Life of Ben (Blog)

Laptop: Disk Cleanup (18th January 2012)

The hard drive had 130GB used space at the start. By the end, it had 119GB. That’s a saving of 11GB for hardly any effort!

Amazing CSS3 :hover Animations (12th January 2012)

Look at these animated caption rollovers. Using Firefox 9 on a 2010 laptop makes them so smooth. Add the opacity and the fact it’s real, searchable text and I’m genuinely impressed.

A rare exception to my normal reaction to demo sites. I usually find them pointless or even harmful to what we do on commercial website. This one made me think: “Wow! Designers should see this.”

Aerobie Frisbee (11th January 2012)

Takes a rather odd technique but flies really well!

Holiday Round-Up (1st January 2012)

Laptop: Stopping the Magical Edges (23rd December 2011)

When an edge of a window gets near the edge of a desktop in Windows 7, magic happens. At first, with a single screen, this was usually what I wanted. But with my setup, it gets weird too often.

  1. Opened the Start Menu.
  2. Typed Snap and it displayed Turn off automatic window arrangement as the first and only item.
  3. Pressed Return and it opened an untitled window.
  4. Ticked Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen. Clicked OK.

(Ticking something to disable it is backwards, as we’ve known since Windows ’95.)

Winter Tennis (17th December 2011)

There are tennis courts in Finsbury Park, unlocked and open to the public. When I rode a few laps round there yesterday only 1 was in use, due to Winter and it being a weekday.

This morning, Fiona and I cycled over to it. We found 3 spare, full-size courts. Amongst the rather wayward shots were plenty of fun rallys, some skidding and numerous smiles. A very chilly wind started blowing so we went for some Mexican food.

Got back just as it started getting dark, before 4pm.

Putting Old PC Out To Pasture (17th December 2011)

Mum and Dad will arrive tomorrow to see the new flat, have a pub lunch load the old PC and take it back to Fleet.

Laptop: Driven Mad by Mouse Drivers (16th December 2011)

My beloved pointing device is the Logitech MX510 mouse but it doesn’t have the MouseWare 9.80 software for Windows 7. Indeed, it relies on the default drivers since Vista.

Laptop: Printing (9th December 2011)

Fiona has a Kodak ESP 7250 which has WiFi support. Windows Explorer shows it in the Network location, listed in both the Computers group and the Printers group. Strangely, Firefox has no idea it exists.

Laptop: Web Developer Setup (8th December 2011)

What do I need on my new laptop to make it a viable environment for making websites professionally?