Snowy Day

January 6th, 2010 by pete 1 comment »

Not leaving the house today. Alas, that doesn’t mean I don’t work, but there’ll probably be time for a snowman or two.

This is Cold Ash hill this morning – that’s a 1:10 hill, so there’s sod all chance of anyone getting up it unless they have a good 4WD car.

It’s still snowing.

Cold Ash Weather

December 25th, 2009 by pete No comments »

I know, it’s a geeky, slightly sad and to some, boring thing.  I don’t care

Cold Ash Weather Page

Finally, I’ve uploaded my Grandad’s Recollections.

December 19th, 2009 by pete No comments »

This took way too long.  I’ve uploaded a scanned and OCRed version of a document that my Grandad, Jim Harpur, dictated to someone from the National Archives in Ireland back in 1950.  Since I’ve done some of the Connolly side of the family, I thought it would be great to get some Harpur notes on here as well.  I know I can’t find my paper copy of these notes, so my Ma was good enough to send them over again, as well as some other documents that I need to get scanned.  Hopefully, the good folks at Google will index this mine of information for the future.

You can read the Jim Harpur’s recollections starting here

Removing a password protected Symantec AntiVirus

December 2nd, 2009 by pete 1 comment »

The magic key I need to remember:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\INTEL\LANDesk\VirusProtect6\CurrentVersion\Administrator Only\Security\UseVPUninstallPassword

Change to 0 (zero)  and run the uninstall program again.  Voila!

Domain Renewal Group – scammy smelling snailmail

November 28th, 2009 by pete 2 comments »

Another day, another letter from “Domain Renewal Group” sent to our house, warning that one of my domain names (my main work one) will expire on April 10th 2010.   Apart from the fact that it’s a wee bit early to renew (I’d prefer to keep my cash in the bank as long as possible, TYVM), they charge an outrageous £20 for a single year.  One & One charge me £8.99, so we’re looking at a 122% increase, yet they don’t host the web site or email, they just redirect these to ones I supply myself.

A pretty poor offer, yet their modus operandi seems to be:

  • Do a whois lookup for the billing contact for a domain that will expire in the next N months (N seems to be getting larger)
  • Send a letter on good quality paper to this address, vague enough to confuse a non-technical person.
  • Take their ridiculous cut for not doing very much.
  • Profit!

There’s more information over here about their dodgy practices. People are even implying that they won’t provide the basic service they claim, but I can’t comment on that since I’ll never use their service.

Parasites.

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