If you use Gmail /Google Buzz and a POP client for your email, chances are you’re receiving a bunch of emails telling you about new buzz’s – including your own updates!

This is very annoying and there’s no direct setting to turn it off. However this guy has come up with a great solution, by basically creating a Gmail filter for emails containing the words in:buzz

This is one of those routine web development things which you assume is inbuilt, but actually proves quite tedious to find a nice solution to.

Specifically, I am talking about converting something like ' to ‘ or & to & directly in Javscript.
This function does exactly that! Note how it adds a function to the prototype for String, so is called in the following way:

"Hello José".unescapeHtml()

Find the code here: paul schreiber » Blog Archive » JavaScript: how to unescape HTML entities.

So ever since I’ve been using Windows 7, every so often I get this annoying error message when saving files, most often when using “Save link as…” from within Firefox (but not only). I would get this error, and the file would in fact be created taking up 0 bytes. However when trying to re-save over it directly after, it would work correctly… so wasn’t too serious an issue.

The full error message is:

You don’t have permission to modify files in this network location.
Contact the administrator per permission to make these changes.

(I thought the “per permission” looked a bit funny…)

Anyway, after looking at this thread, it seems it this issue is NOD32-related. The solution I tried was disabling the “Scan on File Creation” option within NOD32, found under Setup → Antivirus and antispyware → Real-time system protection.

You could argue it’s less secure, but it seems to have worked and it’s a price I’m willing to pay.

Hope this helps anyone having a similar problem.

So after my last post I had pretty much given on the Windows 7 backup. But then for some reason I got the suspicion that the hard drive I was using might be faulty. So anyway, I did a full scan disk and it did in fact find some bad sectors on the disk.

So I switched to another external disk and tried the whole thing all over again.. and it worked! Well, almost. For some reason it still kept complaining about a non-existant directory, C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\Web Development

Anyway this site gave me an obvious but useful solution: just create the empty folder it’s looking for! So I did and now it works properly without complaining. It’s still not my only backup, but it’s good to know I at least have it in case I need it.

Like lots of people who use Thunderbird, I was getting irritated when receiving emails from Outlook users with the smiley’s replaced by J’s.

Unsuprisingly, it’s Microsoft’s fault because they just simply don’t care about other clients and standards. Anyway, here’s how to fix it:

j’s in Thunderbird emails Outlook smiley faces | The Swan Song.

It took me a short while to find out how to do this, so I thought I’d share.

Pin A Folder To Windows Explorer Jump List In Windows 7 ~ Windows Fanatics.

So I went ahead and installed Windows 7, and I just love it. Truth be told, I liked Vista – and 7 is just the next solid step.
I have a Sony Vaio “VGN-CR21S/W” and needed to install a few drivers manually which I downloaded from the Vaio Support site (http://genesis.sony-europe.com/instranet/ccil_sony/selfservice/index.jsp?l=en_IE&m=VGN-CR21S_W)

That was all nice enough.. I steered clear of all that Vaio Media crap, it’s all bloatware as far as I’m concerned.

But one thing I did have a little trouble with was getting the keyboard volume and brightness controls to work. After a little searching and experimenting, it seems you need to install the following to get things working in that department:

1. VAIO Event Service
2. VAIO Power Management
3. Sony Shared Library

It would seem safe to install each in that order, and restarting between each one. I suspect it’s not essential, but best be safe and avoid confusion.

Thanks to this post: http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-support/3860-sony-vaio-fn-keys.html

PS: Haven’t tested bluetooth properly yet, will put any updates here.

I love FF but one of my pet peeves is how it sometimes messes up the favicons in my bookmarks. This plugin works perfectly, allowing you to reset or even set your own custom favicon. Plus it’s totally unobtrusive, just adds an extra option in a bookmark’s properties window.

Nice!

Favicon Picker 3 :: Add-ons for Firefox

Found this quite useful.. Linked to google cache version because the actual page wouldn’t load when I tried…

Bring Misplaced Off-Screen Windows Back to Your Desktop (Keyboard Trick) :: the How-To Geek.

Just as it says on the tin!

BibWord : Microsoft Word Citation and Bibliography styles

All you do is download the XSL file for the style you want and place it in the right directory, and hey presto Word 2007 can format your citations in a new style. Nice.