2026
- Testing Svelte 1 Nov
- Image test 31 Oct
- Xero CIS – correcting a submitted return (it is possible) 13 Jan
2025
- Quickly convert a Xero batch payment CSV to a format that works on Metro Bank 12 Aug
- Clothing for your first marathon 4 Jun
- Marathon training, turning planned run times into distances 26 Feb
- Sharing a plane cut out for use in videos (a banner tow plane) 27 Jan
2024
2023
- Santa-pi, a music player for a charity fundraising float 19 Dec
- Solution sharing: My small business phone system, 4 lines, 6 extensions, and costs less than £10 per month 28 Sep
- Batch qr code generator in python 8 Sep
- FreePBX adding additional network card 9 Jun
- Google workspace – printing the collaborative inbox / printing google groups 2 May
- Testing galleries – nothing here to see 10 Feb
2022
- Automatic Letterheads from a printer 3 Nov
- Setting up Google Workspace for a small business – part 9 17 Jan
2021
- Printers, running costs and life expectancy 18 Dec
- Setting up Google Workspace for a small business – part 8 25 Sep
- Setting up Google Workspace for a small business – part 7 6 Sep
- Setting up Google Workspace for a small business – part 6 6 Sep
- Setting up Google Workspace for a small business – part 5 3 Sep
- Setting up Google Workspace for a small business – part 4 2 Sep
- Setting up Google Workspace for a small business – part 3 2 Sep
- Setting up Google Workspace for a small business – part 2 2 Sep
- Setting up Google Workspace for a small business – part 1 2 Sep
- Moving my small business [cloud email, file sharing, calendars] to a new provider 28 Aug
- Moving Back to wordpress 28 Aug
2020
2019
- Magic letterhead tray – making preprinted stationary automatically on plain white paper 19 Nov
- A Small Business Payroll Solution – how and why I moved our payroll process from an accounting firm to do it ourselves using ‘Software as a Service’ 14 Jun
2017
- How many 1st class stamps to use on heavy letters? 20 Oct
- Google Chrome ” Failed – Network Error.” on downloading files greater than 5MB (ish) – solution for me = Disable QUIC 24 Apr
2016
- Margins and Markups: how to handle multiple discounts/rebates 2 Dec
- Blog traffic 30 Sep
- Upgrading my server to PHP7 broke wordpress admin interface (cloudflare) 30 Sep
- Spam from Scottish Power, their response: we’ll carry on spamming (just not to you). 27 Jun
- Hot topic – our backup server (overheating!) 24 Jun
- Why it’s time to move our business away from 2020 Fusion design software 22 Mar
- Solicitors who spam? That would be Edwards Duthie Solicitors 22 Feb
- Royalty free music and a time lapse video for work 5 Jan
2015
- Migrating from phpBB to Google Groups 3 Nov
- Birthday Calculator – in case you don't want to wait a whole year to celebrate being alive 8 Jan
2014
- Virtual PDF Printer for our small office network – a step by step how to 22 Nov
- sunspot solr slow in production (fixed by using IP address instead of domain name) 2 Oct
- BT Wifi hotspots intercept and redirect google SSL searches 5 May
- How to change a folder icon to a picture in Mac OS X 22 Apr
- VMware consolidated backup missing a catalogue file – fixed! 13 Apr
- A quick note on my first steps using stripe.com 14 Mar
- A new form of Comment spam? – url shorteners and redirection? 21 Jan
2013
- BitDefender v Nod32 18 Nov
- Parallels virtual disk much larger on mac than windows is actually using 12 Nov
- Network PDF printing from Windows 8 24 Oct
- After Win 8.1 update display has shrunk 24 Oct
- Caught in my spam trap – randrnews.co.uk 1 Oct
- Mac OS X Screenshot save to folder (instead of desktop) 23 Aug
- Rails Sunspot/Solr returning result for single character searches 17 Jul
- Backup! (Bye bye TimeMachine, hello Carbon Copy Cloner) 7 Jul
- IBM need help with statistics 4 Jul
- Gandi said thanks :-) 23 May
- Extracting images from PDF (free, using command line) 22 May
- Building an automatic infrared remote control for the shop 6 May
- A quick review of WordPress comment and trackback spam 28 Apr
- How to get noticed on LinkedIn (before LinkedIn existed) 27 Mar
- Email from a new business that want's to supply my business 15 Mar
- Caught in my spam trap – cloud-mailer.co.uk / brainycat.co.uk 14 Mar
- Caught in my spam trap – paramountbathrooms.com / .co.uk 14 Mar
- Caught in my spam trap – buildingmergers.co.uk 14 Mar
- BT Openzone, Mac OS X connection problems 5 Mar
- Grey text on a web page not visible when printing, how to fix it 11 Feb
- Mac Timemachine backups are NOT complete 11 Jan
2012
- Calc (Openoffice / Libreoffice) If statements using 'between' or 'and' 15 Dec
- Gitolite won't let server read repo 6 Dec
- Installing a new hard disk in a Mac = not fun 3 Dec
- WordPress redirects 30 Nov
- Results are in, WordPress gets as much spam as movabletype 28 Nov
- Technical notes on migrating from MovableType to WordPress 27 Nov
- Goodbye MovableType, hello WordPress 27 Nov
- Mail merge onto a PDF background 16 Nov
- What happens when you break down in France (10 things I learnt) 18 Sep
- The joy of being a forum/newsgroup moderator 3 Aug
- Peer to Peer downloading (Torrents) and network problems 26 Jul
- Screen recording on a mac 17 Jul
- Useful bash command for ruby programming (find a string within a file including sub directory files) 11 Jul
- SPF with google site verification 27 Jun
- My SSL certificate was not working in Safari, but it did in Chrome and Firefox 20 Jun
- Dear archant.co.uk, please stop spamming me 31 May
- Outlook Web Access – missing options 26 May
- Block web spammers by their IP address 31 Mar
2011
- Installing Sphinx on Mac OS X Lion 10 Dec
- Windows to Mac continued 19 Nov
- Useful Mac Shortcut Key (show desktop) 18 Oct
- Notes from moving from Windows to Mac 17 Oct
- My name (root) – most dangerous word in computing? 21 Jul
- Good Sailing opportunity! 11 May
2010
- Amazing Stories of Polio – in a shop window 11 Sep
- Backups for Google Calendar – a ruby application 29 Aug
- CRON – multiple cron jobs on one line (running consecutively, not concurrently) 5 Jul
- cciss-vol-status on Ubuntu didn't work, it was cciss_vol_status 22 May
- Bad Bot go away! 6 Apr
- blogging without using a keyboard (using windows built in speech recognition) 20 Mar
- Memories of Nan Root 24 Feb
- ruby on rails sql_type – A reminder for me 4 Feb
- View a Multi page tiff file in windows 28 Jan
- Kent Challenge Team (1994 promotional video – have I aged much?) 14 Jan
- Our Sydney holiday photo (after a little CGI…) 9 Jan
- 5 and a bit years of blogging… just 2 Jan
- Happy new year! 2 Jan
2009
- Brother Dave goes on a cycling holiday, we track his position live by GPS 15 Sep
- Gmail default contact for a friend with more than one email address 10 Sep
- Migrating Coldfusion to Open Bluedragon – form.FIELDNAMES 4 Sep
- Googlemail down :( 1 Sep
- Moving the blog to a new server 31 Aug
- Are you in Medway on Friday? 13 Jul
- Rotary International Convention 2009 – Volunteering 21 Jun
