I took call from a reader today who couldn't access a link in the magazine because they had entered it into the search engine box rather than the address bar of the browser. It's an easy mistake to make. After all, the search box is right in the middle of the screen.

It's not always a problem, type www.computeractive.co.uk into Google and the website is the first result in the list. But, type www.snipca.com/X911 (a shortened link to Windows Update) and there are no matches.

Surely it's not beyond the likes of Google to look through the search term and warn that it might be a link in the wrong place if www or http:// is found.

Posted by Tim Smith on February 3, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last year I took a look at the Fritzbox router. It’s expensive, but an incredibly versatile piece of kit and great for making calls over the internet using ordinary phones, either plugged into the back or wirelessly using DECT.

Now it looks like the final kind of phone in the home, the mobile, is going to be added to the Fritzbox fold. AVM has announced the Fritz!App (scroll down to the bottom), which will be available for iPhone and Android. It will allow the smartphone to connect to the router and then use the landline or access the built in answer phones. Incoming calls can also be routed to the smartphone.

All sounds quite impressive so I’m hoping that this will be available for current models like the 7270 and not just the new ones announced at Cebit.

Posted by Tim Smith on February 2, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rather more ambitious in terms of scale than Discover Europe, Pole to Pole takes you on a 20,000 mile journey from the North Pole down through Canada, the US and South America. A new aircraft is provided in the pack, the Aero Commander 680.

Feeling like Michael Palin we strapped in and took off on a very long journey.

The Aero Commander 680 is a twin engine plane and quite different from the Piper Pacer. The exterior model and cockpit are very good. Most of the instruments are visible without opening extra panels, although the GPS can be opened by itself, it’s visible in the cockpit, just. Then again, I use a 1680x1050 monitor for Flight Sim, so you might need to use the extra panel on smaller sizes or a second monitor.

Just like Discover Europe, there is a PDF manual with details of all the flights with particular points of interest. Our only criticism is that we’d have liked to have seen an overall map.

As the flights are saved flights there is no obligation to fly them in order so you can jump to flights that interest you, or try again if a landing goes badly. Don’t forget that you can also save flights yourself, useful if you’re limited to shorter time than the flights.

Notable locations include Castlegar airport in Canada, with a very challenging approach due to mountains on all sides, and St Maarten with a low approach over a popular tourist beach. To see how low, watch this Youtube video or see the Wikipedia page with photos and warnings about jet blast. The travelogue helpfully includes a link to landing charts for Castlegar from IVAO, an impressive enthusiasts site for Canadian airspace.

One of the reasons I like Pole to Pole is that I learnt some important lessons about flying, specifically setting the correct mixture for the engines. If Flight Simulator is not set to adjust this automatically, you will need to reduce the mixture as you climb. Not knowing this I struggled to reach the altitude required to get over some mountains. My thanks to Jane Whittaker at First Class Simulations for explaining so patiently.

Pole to Pole should keep any flight sim enthusiast occupied for some time and has certainly expanded both my knowledge of interesting airports around the world and my flying skills.

Pole to Pole costs £25 and requires Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 or X.

Posted by Tim Smith on January 28, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not a bad offer here. Get a six month subscription to McAfee Internet Security if you become a fan on Facebook. Once you’re a fan, click on the ‘Protect My PC’ tab on the McAfee page.

If you’re wondering why the offer is greyed out, that’s because you have to become a fan first. Once done, select your language and the McAfee download page will load automatically.

It may also be worth become a fan of the Facebook Security page.

Posted by Tim Smith on January 28, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Fascinating post on the F-Secure blog about what privacy settings in Facebook really mean. Sean added a photo to a Facebook account making sure that every option was set to private. Unfortunately Facebook still adds a public link for the image. Checking the link I realised that this isn’t just a link for anyone on Facebook, you don’t even need to logged in to view it.

Something to bear in mind before you post photos, no matter how funny they are.

Posted by Tim Smith on January 21, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (4)

Passwords. They keep our details and web accounts safe, but they are a real pain to remember. I have to rely on the good nature of our IT department every time I come back from holiday because I invariably forget my password.

The temptation is to try and avoid having to remember them whenever possible, but this can be a big problem, especially if your laptop is stolen.

Lifehacker gives some helpful advice in their article ‘Your passwords aren’t as secure as you think; Here’s how to fix that’.

It was something of an eye-opener for me. I hadn’t realised that the Pidgin instant messaging software stores all of the passwords as plain text. They have a good reason for doing so (not giving a false sense of security) but as I had never known this I still had the false sense of security.

Thankfully there is plenty of useful advice on how to keep your passwords safe with password managers that use encryption. Well worth a read.

