johna's blog

What to do with an old laptop

2022-08-19T12:00:00+10:00

I have an old notebook that is incapable of running a current version of Windows at an acceptable speed.

It's from 2013, so just under ten years old, and it is "powered" by an Intel Celeron 1.8GHz processor with 2Gb of memory.

It came with Windows 8, but it was painfully slow to use, partly due to the bloat that comes with the OEM (Compaq) installation.

I didn't even bother trying Windows 7 or 10 on it.

So what to do with this notebook?

My first plan was to try and do some retro computing by installing something like DOS 6.22 or Windows 95 or 98. But it seems that this computer is too new for such old operating systems.

So I installed the modern equivalent, FreeDOS, which was easy to download and install and worked well to run some old applications, although dBase IV needed some tweaks to get running properly.

But that got tiring quickly, so how about Linux? I searched for lightweight distributions and opted to try Xubuntu first. The installation process was kind of painful and slow. And, worst of all, at the end of it, the notebook failed to boot from the hard drive.

I decided to leave Linux there for now and move on to something else.

Was it possible to turn my notebook into a "Chromebook"? After a little searching I found Chrome OS Flex and I went ahead and downloaded and installed it according to Google's instructions, which went well.

The operating system is reasonably quick to load and is responsive to use. However, I did find that it was a little slow to load and browse web pages, although acceptable.

And despite mention of unobtrusive updates it wanted to restart and update twice once I started using it.

Chrome OS Flex wasn't quite the solution to an OS for an old computer that I was hoping for, but it is certainly worth a try.

So back to Linux. What about Linux Lite?

The installation went well but the first boot took a long time and seemed to be stuck on something network related. It eventually timed-out after more than five minutes and started up.

However, it was also slow and when Chrome finally loaded it couldn't access the network despite successfully connecting to the local wireless network during the installation process.

I don't have much patience so I gave up on Linux altogether at this point.

I thought I might install Windows XP so I could use the computer with some old car diagnostics software I had, but XP crashed while only starting the installation process, so I gave up on that too.

So this is where the story ends. I have reinstalled Chrome OS Flex as that, unfortunately, seems to be the best option. At least it is usable for web browsing, YouTube and other web-related tasks.

500 Internal Server Error after migrating from IIS 7.5 to IIS 10

2019-11-04T12:00:00+10:00

As support ends for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 in January 2020, I have recently gone through migrating some websites to a new server running Windows Server 2016 and IIS 10.

The websites were migrated with the Web Deploy Tool.

Some of the websites did not work, and simply brought up a 500 Internal Server Error, bypassing custom error pages. This is always a sign that the cause of the error might be in the web.config file.

After a little experimenting with commenting out certain sections of the web.config file, I found two sections that had compatibility issues between IIS 7.5 and IIS 10.

The first was the "staticContent" section. I had used this to allow IIS to server .woff and .svg files. This is no longer needed for those types of files in IIS 10 so the section could be removed.

The other problem was where the IIS URL rewrite module had been used to automatically redirect from HTTP to HTTPs.

This module is not installed in IIS 10 by default.

You could download the URL Rewrite extension (https://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/url-rewrite) but if you are only using this to redirect from HTTP to HTTPS then IIS 10 has an easier way of doing this:

• Open the IIS console and select the website
• On the "Actions" pane you will see the "HSTS" option below the "Configure" section
• Enable HSTS and "Redirect Http to Https"

(Source: https://www.hametbenoit.info/2018/10/22/windows-server-2019-you-can-now-easily-redirect-http-request-to-https/)

There may be other causes of these problems too but they should be reasonably easy to identify by commenting out sections of the web.config file one at a time and testing, and a little research with your favourite search engine.

How to send an Instagram DM on a Windows desktop PC

2019-09-04T12:00:00+10:00

I am not a regular user of Instagram but I recently needed to send a DM, but I couldn't find a way to do this on my work PC.

Embarrassingly, I resorted to Google and came to the conclusion that it was not possible on a desktop. I would have to use a mobile or download a desktop application (IG:dm).