- Rotary Internation Convention 2009 – First timer notes 20 Jun
- Goodbye Alicia 27 May
- Moving to a new web server 15 May
- Fresh Ubuntu install could not resolve domains names – and how I fixed it… maybe 4 May
- Eurocon 2009 – the final day 19 Apr
- Eurocon 2009 – The Duel 19 Apr
- Eurocon 2009 – Visit to Fort Eben-Emael 18 Apr
- Eurocon 2009 – Memories of day 1 18 Apr
- Eurocon 2009 – More than just simulation 17 Apr
- Rotary – Club Visit 9 to Lige Rive-Droite 16 Apr
- Eurocon 2009 – Let Battle Commence 15 Apr
- Marley and Me (Rooty Film Review) 26 Feb
- Rotary – Club visit 8 to Chestfield 12 Feb
- Learn french in 10 days…. assuming you don't need sleep? 14 Jan
2008
- Perelandra (C.S. Lewis) and That Hideous Strength (C.S.Lewis) 26 Dec
- 15% VAT – How to work it out from 17.5% inc prices 16 Dec
- Steve meets the president (yes, the nice one, from America) 14 Dec
- 4 Years of blogging 4 Dec
- Laughing Horse? It's a comedy club a friend was performing at… 4 Dec
- VAT Rate changes – more work for the printing industry, more non revenue generating office work for me 25 Nov
- Staying Alive (Alexander Fullerton) 20 Nov
- 2001 A Space Odyssey (Arthur C Clarke) 20 Nov
- The Malacia Tapestry (Brian Aldiss) 20 Nov
- Rotary – Club visit 7 to Faversham 16 Nov
- Rotary – 1120 District Conference – Other things 7 Nov
- Rotary – 1120 District Conference – Rotarian Dr Geoff McKay presentation 7 Nov
- Rotary – 1120 District Conference – Yellowmen of Kadongdong presentation 7 Nov
- Rotary – 1120 District Conference – Orpheus Centre & Richard Stilgoe presentation 7 Nov
- Rotary – 1120 District Conference – Graham Clarke presentation 7 Nov
- Rotary – 1120 District Conference – Leonard Cheshire School 4 All presentation 7 Nov
- Rotary – 1120 District Conference – Help for Heroes presentation 7 Nov
- Rotary – 1120 District Conference 7 Nov
- Pure highway in car DAB radio – time to play with my prize! 21 Oct
- I'm still scared of speaking in public 20 Oct
- Root Nicknames 20 Oct
- Choosing a web browser – why can't I just put up with the default 20 Oct
- Rotary – club visit 6 to Strood 16 Oct
- Rotary – The next level of administration 15 Oct
- Rotary – Club visit 5 to Chestfield 13 Oct
- Red Mushroom, White Spots, found on my walk through the woods 6 Oct
- A very lucky week for Steve! 3 Oct
- GPS Logging from my PDA…needs a little work I think 2 Oct
- The Island (Victoria Hislop) 2 Oct
- Life and times of a Keyboard 2 Oct
- Earth is Room Enough (Issac Asimov) 2 Oct
- Space, Time and Nathaniel (Brian Aldiss) 2 Oct
- The Dark Light Years (Brian Aldiss) 2 Oct
- Sunday European Campaign – on target so far… 28 Sep
- Rotary – Charter Night 25 Sep
- Rotary – Club Visit 4 to Medway 8 Sep
- Rotary and it's impact on our holiday (Part 2) 6 Sep
- Robert Robertson, talented young singer 6 Sep
- Aces High 2 – Sunday European Campaign series begins! 4 Sep
- Rotary and it's impact on our family holiday (part 1) 2 Sep
- Rotary – First visit to another club 29 Aug
- Rotary – Club Assembly 29 Aug
- Rotary – Meeting Steve (at Pilgrims Hospice) 20 Aug
- Rotary – Meeting Craig (at Playing for Success Kent) 20 Aug
- Rotary – Planning for Club Assembly 20 Aug
- Rotary – the Fun Day 20 Aug
- Rotary – Meeting Lucy 20 Aug
- Rotary – Getting to work 13 Aug
- Rotary – Inauguration of a new club 13 Aug
- Rotary – new member, new club 13 Aug
- Rotary and Rootary 13 Aug
- Halting State (Charles Stross) 29 Jun
- Out of the Silent Planet (C S Lewis) 29 Jun