Posted by Tim Smith on January 21, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here’s a clever idea. A font that is designed to be printed, cut out and then glued into 3D shapes.

Not something for a website or essay obviously but may prove useful for various creative products.

Download the font from dfont.com here.

Posted by Tim Smith on January 20, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following the current trend for add-ons offering more than just new aircraft, Discover Europe is a collection of saved flights making round trip of Europe covering 11,000 miles in 64 flights produced by First Class Simulations.

There is a new aircraft supplied, the Piper Pacer. This is a high wing monoplane, so there is nothing in the way of getting a good view out of the window.

Apart from our usual moan of the lack of printed manuals there is a better than average amount of documentation available. There are three manuals covering installation, pilots notes and a tutorial. The latter covers the important topics of where gauges and controls are in the Pacer and the appropriate speeds. Images showing the routes and a quick reference for the Pacer cockpit are also included.

The Pacer model is very good with plenty of detail. The choice of this aircraft dating from Fifties means that the cockpit is quite basic, though there is an autopilot for altitude and heading. The Pacer is good for this kind of touring as it is easy to fly and quite forgiving, but a newer aircraft would have offered more helpful navigational aids, and maybe a slightly higher cruising speed.

The most important gauges are well placed but the very large control yoke does obscure the Vertical Speed Indicator, Turn and Slip gauge and the Horizontal Situation Indicator. The latter is a little annoying because the HSI is used to set the autopilot heading.

There is a separate instrument panel that can be enabled to see the instruments that are not easy to see in the 3D cockpit. The most important of these the autopilot and the fuel gauges. The radio controls are easy to see but using the ATC window means the frequencies are changed automatically anyway.

The low speed is good for the sightseeing parts of the flights but does present a bit of a problem with the longer sections of the flights. This is mainly due to a shortcoming in Flight Simulator with speeding up time.

All of the Discover Europe flights come with a Flight Plan so you receive guidance from the Air Traffic Controllers (ATC). Each instruction must be acknowledged. If not, the ATC asks twice more and then cancels the flight plan. The trouble is that the ATC commands don’t cancel the acceleration and there is no keyboard shortcut either. This makes it impossible to respond in time at higher acceleration settings.

It is possible to re enable the flight plan but it is annoying. The best solution is to pause the game as quickly as possible after an ATC request and then change the simulation rate.

Something like the Aero Commander 680 from Pole to Pole (also by First Class) would have offered a faster cruise speed but without spoiling the view as much using a low winged aircraft.

The biggest problem with Discover Europe is the price. The Piper Pacer model is very good, but the saved flights are relatively easy to create yourself with an atlas, which makes the £25 price tag feel quite steep. Even so, Discover Europe is a great way to explore Flight Simulator.

Posted by Tim Smith on January 12, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Installing Windows 7 alongside Windows Vista was convenient but I was a little lazy moving my files. When I couldn’t put it off, I dragged and dropped the files from my backup to the Documents folder. Realising that this would take some time, I went off to get some dinner.

Sadly, I returned to find that there had been an out of memory error while copying one of the files. I clicked on Retry but then it happened again.

So I went back to what I’d used to make the backup in the first place, and should have used to restore it, Freefilesync.

This is a clever (and free) utility that can be used for large file transfers or for backups. It compares two folders (including subfolders) and then copies files between them so they become identical.

In this case, where there are gigabytes of files to copy, it has the big advantage that you can save the job and come back to it later on if you are interrupted (I dislike leaving my computer on overnight). It also meant that there was no problem with the fact that I had got halfway through the files when I had to cancel copying.

Files can be compared either by size and date, or by their contents and there are several templates for how to handle situations where a file with the same name and location exists on both sides. These rules can be overruled for individual files.

Just as importantly, you can decide what happens when files are deleted, with the option to copy them to another folder, just to make sure nothing important is lost.

Posted by Tim Smith on January 12, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hopefully I’m not too far from normal with the challenge of working on documents across several computers, not to mention different versions of Windows and Ubuntu.

USB keys are one solution provided you remember to put them back in your pocket and online office suites like Zoho and Google Docs are best used when you’re, well, online.

Enter Dropbox. It’s an online service that offers 2GB of storage at no cost (or 50GB and 100GB for $10 or $20 a month respectively) with a clever program that updates files automatically. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Folders can also be marked for sharing with other Dropbox users, which should come in handy when working on projects with several people.

Dropbox isn’t the only online storage service. I’m also using the paid for version of Humyo for backing up my work, but it’s handy to have a separate account just for working from and sharing with friends.

Posted by Tim Smith on January 7, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (5)