This seems strange but okay, we are in a "mobile-first" world. But it's still a strange choice.

Even more strange is that apparently you can't send a message, but you can reply to one on a desktop.

I got to thinking... If I can do it on mobile maybe I can fool their website into thinking my desktop is a mobile.

Bingo!

Using your browser's developer tools you can easily access Instragram on your desktop using a mobile user agent.

Developer tools can be opened by pressing F12.

In Google Chrome turn on the device view toolbar (see screen capture, lower left corner). The toolbar will then appear at the top of the screen and you can choose a mobile device to emulate. Then go to the Instagram website (or reload if it is already open) and you will see the paper plane icon at the top right corner.

In Microsoft's Internet Explorer Developer Tools switch to the emulation tab and choose the Windows Phone browser profile, like in the screen capture below.

Microsoft Edge is similar. Just switch the device setting to one of the Nokia mobile phones.

Note that some devices or screen resolutions you choose to emulate using the browser developer tools might not show the icon, so you may need to experiment if you are not choosing one of the more basic devices.

You need a password system!

2018-10-10T12:00:00+10:00

For your security it is critical that you use strong passwords that are unique for each website.

If you are using the same password for every website then it can be quite easy for someone to get access to your accounts. Take a look at how simple this can be:

1. Malicious person or organisation sets up an attractive or useful website. This could be something like a competition, or a website offering something for free like ebooks or software.

2. To use this malicious website you must enter your email address and choose a password. You want the freebie so enter your email address and your usual password.

3. They now have access to your account on any websites that only require just an email address and password. They can attempt to login to popular websites such as PayPal, eBay, Facebook, Instagram, etc using your email address and the same password.

4. From your email address they may be able to determine your email provider, eg. Hotmail or Gmail, and gain access to your email account. Once they have access to your email account they can look through your emails and identify other websites you use, such as banking and PayPal. If your usual password doesn't work on these or other websites they can request a password reset via email and then get access to those accounts too.

Any websites where two factor authentication is enabled will be safe, so this is a useful safety feature you should always choose to use.

So, how can you have a password that is easy to remember but safe and unique?

The answer is to have your own system of generating passwords.

Almost all websites have a rule for the minimum length a password must be, and many have rules for including upper case characters, numbers and non-alphanumeric characters.

So you can use the same system for all websites, your password system should include at least one capital letter, at least one number, and at least one non-alphanumeric character.

So the password is unique, you also need to include something to secretly identify the website. Why secretly? Well if your unique passwords are just something like "johnebay", "johnpaypal", "johnhotmail", etc then the hacker may be able to easily guess the password for each site.

Here's a simple example of a password system you could use. This one is for eBay:

bJohn18y!

b is the second letter of ebay.com
John is a word to use for every website with one capital letter
18 is a number to use for every website
y is the last letter in ebay.com (before the .com)
! is a symbol

aJohn18l! would be the password for PayPal using the same system.

To a hacker the "b" and "y" are not obviously identifying that the password is for ebay.com, although you may want to obscure the password even further.

For example, "John" might be easy to remember but a made up word might be safer. Capitilising the "J" also draws attention to it being separate from the rest of the password.

How about we use "alPha" as our system's word, place the second letter of the website name in a different position instead?

Our eBay password would be "ablPha18y!" and our PayPal password would be "aplPha18l!". They look more obscure.

When coming up with your own system consider other options like capitilising one of the letters of the website name, swapping the last letter and second letter positions, and so on.

Hopefully using these techniques you will come up with a system that is easy to remember yet safe.

What happened to Trading Post Australia?

2018-02-14T12:00:00+10:00

While looking for a new car to buy – without much success – I looked further afield than the usual carsales.com.au and gumtree.com.au and found myself at tradingpost.com.au.

I last remember Trading Post being owned by Telstra/Sensis and was surprised to no longer see any references to them.

I wasn’t surprised that the quality of car ads was just as bad as I recall, mostly just dealer ads, 99% of which probably get put up automatically for free by their dealership management software.

