Technical

Installing and configuring Thunderbird 3.1 for the first time, I discovered it would automatically create an IMAP email account, rather than POP3. In Thunderbird’s Account Settings / Server settings, there is no option to change from IMAP to POP3.

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EasyPHP is a free Web-server software suite, providing a Windows version of Apache, MySQL and PHP (WAMP) in an easy-to-install package. But it doesn’t run CGI programs automatically. But it is quite easy to enable.

After installing easyphp.org, and ensuring it runs to make the changes, you needs to quit! Then:

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Each time I started my PC, one of the boot-up screens was showing an error (edited):

Since my PC was still working, and I my hard disk was showing more than 465.8GB full, then the second physical drive must be working OK, despite the error message.

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From: “Scholar Support”
Subject: Meta data help

Thanks for your email regarding Google Scholar. In order to improve coverage and citation accuracy for your content in Google Scholar, we recommend that you provide us with article-level metadata for your publication(s). The easiest way to do so is by embedding “metatags” of your bibliographic information within your website’s HTML pages. Once the tags are in place, our crawlers can re-crawl this data and add it to the Scholar index.

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bid4vouchers.co.uk is a site that auctions store vouchers, with the winner typically winning a voucher at 75%-90% off face value.

Each bid cost money, which is how the site says it makes its money.

I discovered, for example, that of the last 7 auctions, the winner averaged 6 bids (max 13), for vouchers averaging just over £60 a time (max £150). If this is typical, it should be easy to pick up a bargain. And this seemed typical of the last few days.

In my first and only auction, the winner made 48 bids, I made 50 bids before I ran out of money. This seems suspiciously high compared to previous auctions. There is no way to contact other bidders, so no way to check whether such bidders really exist.

I’m not suggesting this is a scam, but Caveat Emptor.

I run a small PHP script that uses $HTTP_HOST to return the current host URL name, usually “127.0.0.1”. Today is stopped working. My suspicions are a new Microsoft Windows Update (KB951748), though I don’t think it has fully installed yet.

The problem arises with PHP v4 on Apache 1.3 and Windows XP with Service Pack 3. The problem does not arise with PHP 5 with Apache 2.2.8.

The workaround is to change occurrences of $HTTP_HOST to $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’]

Symptoms

After installing Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), my Plustek OpticBook 3600 stopped working.

Detailed description

On restarting my PC, and while the system tray is being populated, an error windows pops up with the message:

“AM32 Plus was unable to find some components of the software”

…with a suggestion to resinstall the scanner software (which I tried without it resolving the software)

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Our radiators needed bleeding to remove excess air (they were hot at the bottom, and cooler towards the top). But we need to get more water into the system via our Greenstar 24i junior (or 28i junior) boiler, as the panel was showing a pressure of around 0.5. Here’s how.

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Our son’s computer became infected with these adware programs.

Symptoms

The PCs Internet Explorer browser would pop-up new browser windows containing Web sites we were not interested in, including directing us to www.Zestyfind.com and www.look2me.com

The Solution

A utility program called kill2me, specifically designed to remove look2me, removed the adware, Download here.

More information only Zestyfind can be found here (I just removed the files named msg117.dll and msg.118.dll from the /windows/system folder), scanned with Spybot (see below), and restarted. There are also some similarly names files msg….acm which must not be touched.

You get use to the feel and responsiveness of your computer. So it was a surprise to find that my system started running slowly.

Symptoms

• On selecting various items on my desktop, there would be a slight delay before anything would happen. For example, on selecting a menu from the menu bar, or clicking the red Close icon in the top-right corner of a window. The delay was ‘only’ about half a second, but enough time to be noticeable.
• Drop-down windows would appear gradually. For example, if I selected the Edit menu, the menu would appear to fade-in gradually, making it look animated. If I moved from drop-down menu to menu, the delay would make it frustrating to browse through them.
• Moving windows around my desktop was very slow. If I clicked on the blue title bar of my browser, and held down the mouse button, on moving the window fairly fast, I would see ‘comet-like’ tracks behind the window’s movement, as the PC struggled to update the display. Every few seconds the display would freeze for an extra half second, making the movement of windows seem to jump across the screen.
• On playing videos, the video would occasionally freeze for a fraction of a second.

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