Luckily, it’s possible to switch the columns back to how it was displayed previously. All that is needed is Greasemonkey, and the installation of a user script. I found a great script created by saintjava – I’ve taken a copy of it and uploaded it to my server so that you can download it. If you have Greasemonkey installed, then clicking the download link should be enough to get the script installed. Afterwards, Twitter should now look a little bit more like it did before:

Since Gmail’s recent redesign, you can access Tasks from a dropdown menu in the top left:

However, this just displays the tasks in a pop-up in the bottom right. Thankfully, there’s a way to display them in the main window, so I can keep track of tasks without having to navigate to an extra window. First, open your Mail settings by clicking on the config icon in the top right, then selecting Mail settings:

Then, select the ‘Labs’ tab. You want to enable a feature called ‘Add any gadget by URL’.

Finally, select the ‘Gadgets’ tab, and enter ‘http://www.google.com/ig/modules/tasks.xml’ in the text box and click Add.

You’ll now have a Tasks gadget in the Gmail sidebar – much more convenient!

Initially, when adding my account details into the app, I got the following error message on my phone, which reads as follows: ‘Connection Error: XMLRPC Fault: XML-RPC services are disabled on this site. An admin user can enable them at http://www.keanei.com/…/options-writing.php (code 405)’.

Luckily, this error is easy to solve. Simply log into your WordPress dashboard, then from the ‘Settings’ menu choose ‘Writing’. Here, there will be an option to enable XML-RPC Remote Publishing, simply tick the box and save the settings.

Now you should be able to add your WordPress account to the app!

The solution (which I have now discovered is very simple) is to setup a virtual host. I decided to setup a virtual host called ‘keanei’ which would show the directory ‘www/keanei’.

Firstly, you need to edit WAMP’s httpd.conf file to allow virtual hosts. To do this, click on the WAMP icon in the system tray, then select Apache and click on httpd.conf:

The file will open in Notepad. Now, uncomment the line below ‘#Virtual hosts’ so that the virtual hosts configuration file is included:

Now you need to open httpd-vhosts.conf for editing. The default path for this is ‘c:\wamp\bin\apache\Apachex.x.xx\conf\extra’, although on my PC I have WAMP installed on d:. As you can see below, I’ve added two virtual hosts – one that maps ‘localhost’ to ‘d:\wamp\www’, and one that hosts ‘keanei’ to ‘d:\wamp\www\keanei.co.uk’:

The next step is to edit the Windows ‘hosts’ file. The usual path for this is ‘c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc’. The basic file will include an entry for ‘localhost’, but I’ve added one for ‘keanei’:

Finally, restart WAMP, and the new configuration will be in place. Now I can type ‘keanei’ into my web browser and it will display the contents of ‘d:\wamp\www\keanei.co.uk’, and most importantly all relative links will now work correctly!

The problem here is that the Android Market uses a cache to download the .apk files. This cache is stored in /cache, but in HTC devices /cache is pretty small and is shared with other caches, such as the Dalvik cache. One method of getting around this limitation is to set up a download folder elsewhere and change /cache/download to be a symlink. Instructions on how to do this are on the CyanogenMod forum, but I’ve reproduced them below.

You’ll need a terminal emulator installed on your device (which needs root, but if you’re reading this you’ll almost certainly have root anyway). Open this up, then enter the following commands:

mkdir /mnt/sdcard/market-download-cache
su
cd /cache
mv download download.bak
ln -s /mnt/sdcard/market-download-cache download
ls -ahl .

The final line is just to check that the symlink has been set up correctly. Now larger apps should download and install without any problems at all.

Unfortunately, there is no general option to turn off comments under images or attachments. The solution I’ve found is to override the code in attachment.php which displays the comment box. Here is how I did this:

• My custom theme is based on the Thematic theme. The file used to generate the code to display attachments as a post is attachment.php. This file will also generate the code to display images as a post if image.php is missing (which in my case it is). So I copied attachment.php from /wp-content/themes/thematic to /wp-content/themes/mytheme
• I opened the copied file in Notepad++ and commented out the following line:

  comments_template();

• I uploaded this file to the webserver and now the comments box no longer appears under attachments or images.

This solution isn’t perfect – as you can see if you click on the image above, underneath it still displays some text suggesting you leave a comment. But the comment box is no longer there which is the main thing. I’ll work on updating this text in future but hopefully I’ll now see a reduction in comment spam on image posts.

Thankfully it’s not too difficult to disable – type about:config into the address bar, and search for ‘dom.ipc’.Then change the value for ‘dom.ipc.plugins.enabled’ from true to false (just double clicking on it should change the value).

Once this is done, restart Firefox and it will no longer use plugin-container. Now web pages featuring Flash no longer slow down my PC quite as badly!

Once the virus has been installed, you are presented with the following screen when you start up, asking you to click to do a ‘Safe Startup’:

There are several automated tools available to fix this, but I prefer to do it manually (some of the tools may themselves contain viruses). Here are the steps I followed to clear the virus from the machine:

• Reboot the computer, press F8 before Windows starts and select the option to enter Windows in Safe Mode with Command Prompt only.
• Once the command prompt appears, type ‘explorer’ and press enter:
  
• This will then bring up the normal Windows dekstop. From here, go to the Start button, then choose Run, and enter ‘regedit’ to open the Registry Editor.
• In the Registry Editor, you need to navigate to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon’, and look for the Shell key, which will have a value of a filepath and ‘gog.exe’. Take a note of the filepath, then delete this key.
  
• Now, open Windows Explorer and navigate to the filepath noted previously. Here you should find ‘gog.exe’, which can now be deleted.
  

Finally, restart the PC normally and it should load Windows normally. Now it would be advisable to run a full virus scan, and also use something like Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware to ensure nothing is left.

First of all, Outlook would crash whenever it tried to synchronise with my Gmail account via IMAP. Despite setting it to only synchronise my Inbox, it would still take a long time and would usually fail before completion. To fix this, I’ve changed it so that Outlook only downloads headers. This has made things much quicker. To do this, first of all go to the ‘Send/Receive’ tab, select ‘Send/Receive Groups’ and then ‘Define Send/Receive Groups’:

Then, on the next window choose ‘Edit’:

Finally, select the account to change on the left, then under ‘Receive mail items’ choose the option that you’d like.

The next step for me was to change the setting that deals with viewing emails in the Reading pane. My preference is for the email to be marked as read once it’s highlighted and is being viewed in the Reading pane. To do this, first of all choose the ‘File’ tab, then select ‘Options’:

Next, choose ‘Mail’ from the list on the left, and click on ‘Reading Pane’ under ‘Outlook panes’:

Finally, click the box to select ‘Mark items as read when viewed in the Reading Pane’ and choose a custom time if desired.

The last step (for now) was to change the view so that conversations were threaded, as they are in the Gmail web client. To do this, simply select the ‘View’ tab, then tick the box next to ‘Show as Conversations’. This will then show emails in threads if they are related.

One more thing I’d like to have in Outlook is the option to archive an email, but it doesn’t seem to be possible without using customised scripts to replicate the feature.

The only solution I’ve found is to change one of the settings in about:config. In about:config, type ‘webgl’ into the filter. The preference name that needs changing is ‘webgl.force_enabled’. Simply double click this to change the value to ‘true’:

Now, sites such as get.webgl.org should work without any problems!