Technology

Another "note to self" post.

PayPal have changed things so that you need a business account to set up an "IPN" notification endpoint. In their own words:

Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is a PayPal feature that sends messages about payments (and other transactional events) directly from PayPal to your website(s)' back-end systems.

For many years I have used Retrospect for backing up our home computers. It's very important to have a thought-through backup strategy, that includes keeping more than one copy of your data, including at least one copy that is "off-site". If disaster strikes, such as your computer hard-drive failing, you wouldn't want to lose all your documents, photos and possibly emails.

I've been putting off learning how to build sites in Drupal 8, and migrating my existing Drupal 7 sites over to Drupal 8. Why? Drupal 8 uses a lot of new tools. I want to learn how to set up a Drupal 8 site in the "right" (optimal) way so that I don't incur technical debt for myself later on. That means I have a lot of tools to learn. That takes time, which I don't have a lot of. So I've procrastinated.

Yesterday, someone posted a comment on a post of mine discussing a critical bug in NetNanny, software that can be used to help children use a computer safely (including browsing the internet without stumbling across inappropriate material). At least, it could be used, once they fix this absolutely devastating bug that makes it absolutely useless.

I've owned a number of Android phones over the years. Some have been relatively high-end, with good RAM and storage space for their day. Others have been budget models, that come with the bare minimum to get things done. They're slightly slow and laggy to use, you can't install everything on it, but they do the job.

After over 10 years of development, SuperTuxKart has released version 1.0.

It's been a long road. In December 2009, the long task of porting over to an entirely new codebase, Irrlicht, was complete. In December 2014, a new version was released with a new graphics rendering engine that made the 3d graphics faster and a lot more realistic. But still the versions were numbered 0.x.

Over 10 years ago, I first published a piece of software called Bible Reading Plan Generator. It is very simple: You enter a list of books of the Bible you want to read (or a pre-prepared list, such as "Gospels"), and the number of days you want to spend reading them. It will divide those books up into the most evenly lengthed sections possible.

This article offers a simple tool and some instructions to help anyone with the following problem: You've obtained a copy of Microsoft Office (for Windows) via Microsoft's charity donation scheme, only to discover that you have to use their Volume Licensing system to install it. This means that you don't get a nice, easy setup wizard to follow; instead, you find the process less than straight forward for those who don't live and breathe technology.

On 31st January 2014, I paid £2.42 to Google Play for a copy of Swype Keyboard. (That link is broken, unless you too bought it). At that time, it was by far the best onscreen Android keyboard that lets you trace the word you're typing with your finger.

Control panels make a web server a sinch to use. If you sign up for shared web hosting, you'll be given a login for the control panel to manage just your account. Even if you run a whole server (virtual or dedicated) there are great advantages to using a control panel. Some control panels are free (like VirtualMin), and others you have to pay for (like cPanel).