Chris: Geek Guy

I braved the queues (actually, the barrage of error messages) on Tuesday, 15 July, to pre-order my iPhone 4 direct from Apple. Hopefully I’ll save in the long run as I’m planning to go for a £10-15 pay-as-you-go or SIM-only contract deal rather than being tied in to a £30+ contract for 18 to 24 months.

Until I’ve figured out which operator to go with, I plan to stick with my current O2 contract. I’ve crossed my fingers that O2 will ship me a microSIM before I get the phone, otherwise I will be going down the DIY route, trimming my existing SIM down using this PDF template. In case you don’t read German, here’s a quick translation of the instructions:

Micro-SIM template for iPad/iPhone 4 SIM cards

The Apple iPad (and upcoming iPhone 4) uses not a standard 25x15mm SIM card, but a micro-SIM. The micro-SIM format is 15x12mm, but the contact layout is identical to a standard SIM.

Therefore, it is possible to convert a standard SIM into a micro-SIM which can be installed in the iPad or fourth-generation iPhone.

How does it work?

1. Print the stencil at 100% – don’t shrink to fit the page. The outer black portion should match the size of your existing SIM.
2. Cut and paste the stencil on the back of the SIM (not on the contacts!). The white area must be exactly on the reverse side of the chip.
3. With sharp scissors, cut cleanly along the outline of the inner white area.
4. Remove the stencil. If necessary,  diagonally trim the corners and/or grind down the edges with a nail file.

I accept no responsibility if you damage your SIM by following these instructions… in fact I’m too busy worrying about whether I’ll break mine!

There are commercial card cutters that can do the job, but I can’t justify spending upwards of £20 for something I’ll only use once or twice at most, and again there’s no guarantee that the item would be delivered by launch day.

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My brother-in-law recently reported a problem with his Dell XPS M1530 laptop. When starting the laptop (using the power button), it displayed a greyscale Dell MediaDirect logo for a few seconds, then a Blue Screen of Death relating to a Plug & Play driver.

When I restarted while holding F8 in an attempt to access Windows Vista in safe mode, the boot menu showed only “Windows XP Embedded”, and booting into safe mode just resulted in another blue screen. This is when I began to suspect the MediaDirect feature, which allows users to view media such as DVD movies without having to boot into full Windows.

Sure enough, when I powered off the machine and pressed the “Home” logo button, the laptop attempted to boot into MediaDirect (with a colour logo) and showed the same blue screen as before.

I did some research online and ended up finding a download for a MediaDirect Repair boot CD. This appeared to run successfully, but actually didn’t help. Now when I booted up, I just got a black DOS-type screen with the text “2 active partitions” in the top left-hand corner. It looked like the repair CD had somehow corrupted the partition table by setting two partitions as active – not good news!

Fortunately, I found a forum post by a user of a different model of Dell laptop running Windows XP. This inspired me to try the Vista recovery CD (you can also use your original Vista installation CD if you have it to hand), running the BootRec /FIXMBR and BootRec /FIXBOOT commands as detailed in this knowledge base article.

This fixed the issue and the laptop was now able to boot into Vista as normal.

I then tried my luck with powering off the machine and booting into MediaDirect using the “Home” button. Unfortunately this brought the system back to its earlier, broken state, and turning it off and on again using the power button revealed that I wasn’t able to get back into Vista!

I repeated the BootRec steps and this got the system working once again. Further research showed that Dell have released a new version of MediaDirect which removes the “dual boot” functionality, so I can only imagine they’ve had quite a few problems with it!

I returned the machine it to my brother-in-law with instructions not to touch the Home button for the time being, and to try installing the new MediaDirect software. I’ll report back when I hear the results.

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At work, I recently needed to edit a database connection string in an Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately the macros were password protected, the person who wrote the spreadsheet left the company some years ago, and we had no record of the password.

Luckily, thanks to a post on David Bugden’s blog, I discovered that it’s simple to circumvent VBA macro password protection without having to purchase a commercial utility such as Passware’s VBA Key.

The hex editor method worked for me in Excel 2003, although I’m not sure whether Microsoft have beefed up the security in 2007 and later versions.

If you want to remove the password used to protect/unprotect worksheets and workbooks, there is some information available here.