I was curious who now owned Trading Post and scrolled to the footer where I noticed that they were now a Pte Ltd indicating they were no longer an Australian company. They were also indicating that they were tradingpost.com, which suggested that maybe there was an international Trading Post that they were part of.

Strangely tradingpost.com did not actually go to a website, just an error page, which seems a waste of a domain name, and it is also strange that you would call yourself tradingpost.com if tradingpost.com is not actually a website.

A little Google-ing revealed that Trading Post was sold for an amount believed to be less than $10M (Telstra paid $636M in 2004) around 2015 to a group of entrepreneurs including Geoff Holmes, formerly of Carsales, DealerAds (to do with eBay Motors) and a company called Unique Websites.

Unique Websites were mentioned as having been operating Trading Post for Telstra since 2013.

Trading Post were apparently attempting to raise $15M in 2017 and I guess were successful as they purchased Service Central.

A little digging on LinkedIn reveals that Trading Post and Unique Websites appear to be one group based out of Singapore or Malaysia.

Strangely the ACCC prevented a sale of Trading Post to carsales.com.au in 2012, but no one prevented it from going overseas.

Which brings me to the point of this post. How can a company raise tens of millions of dollars and produce such a crap product?

Why crap? Firstly, the marketing of Trading Post appears to be poor and there doesn’t seem to be any innovation. You are going to have to come up with something better than just free ads if you are going to take on Gumtree, etc.

Then there’s the aforementioned issue of calling themselves tradingpost.com in quite a few places but not actually having a website at that address. People, just have tradingpost.com as an alias of tradingpost.com.au – surely you have someone there who can do that?

They have an amazing 25,500 people following them on Facebook yet in the “About” section they list their website as tradingshoes.com! They don’t even appear to own that domain name as it goes to one of those generic domain placeholder websites and they are not listed as the owner in whois. Very strange.

And then we get to Unique Websites. Here’s a website that looks like it was made a decade or more ago and has remained completely unchanged since then. The CSS file is dated 2010 which gives an idea of when it might have last had any work done.

It’s not mobile-friendly, their phone number is only partly visible in the header, there is a missing image in the footer, their support documents refer to versions of Outlook from ten years ago, and their client login goes to an error page.

It doesn't use SSL and there isn't even a favicon.

I was tempted to call the number (if I could figure out the missing digits) and just check they were still around and how shocked they might sound if they actually got a call.

I wonder how long it’s going to take to get back those tens of millions of dollars with just Google Ads?

Bootstrap 4 and 5 Customiser

2017-10-31T12:00:00+10:00

I love Bootstrap v4 and now that it is finally in Beta can start to use it in new projects.

But I miss the online customizer that was available for Bootstrap v3.

Perhaps one day the Bootstrap team will make a v4 customizer available on the Bootstrap website but I thought it might be handy to create on myself.

Presenting Bootstrap Customizer.

I wrote a simple website in PHP and used a Sass library called scssphp.

Bootstrap Customizer is simply a web form with fields for all Bootstrap Sass variables, and upon submission it compiles these variables and the Bootstrap SCSS files into a single Bootstrap CSS file.

Bootstrap Customizer is currently Alpha, and I plan to add some more features as time allows:

Option to exclude Bootstrap v4 components and features
Save customizations to a database so that they can be modified and recompiled
CSS minification

UPDATE: Bootstrap v5 is out now and I have updated Bootstrap Customizer for each Bootstrap release from v4 Beta to the latest v5 release.

Customizations are stored to a database and inside each downloaded CSS file there is a link to return to the customizer and make further changes.

If a file was generated for an earlier Bootstrap release, you will be given the option to migrate your customizations to the latest release.

The website also has a small number of articles on Bootstrap.

Gumtree Australia ad photos don't load

2016-11-29T12:00:00+10:00

Do you ever find that images don't load for any of the ads in Gumtree? Like this...

I find this happens to me sometimes and the problem seems to be that the images are loaded from a different site (i.ebayimg.com) and there is an issue with the certificate for that site.

There' an easy temporary fix.

