Top marks to BT Openreach, they turned up when they said they would and got it sorted within a hour.

This was us before:

And then this was us after:

And now:

If it keeps increasing like this, I will have all the world’s bandwidth by Christmas!

I was dragging an image from my desktop into a folder when it happened to pass over my browser with Google open on it. Suddenly, Google suggested that I might want to search the web using the image.

How well it works is debatable, but it is certainly interesting.

For example, if I upload the image I use as my avatar I get a series of pages that that image is used on. It also shows me visually similar images, but none of them are me.

I can see that finding where an image has been used can be useful. Not sure about the similar images though. However, it works better if you use a photo of a celebrity. It identifies the person and then tries to find relevant pages.

The image I uploaded was just called 11.jpg and doesn’t have much metadata, so it is quite impressive that it worked all that out from the image.

Recently, I wrote about some of the poor user experience encountered when using HSBC’s online banking.

Today, I am going to show you how to fix some of it. These instructions are for users of the Google Chrome web browser. If you use Mozilla Firefox, you can probably achieve a similar effect using Greesemonkey.

Tampermonkey is a browser add-on that allows you to run custom user scripts on existing websites. The first thing you will need to do is install it.

Once you have done that, the Tampermonkey icon will appear in your browser. Click this and when the menu appears select “Add a new script…”. Wait for the page to load, then copy and paste the following in:

// ==UserScript==
// @name       HSBC online banking
// @namespace  https://www.business.hsbc.co.uk/
// @version    0.1
// @description  Improves HSBC's online banking
// @match      https://www.business.hsbc.co.uk/*
// @copyright  2014
// @require http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js
// ==/UserScript==

$('#benSortCode').attr('size', '8');
$('#benAccountNumber').attr('size', '10');

This code will then be run every time you access a HSBC online banking page. So, as if by magic, when you try and create a new payee, the boxes will be big enough: