Michael Turner
IT Consultant & Young Entrepreneur from Somerset
Quick Reminder about DNS & DHCP
Aug 9th
Hi All,
I have recently had an issue with a clients ADSL line, which decided to be a right pain, it usually had around 4mbps, then one week it decided to drop down to dial-up speed. It was absolutely awful, very difficult to do anything, when they have an office with 30 workstations chugging away.
We raised a ticket with the ISP in question and long-story short, we had to get a new line installed, it turns out the line was damaged somewhere between the building and the exchange.
So now that we were presented with a new IP range, we had to reset lots of devices, printers, scanners, access points and of course the servers, proxy server and static-ip PC’s.
All the DHCP PC’s would automatically get the new IP once we had change the scope on the DHCP server, so we thought.
But it didn’t and the reason is, that you must remember to restart both the DNS and DHCP services otherwise the Microsoft Server 2008 will not use the new scope!
My iPad Review
Jun 5th
I’ve been using my iPad now for little over a week, I’m even writing part of my blog using it!
It’s a great tool for everyday use, especially if you’re like me, you can’t be without your laptop or phone for more than a few minutes, it solves the gap of being able to lookup something which would normally be too small on my iPhone’s screen or I would forget about it, by the time my laptop has powered up.
It’s excellent for integrating and catching up on social media, largely twitter and facebook, although TweetDeck does crash occasionally and we are waiting for the updated iPad official Twitter app. I’ve been using Facebook.com, rather than the app as it just looks awful, I can’t quite work out Apple’s idea behind the iPhone App mode, it’s not appealing and certainly doesn’t follow Apple’s normally well aesthetically designed software.
I’ve downloaded a few apps, including iBooks and Kindle, although I’ve not purchased any Books yet, I’m not sure I will, as it looks cheaper to buy a paper copy of the book and I would be a lot happier loaning that to a friend!
There are some great games available, I’ve become addicted to Harbour Master (Free) and it’s Flight Ctrl counterpart (£2.99). – My best score so far is 85, I’m not sure how the leading gamer has managed to achieve nearly 2,000 points, some real dedication there!
What I love about the iPad as it’s a good insight into Apple’s great software, without having to pay the Mac price-tag. Now that they have completely re-designed and launched iWorks on the app store, I can sit on the train and create a presentation on the fly and then using the VGA adapter (£25) connect my iPad to a project and present, I can also create spreadsheets and even word-process on the go.
This leads me on to the keyboard [Image], it’s a lot more difficult than the iPhone, it’s too small to use two hands and it’s too big to use your two thumbs, so you have to use one hand or squish your hands together and try to avoid making too many mistakes. – Of course you could always purchase a wireless Bluetooth keyboard.
In addition one of the big let downs of the iPhone and now iPad is lack of Adobe Flash integration, which now seems to be even further away [Image].
I’m looking forward to using my iPad over the next few months and I hope that developers continue to build fantastic apps that continue to help everyday tasks and keep me occupied.
Follow me on Twitter @tkitmike to keep up to date on my review of the iPad
So which Invoicing App did I choose?
May 1st
Well, after looking around for weeks, I finally saw an article on Mashable about InvoiceBubble, from the developer of successful Project Bubble.
invoiceBubble is less than the price of a posh latte at just £3.50 / $5 per month.
Whilst mainly targeted at the US market, the developer Stu is based in England, they recently moved their servers to the Rackspace Cloud, so this should result in improved uptime and speed.
I decided to choose InvoiceBubble over FreeAgent due to my accountant not ‘happy’ to use its advanced feature set, so I felt it was unreasonable to pay considerably extra and not use many of the very good features.
InvoiceBubble makes Invoicing easy, with recurring invoices, PDF Invoices attached to emails, CSV exporting and customisation and part-payments on its way soon.
If you’re looking for an easy to use Invoicing solution with better features than Curdbee, try InvoiceBubble!