- The Torch Bearers (Alexander Fullerton) 29 Jun
- Air Bridge (Hammond Innes) 29 Jun
- The Last Voyage (Hammond Innes) 29 Jun
- Sea Change (Robert Goddard) 29 Jun
- Eurocon – Extended Play 19 May
- Eurocon – they tell me to shut my computer down 18 May
- Eurocon – The Duel Championship 17 May
- Eurocon – yesterday, or today, or i forget already 17 May
- Eurocon – great times with more to come 16 May
- Eurocon – international culture at it's best… 16 May
- EuroCon – Dead Parrots? 16 May
- Eurocon – The arrival 16 May
- EuroCon I'm going I'm going! 16 May
- Hero lost, hero found 10 May
- Ruby woes: NameError and uninitialized constant 31 Mar
- Spam filter that blocks the spam senders from RECEIVING email! 26 Mar
- We featured on ITN National news 25 Mar
- BBC iPlayer – it might reach your iPhone but not my PDA (…yet) 9 Mar
- Coining phrases: "Messenger Lag" 5 Mar
- 3 Mar
- Steve the podcast star? 29 Feb
- Stumble upon – first stumbles 23 Feb
- My best PDA/phone ever! (it's a HTC Touch Cruise) 21 Feb
- Spam Wars – The spammer lost in court, but will they pay? 19 Feb
- The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World (Harry Harrison) and The Stainless Steel Rat for President (Harry Harrison) 13 Feb
- Spammer comments on my blog pretending to be someone else! 4 Feb
- Mr Roots and his lovely old boots (or 14 years of heaven courtesy of Mr Brasher) 2 Feb
- Space Mercenaries (A. Bertram Chandler) 28 Jan
- Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) 28 Jan
- The Stainless Steel Rat (Harry Harrison) 28 Jan
- Automatic backups of my windows laptop 21 Jan
- The Floating Madhouse (Alexander Fullerton) 21 Jan
- Spam wars – "determination of damages" hearing date set 10 Jan
- BBC iPlayer – still not worth installing but worth watching online 9 Jan
- Jennifer Morgue (Charles Stross) 8 Jan
2007
- Tales from the White Hart (Arthur C Clarke) 31 Dec
- Star Risk – The Scoundrel worlds (Chris Bunch), Star Risk – The Doublecross Program (Chris Bunch) and Star Risk – The Dog From Hell (Chris Bunch) 28 Dec
- Star Risk (Chris Bunch) 11 Dec
- "Smart" new training centre (I just couldn't resist the pun!) and other things 7 Dec
- 3 Years of blogging 7 Dec
- Margins and markups What everyone in business needs to know. 6 Dec
- VoIP at home with a Linksys SPA3102, trails, tribulations but it's working now 30 Nov
- One of our Australia photos was photo of the day on another web site 28 Nov
- Welcome to the Christmas Party Season 28 Nov
- Spam wars – court date set 16 Nov
- Messiah (Boris Starling) 16 Nov
- Coyote Frontier (Allen Steele) & Spindrift (Allen Steele) 11 Nov
- The End of Eternity (Isaac Asimov) 11 Nov
- VoIP – testing sipgate 4 Nov
- Movable Type 4 upgrade 31 Oct
- EMC 82 Frame 1 results 16 Oct
- Cooking with Nanny 10 Oct
- Spam wars – they didn't reply to the court… 4 Oct
- Dark Space (Marianne de pierres) 4 Oct
- EMC 81 Logs 1 Oct
- Spam wars – I get ignored, but will they ignore the courts? 13 Sep
- Charlie's War (David Fiddimore) 13 Sep
- The Atrocity Archives (Charles Stross) 13 Sep
- Wow! two months without a post 13 Sep
- Music I like: ViRGiNiE 12 Jul
- Sharpe's Prey (Bernard Cornwell) 5 Jul
- Accelerando (Charles Stross) 13 Jun
- Family trip to Dickens World.. hmmm 5 Jun
- 3001 (Arthur C. Clarke) 4 Jun
- Spam Wars – Success! 3 Jun
- Spam wars update 22 May
- Sharpe's Battle (Bernard Cornwell) 22 May
- Iron Sunrise (Charles Stross) and Singularity Sky (Charles Stross) 22 May
- The Robots of Dawn (Isaac Asmiov) 22 May
