mthomas.co.uk - IT Tips, Tricks & Tutorials

So here’s my MacBites bag and my MacBites mug…oh, and my Windows PC.

BTW - process for getting the photo on here:

• Take photo with crappy £30 Vodafone 1.3 megapixel camera - stop gap because my last phone broke and the iPhone wasn’t out
• Insert USB cable into camera and other end into PC. Nothing
• Boot up MacBook
• Turn on bluetooth on MacBook and phone
• Finally MacBook finds phone - after picking up colleagues phone 5 yards away
• Copy file onto MacBook from phone
• Copy file onto USB pen drive from MacBook
• Insert pen drive into colleagues PC - mine won’t accept pen drives!
• Ask him to email it to me
• Upload to blog

Trying to use Evernote at work. However, it doesn’t appear to support IE6. Roll on the iPhone!

Just finished watching the Bill Gates interview on BBC2. Interesting insight into the man who changed the computer world (although that’s a matter of opinion I suppose). I was going to watch it earlier in the day (during my lunch hour) but Internet Explorer had other ideas.

Sums it up really!

I’ve recently discovered Twitter. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/thomasmike.

OK so I decided to try and eat a bit more healthily starting at the end of March. On March 31st I stopped eating chocolate and on April 10th I started again. April 10th and 11th just happened to be the dates that I was running a 2-day Microsoft Project course - my first one for a few years. Even with a bit of prep, Project always throws up the unexpected.

Are there any trainers out there who actually like training this product?

Absolute cell references allow you to “fix” part or all of a cell reference in a formula. This can be a great time-saver when copying formulas, however, there is more to it than meets the eye… Read More

Suggested to a client that they buy a Mac. Well, he’d already decided that his next laptop will be a Mac, so I can’t really count that as a sale - but at least it confirmed it in his mind.

A question arose today about entering random text into a Word document. You probably know that if you type =Rand() into a Word document you get 3 paragraphs each containing 5 sentences where each sentence is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”

And if you type =Rand(X,Y) where X and Y are numbers, you get X paragraphs of Y sentences each where sentence is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. For example =Rand(8,10) will generate 8 paragraphs where each paragraph contains 10 sentences.

Well in Word 2007 you now have =Lorem() Read More

This was the top story in my RSS feed this morning. As someone who works for IBM and has spent the past 12 months trying to convert my colleagues to the Mac, I just had to smile at this one!

IBM’s Research Information Services division is investigating the possibility of moving a significant number of employees to Apple’s Macintosh platform according to a report acquired by RoughlyDrafted.

“In line with IBM’s external strategy of offering a true ‘Open Client’ that may be Windows, Linux or a Mac,” the document noted, “[Research Information Services] is focusing on providing an IBM application stack on multiple Operating Systems, rather than be confined to one or the other.”

The first phase of the pilot program was conducted between October 2007 and January 2008. During this phase, 24 MacBook Pros were distributed to researchers and used as the primary notebook, with the employees’ existing ThinkPads acting as backups if needed.

Of the 22 of 24 who responded, 18 said that the Mac offered a “better or best experience” compared to their existing computer, one rated it “equal or good,” and three said the Mac offered a “worse experience.” Seven reported having no or marginal prior knowledge of using Macs, while 15 reported having moderate or expert knowledge of the platform.