All you need to do is go to https://i.ebayimg.com/ and accept the certificate error.

This will mean that the website may not be secure, so if you care you shouldn't do this. But it's just Gumtree, not online banking, so why would you care?

To accept the certificate error in Internet Explorer

1. Go to https://i.ebayimg.com/

2. Click "Continue to this website (not recommended)"

To accept the certificate error in Google Chrome

1. Go to https://i.ebayimg.com/

2. Click "ADVANCED"

3. Click "Proceed to i.ebayimg.com (unsafe)"

Ignore the message you see after this, as it isn't a valid page. You can close this page.

Then go to www.gumtree.com.au and ad photos should now load.

If this solved your problem please leave a comment or use one of the social media like buttons below to let me know that I'm not the only one suffering this problem.

I hope Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) fail

2016-05-23T12:00:00+10:00

It's not often I wish such bad fortune on a new innovation but I am wishing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) dies a quick death.

It's not that I don't agree that websites should be MUCH more efficient and load quicker.

It's just that I don't agree that this is the way to make it happen.

If you don't already know about AMP, in 25 words or less it's a way of creating web pages that are small and faster loading. AMP pages cannot contain certain HTML (like forms), only include images using a special AMP tag, only allow approved scripts, don't allow external style sheets, and the total page size must be less than 50kb.

The most important thing you need to know about AMP is that Google are backing it, and "supporting" it by making it a ranking factor.

Not that long in the past many of us developers were creating websites that were optimised for a specific resolution, usually a maximum width of 1024 pixels so targeted at desktop screens.

Then mobile browsing became popular and many of us started creating mobile only websites. These were usually cut down versions of the desktop site and were faster less bandwidth hungry (and usually uglier) but meant that we now had to maintain two websites.

Then along came "responsive design" and we were able to create one website for all devices.

Now Google wants us to create AMP versions of all our web pages.

I'm not sure the world wants cut down versions of web pages. As a frequent mobile browser (someone who browses, not something like Internet Explorer) myself, there are times when I appreciate a simple, easy to read alternate mobile only version of a web page, but there are also many times when I can't find some relevant feature on a mobile page that I am used to seeing on the equivalent desktop page. Often enough, I find myself looking for a "view full site" hyperlink.

Given the high rate of technical advances in mobile technology, and the ongoing reduction in cost of mobile data, I hope that AMP might not be relevant.

One-way Web?

As I said earlier in this post, AMP doesn't allow HTML forms. This might be okay for some types of websites, but many websites (possibly most) have a real purpose for forms such as posting a comment on a blog or news website, subscribing to a newsletter, or buying something on an ecommerce website. How do you accommodate this? Move these things to separate pages, and then you would probably want to style them the same as the AMP pages which means you are now maintaining a desktop version of the site, AMP version of the site, and these AMP spin-off pages.

Is your website supported by advertising? Well, only certain advertising platforms' scripts are approved, so hopefully you use one of them and not one of the unsupported platforms. Google AdWords is supported, of course.

Disallowing unapproved scripts mean that you won't be able to add any AJAX either. AMP pretty much makes the web one-way. How 1990s!

So, if I am against AMP, what could Google do instead?

I think they already had some good things going like suggestions for optimisations and improvements in Google Search Console. Telling people what's wrong with their websites and how to fix them is a good step.

Punishing us for producing slow websites, as much as I won't like being a victim, is also probably the right thing to do.

But how about if they got involved in some of these open source systems that are used by so many websites and improving them? I am talking about open source applications such as CMS and eCommerce, many of which are horribly inefficient. And popular open source frameworks like Bootstrap and jQuery.

Review of fiverr.com

2014-10-29T12:00:00+10:00

I was really excited when I first found fiverr.com. Here was a site where you could get almost anything done for $5 (US).

The next website that I was developing for myself I thought I would give it a try and get a logo created. There are hundreds of people on there who will create a logo for you, most for $5.

Many of them do actually charge more than $5 for things like faster service, additional file formats, and other benefits, but there is still plenty on there that just charge $5.