- False Impression (Jeffrey Archer) 22 May
- Busy Me! 22 May
- If that was a small earthquake… 28 Apr
- Sword of Honour (Alexander Kent) 17 Apr
- Sharpe's Honour (Bernard Cornwell) 12 Apr
- Spam Wars – Success? 10 Apr
- Glasshouse (Charles Stross) 10 Apr
- Another Business Acronym 5 Apr
- La classe de franais 4 Apr
- NHS – I can only say good things about it…. 20 Mar
- Ever wonderered what the web server looks like? 17 Mar
- Bereavement, and why I don't know what to say 14 Mar
- The Peacemaker (C.S.Forrester) 4 Mar
- I had an offer from a personal trainer to help my fitness training… 27 Feb
- Sharpes Waterloo (Bernard Cornwell) 27 Feb
- Sharpe's Regiment (Bernard Cornwell) 27 Feb
- webERP Virtual Machine 24 Feb
- Best foot forward 22 Feb
- Sharpe's Devil (Bernard Cornwell) 22 Feb
- How much email? 19 Feb
- Running – not always good for your health 17 Feb
- A Fine Night for Dying (Jack Higgins, a.k.a "Martin Fallon") 5 Feb
- Root Objective Theory 4 Feb
- I was Amelia Earhart (Jane Mendelsohn) 24 Jan
- Tuesday's War (David Fiddimore) 23 Jan
- J'apprends Franais! 19 Jan
- Plagiarism is the greatest form of flattery. I guess I've been flattered then? 18 Jan
- I've done something amazing 9 Jan
- Jonathon Livingston Seagull (Richard Bach) 7 Jan
- Life of Pi [Audio CD book] (Yann Martel) 7 Jan
- Gold Mine (Wilbur Smith) 7 Jan
- Islands in the Sky (Arthur C. Clarke) 7 Jan
2006
- Warbirds – Flight Sim that's free offline and lots of fun online 12 Dec
- Is damn a swear word? 5 Dec
- Vanity searching on Microsofts new live.com portal 4 Dec
- Enter Now to win! 28 Nov
- Avenger (Frederick Forsyth) 27 Nov
- Driving Blind Stories (Ray Bradbury) 26 Nov
- The Tristan Betrayal (Robert Ludlum) 26 Nov
- Redcoat (Bernard Cornwell) 26 Nov
- First ever competition for this site (and first video too) 10 Nov
- Nightfall ONE (Isaac Asimov) 10 Oct
- Spam again – at least this one can read, if not write 9 Oct
- How much do books weigh? 7 Oct
- Almost two years! – Say hello everyone 5 Oct
- Sharpe's Enemy (Bernard Cornwell) & Sharpe's Sword (Bernard Cornwell) 4 Oct
- Harlequin (Bernard Cornwell) & Vagabond (Bernard Cornwell) 4 Oct
- creating a new column in a MySQL select query 4 Oct
- Sharpe's Havoc (Bernard Cornwell), Sharpe's Tiger (Bernard Cornwell) & Sharpe's Eagle (Bernard Cornwell) 1 Sep
- Warrier Class (Dale Brown) 1 Sep
- Holiday time, Foray en France 26 Aug
- The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger) 30 Jul
- Gallows Thief (Bernard Cornwell) 30 Jul
- Sharpe's Triumph (Bernard Cornwell) 30 Jul
- Piranha (Dale Brown) 30 Jul
- Course Complete! 20 Jul
- Who created $foo $bar? 17 Jul
- You did do that backup…. didn't you? 13 Jul
- PDF Creation, a cheap way for network users 10 Jul
- The Lords of the North (Bernard Cornwell) 10 Jul
- First Lessons 5 Jul
- My return to education begins…. in a distant sort of way 5 Jul
- Sharpe's Trafalgar (Bernard Cornwell) 5 Jul
- Imperial Earth (Arthur C Clarke) 5 Jul
- Quote of the day: "The failure rate of hard drives is 100%…" 26 Jun
- The Last Kingdom (Bernard Cornwell) and The Pale Horseman (Bernard Cornwell) 22 Jun
- Prelude to Foundation (Isaac Asimov) 22 Jun
- Happy Birthday to me! (30 today) 18 Jun
- Woohoo! a new uptime record for my Win XP laptop 9 Jun
- The Sigma Protocol (Robert Ludlum) 8 Jun
- New village website 4 Jun
- Some people try and spam anything 28 May
- The Last Templar (Raymond Khoury) 26 May
- Interesting Statistics for the new .eu domain 21 May