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Having held an AA membership for just under a year, I recently had occasion to call them out for the first time. I wasn’t at all pleased with the experience, so decided to vote with my feet and look into signing up with one of their competitors.

When I mentioned this to a colleague, he recommended Auto Aid. Like the AA, the RAC and Green Flag, they provide breakdown cover for £37 per year, which is quite reasonable. They don’t operate their own recovery fleet, but instead send out a local garage to pick up your car. You then pay the cost of the recovery on your credit card and claim this back from Auto Aid. A year’s membership costs £37, which covers yourself and your spouse and includes recovery to and from anywhere in the UK,  even if you break down on your doorstep.

I hadn’t heard of Auto Aid before my colleague mentioned it, but renowned financial expert Martin Lewis has good things to say about Auto Aid on his Money Saving Expert website so I decided to give it a go.

Their website is basic but tells you everything you need to know. I filled in the online application and received a call back the next day to confirm that I wanted to go ahead and to take my payment. Five minutes later, I was covered, and for a fraction of what the AA would have charged me for renewal.

Hopefully I won’t need to call them out any time soon, but if I do I’ll be sure to report back. I’d be very surprised if they did any worse than the AA though, given my recent experience!

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One of the factors that dictates browsing speed is the time it takes to do a DNS lookup – that is, convert a domain name such as google.com into an IP address such as 209.85.227.105. Generally most people use the DNS servers operated by their ISP. Usually this is fine, but sometimes ISP DNS servers can be unreliable, and they’re not always the fastest choice.

There are many free public DNS services, such as OpenDNS and search giant Google’s Public DNS, but it’s difficult to know which one is best for you. Enter NameBench, a free cross-platform tool which tests a raft of public DNS services using either your browser history or a list of top domains. Once the tests are complete, you receive a summary of the results including suggested primary, secondary and tertiary servers:

So if you’ve got a few minutes to spare, why not see if you can shave a few milliseconds from your page load times?

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I’ve just installed Virtual PC 2007 on my work laptop (which runs Windows XP), and when I tried to start it, I got the following error:

---------------------------
Virtual PC
---------------------------
Virtual PC has detected an invalid or missing Product ID.
A valid Product ID is required to operate Virtual PC. Please
re-run the Virtual PC installer and enter a valid Product ID when
requested.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

The solution is basically as described here, except I had to create the registry keys and values as they were missing on my machine.

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My employer’s SharePoint-powered external website – which I look after – uses ISAPI Rewrite to provide “friendly” URLs for certain pages, and also to redirect old URLs to their new locations. Coming from a LAMP background, this is great for me as it basically works the same as Apache’s mod_rewrite.

Previously the website responded to requests for both domain.com and www.domain.com, which is not ideal. SEO best practice is to either redirect the non-WWW version to the WWW version, or vice-versa. In my case, www.domain.com is the preferred format, so I’m using the following rule:

### Redirect domain.com to www.domain.com
RewriteCond Host: ^domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://www\.domain\.com$1 [I,RP]

If you want to do the opposite, you’ll need this one:

### Redirect www.domain.com to domain.com
RewriteCond Host: ^www\.domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://domain\.com$1 [I,RP]

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The Include Gadget allows you to embed any HTML page within your iGoogle start page without having to go to the trouble of writing a true iGoogle widget. I’ve created a “Work” tab on my iGoogle page and I’m using the Include Gadget to display the latest news from my company intranet alongside some other useful gadgets, as illustrated below.

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Like me, Darren Wright is fed up of seeing notifications in his news feed from applications such as FarmVille. Fortunately there’s an easy way to solve this, which doesn’t involve unfriending anybody!

Just click the Hide button next to one of the offending notifications, and you will be given the option to hide notifications from that application. Even better, this also stops the notifications from appearing on the Facebook mobile site, iPhone application and third-party readers such as TweetDeck.

Thanks to Darren for bringing this to my attention.

There’s also the option of switching to Facebook Lite, a back-to-basics version of Facebook which does away with applications altogether.

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I just tried to install Google Chrome on my Windows 7 machine and was faced with this obscure error message.

I found the answer on the Chrome support site – it’s caused by the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Setup\State\ImageState

Mine was set to IMAGE_STATE_UNDEPLOYABLE. Removing this value enabled the Google Chrome installer to proceed as normal.

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