So, being the big spender, I invested $15 in logos from 3 different people. The result...? Absolute crap! All four logos (one person provided two logos) were amateurish and could not be used.

What can you do? Most of the people advertise that they will make amendments until you are happy, but (a) if the first one was crap then most likely they are only capable of producing crap, and (b) it was only $5 and how much work do you expect someone to do for $5 even if it is crap work?

So what did I do? Not wanting my $15 to be wasted I decided to spend another $10 on another two logos from two more people. Can you guess the result? Yes, crap again!

All of the people I bought from showed a great set of samples and some had really good reviews from past customers. But what I got was nothing like the samples and all appeared to be the work of amateurs.

Now I'm sure many fiverr.com sellers would say what do you expect for $5 and probably say you have to go for top rated sellers and pay the premium for extra services to get a good job, but after this experience I am reluctant to try.

I found it interesting too that some sellers say don't leave them negative feedback, instead they would rather give you a refund.

I think I have a great idea for fivver.com, though. Seeing they have so many sellers who are obviously willing to work for very little, how about running a competitions service. Me as a buyer posts a request for something like a logo, selects an amount I will pay for the finished product (from $5 upwards, of course) and people can submit their product for me to choose from. You can add a watermark to protect their work. This I would do, but I won't be spending any more money at fivver.com otherwise!

Update 5-Nov-2014

I gave up on fiverr.com and tried freelancer.com. Read my review.

Goodbye Google Postini

2013-03-05T12:00:00+10:00

I have setup Google’s Postini anti-spam service for a number of businesses over the last few years, and although it can be difficult (to say the least) to setup, its’ ability to prevent spam is the best I have seen.

Unfortunately as I alluded to, setting up Postini is not for the faint hearted. You need to know all the complicated steps to make it work.

Also, support, at least for smaller companies or those not going through a partner, is almost non-existent. Sending an email to support will always (from my experience) result in zero replies. The only option seems to be using the forum to discuss your problem.

And lastly, the payment system can also be complex and during the last week I have found it impossible to make payment for due or now overdue accounts. Whether I use the manual renewal link after signing in or the link provided in the email Postini sent to prompt payment, I always get “server error – We are unable to process your request at this time, please try again later.”

I don’t know if this has something to do with Google’s plans to stop offering Positini as a stand alone service and integrating in to Google Apps (see here). Maybe they don’t want any more renewals?

It’s probably a good thing it’s going, it’s just a shame that it was actually very good at preventing spam.

Alternatives? I recently signed a customer up for Office365 as a replacement for their own Exchange mail server, and one of the selling points was that it has anti-spam so they would no longer need Postini. Unfortunately Office365 seems to be very bad at preventing spam, and unfortunately small business customers get very little control over the anti-spam settings. Businesses on the enterprise plans get more control, though I’m not sure if that makes the anti-spam service any better.

If Google Apps makes full use of the Postini ant-spam engine then it should be good, although I have stayed away from Google Apps for email as it doesn’t integrate as well with Microsoft Outlook like Office365.

You've heard of Shazam, but there are alternatives

2011-08-19T12:00:00+10:00

Many people are aware of Shazam, the service used on mobile phones where you can play a song near the microphone of your phone and it will (usually) identify the song after a few seconds and tell you the name, artist, album, etc.

There is a free alternative service that you can download and use on your desktop. It's called Tunatic and it is available for PC and Mac.

But possible the most interesting website I found that offers a similar service is Midomi. Midomi is also free and in instead of identifying pre-recorded music you can sing it yourself or hum it.

That's a pretty amazing useful service in my opinion. Can't get a song out of your head that you don't know who the artist is? Give it a go.

Midomi is also available for mobile devices.

The Commodore 64 Lives On

2011-08-17T12:00:00+10:00

I came across an interesting website which details a new version of the Commodore 64 that you can purchase new now.

It no longer has 64kb of memory, a cassette player, and an 80x25 character display. Instead, the new Commodore 64 features Intel processors, DVD or Blueray drives, and runs Linux or Windows.