- Spam Wars – on the trail of a serious spammer 19 May
- Spam Wars – A busy day! 18 May
- Spam Wars – a little progress. 18 May
- Batteries will *require* recycling – so what happens to ipods? 18 May
- Spam wars continue… 15 May
- A new category – Warbirds 8 May
- Spam (warning – I'll be ranting again!) 4 May
- The Naked Sun (Issac Asimov) 3 May
- The Songs of Distant Earth (Arthur C.Clarke) 26 Apr
- Blast from the past! 23 Apr
- A Dawn Like Thunder (Douglas Reeman) 23 Apr
- Issac Assimov's Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation 22 Apr
- Boot from DVD (bios setting) 2 Apr
- A new category! 27 Mar
- International post 23 Mar
- My New Phone 4 Mar
- I won an iPod! 25 Feb
- New experiment – googleads now on the site 25 Jan
- The CD/DVD-Drive and the Paperclip (a.k.a. how to get your DVD out of your computer when the power is off) 22 Jan
- Phases of Life 18 Jan
- The Big Server Move 10 Jan
- The holiday photos 10 Jan
2005
- Majestic12 – a distributed search engine 25 Dec
- The evening of Christmas day 25 Dec
- Telesales 17 Dec
- Sharon came home! (and now she's gone again) 12 Dec
- One whole year! 26 Nov
- Things people don't understand – Thermostats 30 Oct
- Subdomain Redirects 29 Oct
- Changes to the Site Stylesheet 27 Oct
- Memories, Music and co-incidence 26 Oct
- Secret Lives 26 Oct
- A new category – Root Theory/Root Memory/Roots Observations 26 Oct
- Useful Windows Shortcut Key (show desktop) 26 Oct
- When I realised being sick wasn't so bad after all 26 Oct
- promotional spam that made me laugh 24 Oct
- Nan 17 Oct
- JCB Song 13 Oct
- Ha! – there must be a third…. 10 Oct
- The award for most annoying website of the week goes to… 10 Oct
- Running Devil 9 Oct
- images in the text 9 Oct
- Mum and Dad fly to Oz 9 Oct
- The Boughton 10k went well 9 Oct
- Have you ever noticed… 9 Oct
- First Aid 5 Oct
- Busy me = Quiet Blog 10 Sep
- To Ad, or not to Ad, that is the question 10 Sep
- Nice little badge for my blog 27 Aug
- another busy month 21 Aug
- Back to basics 1 Aug
- Movable Type Beta 18 Jul
- How to resize a photo (jpg) to send in an email – (the quick way for Win XP) 11 Jul
- Linux on a USB Memory Stick 10 Jul
- Sharon & Todd have a daughter 10 Jul
- I did it! 2 Jul
- A month with no posts 25 Jun
- Running Rooties 23 May
- If it's quiet here – I'm busy! 18 May
- When business systems go bad… 8 Apr
- Strange download behaviour? 4 Apr
- Moving a whole network (bit by bit) 22 Mar
- Computeried Diary for the whole office 13 Mar
- ATC – Venture Adventure! 26 Feb
- Annoying DVD's 20 Feb
- Shell Profits 3 Feb
- Old Friends pop up 28 Jan
- Run that by me one more time… 17 Jan
- The Google Experiment Results 17 Jan
- New Category – WebDev & Code 1 Jan
- Happy New Year 1 Jan
2004
- Lots of friends 29 Dec
- Learnings 23 Dec
- Site Bugs to fix 20 Dec
- Last posting date was today? 20 Dec
- Snowboarding Nicola 18 Dec
- Running Rooties – Dave's in the London Marathon 15 Dec
- Coldfusion is better 13 Dec
- They spoil their site by sending spam 10 Dec
- Memories & Mums 7 Dec
- New Category – Posts Waiting to happen 7 Dec
- My mark on the web server scene 7 Dec
- The Australian company that wishes it was American? 6 Dec
- Now the search engines know I'm here 2 Dec
- Water Bills rise in price – I still think its cheap 2 Dec
- Coldfusion MX is no fun today :( 1 Dec
- Image Discovery 29 Nov
- Rotating Banners and "SU -" 27 Nov
- Dangerous Words 26 Nov
- About this site 21 Nov
- And so it begins… 21 Nov