Rooting your Android smartphone can offer some pretty amazing benefits, from simple things like the ability to take screenshots to the option to use your handset as a Wi-Fi hotspot.  Perhaps the most impressive, however, is the option to change the apps that are pre-installed on your ‘phone, and replace them with your own. In [...]

The aRSSduino is a simple project for the Arduino microcontroller, designed to display RSS feed entries on a 16×2 LCD.  It’s still in the early stages, with the following outstanding: To Do: Support for larger LCDs To Improve: Better UTF-8 character handling To Do: Multiple RSS feed support For now, however, it’s a pretty neat [...]

I’ve stumbled across a neat toy in the form of AppBrain, a snazzy bit of kit for Android ‘phones that finally brings the one feature I’ve been missing since getting my Milestone: a desktop interface to the Android Market. It’s a simple concept: you install a client app on your ‘phone, and then it syncs [...]

I’ve been scoffing at the iPad since its details were first announced: no Flash support; no multitasking; no third-party unapproved apps; why would I ever want one? Well, I think I’ve just found the answer in the Marvel Comics app.  Quite frankly, it looks awesome. The guys over at Boing Boing have got the details, [...]

Having finished my articles this morning, I figured it was time for an apt-get dist-upgrade on the laptop to ensure I was running the latest versions of everything.  A quick download and install later, and it was time to reboot. At which point Firefox broke completely. No starty, no error – even when launched from [...]

I appear to have broken my netbook. Well, ‘broken’ might be a bit steep – it no longer responds to a lid close event with the nice, neat standby mode it once treated me to.  Instead, it triggers the standby script and gets itself into a half-on, half-off state. In this state, the power light [...]

I came home tonight to find that my Internet connection had crapped out, but that’s not what this post is about.  This post is about how Billion – that is, the company rather than the oft-misused numerical value – software engineers are perhaps not the sharpest tools in the box. After restarting my router, the [...]

Google has unveiled a new addition to the Google Maps for Mobile fold: Latitude.  Basically, it’s a service which tracks your location – or, technically, the location of your ‘phone – and tells your friends where you are.  Obviously, you can see your friends’ locations too. It’s pretty snazzy, and integrates well with the Google [...]

I use the open-source Pidgin IM client, and came home to discover it had stopped connecting to my MSN Messenger account with the error “Unable to retrieve MSN address book.” Turns out that Microsoft have blocked the version of the protocol Pidgin’s MSN plugin uses to communicate with their servers.  While this is bound to [...]