There is also an operating system - Commodore OS - which is a community-driven Linux distribution.

In addition to the 64, Commodore has another model called the VIC-Slim which is a modern looking all-in-one computer housed in a keyboard style casing. They also have a line of "Amiga" models, modern-looking computers styled in the spirit of the original Amiga models.

The company building these computers is Florida, USA-based Commodore USA, LLC. Their website is www.commodoreusa.net

Goodbye Exetel

2011-01-02T12:00:00+10:00

I have been a long time customer of Exetel, using their ADSL and then ADSL2 services.

Over this time I have been a loyal customer, and recommended others to become Exetel customers.

However over the last few years they have annoyed me a several times emails saying that my plan is no longer economical and that I need to pay an additional fee to continue using my current plan, change to a new plan, or move to a different ISP.

The last time this happened I was paying $35 per month for ADSL2 with 2Gb data allowance. They said this was not profitable and that I needed to pay $10 per month extra to stay on this plan, move to a new plan, or switch ISPs. I opted to move to the $30 per month plan with 10Gb data allowance. That's right - I pay less for more. Hard to see how this could be more profitable.

This could explain why many months later a similar I receive an email telling me that my plan is no longer profitable and the usual $10 extra, new plan or switch ISP routine. This time unfortunately their cheapest new plan is $45 for 30Gb which is data I don't need.

One of the reasons for the increase is that they claim that people are using more data. Why not offer plans for people with smaller data requirements?

With some regret (and inconvenience) I am saying goodbye to Exetel this time. Whilst people I know tell me stories about how their ADSL costs are going down and data limits are going up, Exetel seem to be going in the opposite direction.

I am switching to TPG. Their $29.95 per month plan with 5Gb peak, 10Gb off-peak should suit me and I know a few people who use their services who have been happy. And no talk of frequent emails telling them that they are not a profitable customer. Sounds great.

New Microsoft Hotmail good reason not to use Microsoft Explorer

2008-12-10T12:00:00+10:00

Am I the only one having problems with the newly updated Hotmail?

I use Hotmail regularly throughout the day on a variety of computers, Windows XP and Vista, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (Beta). After going through a few pages Explorer freezes up and has to be forcibly ended.

So now I prefer to use Firefox to check my Microsoft Hotmail.

Incidently I find that you cannot reply to an email using Hotmail on Google Chrome.

Why are most real estate agents so bad at selling online

2008-12-08T12:00:00+10:00

I have often read or heard that the Internet is now the most successful method of advertising for real estate agents.

So why is it that so many real estate agents fail to appreciate some basic fundamentals about advertising online.

Having been looking for a house for the last few months I have encountered three main issues that irritate me when it comes to real estate agents.

1. Poor listings

Now I admit that I don’t know how websites like realestate.com.au or domain.com.au charge agents but my guess is that there is probably no difference in cost between 1 photo and 5 or 10 photos, and there is probably a very generous limit on the amount of text they can enter for the property description.

So I don’t understand why so many agents have one photo and/or a very brief description of the property, often omitting information that might be important to potential buyers.

Agents should understand that certain information will affect whether their listing will appear when certain search criteria is selected. For example, I want to search for a house with a double garage but so many agents leave the carspaces that I can’t depend on this feature.

And why do so many use bad quality photos?

2. Response to enquiries

In this day and age it is not unreasonable to expect a reply to an email enquiry within several hours. At worst you would expect a business to check and respond to emails at least once a day.

But a large percentage of agents in my experience either do not respond to emails at all or take several days.

And when I ask a question I expect an answer in reply. So to the agent who replied to my request for the property’s address some two weeks later with, “Please telephone our office to speak to one of our sales consultants,” I say much too little, much too late.

3. Failure to update listings

Too many times I have enquired about properties only to find out that they have been long sold or are under contract.

I know the popular websites have the facility for agents to indicate that a property is sold or under offer or contract. I wish more agents would use them.

And it is good to see agents listing open for inspection times online (and I wish more would) but there should be no excuse for not removing these when the open house is cancelled.