Monday 16 August 2010

Saint Simon of bikehike.co.uk


Dude you are a saint!


This is probably counter-productive in the sense that the more people use his excellent service, the more likely he'll hit the Ordnance Survey quota limits more regularly! (That just so happens to be the case as I'm typing this)

His site is awesome (probably not as much as when you could save your routes, but then I joined up after he had to close that functionality down).

For those (e.g. me) with Macs that can't install Memory-Map on your computers (or with PC's who can't afford their extortionate prices) and want to be able to plot GPX courses on a proper OS map (25k and 50k) that you can upload to your Garmin (or other brands) GPS devices, bikehike is a godsend.

It's quick and easy to use (it even works in my Safari browser for the most part). You can download routes and even upload them later for tweaking before downloading it again. You can see the route elevation profile, etc.

I don't necesarily like paying for services and software, but in this case I'm more than willing to buy Simon a few pints!

GET A PAYPAL DONATION LINK ON YOUR SITE!

LastPass, the LAST password you'll have to remember!


This is a quick shout to the guys at LastPass - great service, and even greater if you go for the "Premium" edition (which costs a staggeringly astronomical £7.66 per year)

It's highly rated by the security geeks (Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte) who do the Security Now podcasts, listen to/watch episode 256 for the review.

Excerpt from iTunes:
Security Now 256: LastPass Security
ReleasedJul 10, 2010

Hosts: Steve Gibson with Leo Laporte Steve thoroughly evaluates LastPass, explains why high-security passwords are necessary, and tells us how LastPass makes storing those passwords secure. Download or subscribe to this show at twit.tv/sn. We invite you to read, add to, and amend our show notes. For 16kpbs versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Audio bandwidth is provided by Winamp, subscribe to TWiT and all your favorite podcasts with the ultimate media player, download it for free at Winamp.com. Running time: 1:54:05

Pure Flow Server / Twonky Media Server - How to disable it on Mac OS X (Leopard +)




This really annoyed me until I found the solution by digging around the twonky official website.

Are you running Pure Flow Server on your mac and want to disable it/prevent it from starting automatically? (It's just too heavy to leave it running all the time!)

Go to System Preferences > Accounts
Click on Login item
Delete Flow Server from the list

- it's that simple!

Of course if you want to add it back it can simply go to Login Items, click + and browse to and select Pure Flow Server from Applications or you could just run it manually from Applications when you need it.