John Hancock's Tech Talk

Then you should be retired and living out the remainder of your days in a sunny resort.

My first reaction upon reading this item in The Register was to wonder if they were refering to a Pheonix or a Turkey.

For those of you too lazy to read (me most of the time) the article is refering to the er-invention of the ol CBM or Commodore company. You remember - the PET, Vic 20, Commodore 64/128, Amiga..... They are now trying to drag the brand name into the 12st C. Good luck with that.

Read the Reg article, very interesting.

A lot of people think that when they buy software they actually own it. This may be true for some software but in most instances all you pay for is the right to use it for as long as the real owner deems fit. Of course this depends on your local copyright legistation to some extent. For instance in Australia there is a little known provision that if a piece of software is no longer available and abandoned (no more development or support) it is deemed free to use. We used this many years ago to freely copy an old DOS menu program we used on our Novell network. AFAIK this provision still exists.

Now this is where the crunch hits the fan. It was recently reported on The Register that the right to use MS Windows was locked inextricably to the motherboard on which it was origonally used. Now I have long known that the license said that you only had the right to use the software for as long as MS wanted you to use it, and that you could not sell it, give it away, which effectively means that if you sell your PC you cannot give or sell the copy of windows with it. But what this new revelation means is that if you change your motherboard then you have to buy another copy of windows.

Now this means that My company should have bought two additional copies of windows for my PC at work since there have been two motherboard replacements. Apparently this provision has always existed in the software license agreement. So of course the bottom line is that a large proportion of people who think that they have a legal copy of MS Windows are in fact breaching copyright. Now tell me please why this is not greed at its worst?

The web site jmbh.org is now back again and should be much more reliable. We changed providers and now have a static ip adress. It is still ADSL 2+ so should still be a good speed.

Due to a change in provider my web site jmbh.org it will be down for up to several days this week. This includes the site, the gallery, forums and my personal blog.

A few weeks ago I was using my M200 Toshiba Tablet PC when the video suddenly broke up, after which the screen went blank. After several attempts at rebooting and getting nowhere I rappidly came to the conclusion that the video RAM failed. Being integrated into the motherboard this was indeed bad news for the PC, but not such bad news for me since my little precious is covered by a three year warranty, of which there is the better part of two years to run.

This is the fourth fault on this PC. The first fault occured a few days after it arrived. It was a fault in the digitiser which formed a dead reigon on the right inch of the screen which would not respond to the tablet pen. I was offered a new replacement but the local service agent, Volante fixed it and returned it within three days.

The second was again with the digitiser but in this case it stopped responding when I rotated the screen. I had it back twice for this but in the second instance the service agent ordered the part before hand and it was out of my posession less than a day.

The third fault was a dead hard disk drive. This occured after I had it for about three months. Again the tablet was away only a few days.

On the last occasion I delivered the laptop to Ian Knobben of Volante on the Thursday and it was retuned on the following Tuesday, fully operational. Ian has serviced my laptop on each occasion.

The last response is excelent as an average but this is the worst response I have had from Ian. His excuse (as if he needed one) was a doubeling in the number of failed units (the service laptops for a number of manufactures) for this month. January is usually a slow month but for some reason they had 150 units where the average is 65. But despite that the laptop was away less than a week.

I read in the Toshiba forums about people waiting for months for laptops to be returned from warranty repairs. I think Ian nad Volante are to be commended for their prompt response. It demonstrates that prompt and efficient service can be acceived if the company really wants to. I know that Toshiba's reputation in the US has been damaged by the stories of woe that users there tell, but in Adelaide Australia I have nothing but praise for Volante, and more specifically Ian.

The web site http://jmbh.org is currently down for maintenance and should be back up shortly.

This affects the web site and the gallery.

I have been using this great little utility now for some time and it has proven invaluable.

Konfabulator is a shareware applett manager for Mac and Windows. The shareware version has all of the functions of the registered version but with a popup reminder to register. Registration is US$19.95.

Once the user downloads and installs Konfabulator a library of widgets (appletts) is established from which the user can choose which widgets to run. The widgets sit on the desktop and come with configuration options depending on the function the widget is to perform. The user can access the Konfabulator Widget Gallery to download additional appletts. At the writing of this entry there are 584 widgets.

Some of my favourites are;

System dashboards


This includes memory (including Virtual, RAM, and HDDs), Battery, Wireless signal strength, and Time.

Various clocks







These last two allow you to view multiple time zones.

And various forms of count down timers including programmable and specific events.



Believe me, there are some wierd clocks!

RSS Feeds



There are many RSS type feeds and a number of dedicated news feeds as well

Web Cams



A number of web cams and traffic reports from cities from around the world - but not my city!

There are many other utilities to suite every taste.

My only gripe is not with the program itself but more a windows thing. I use There and when I have the There window open and there is a widget behind the There window that is updating it flashes through the There window which becomes quite annoying. I am not sure wether this is the video driver or a Windows thing.

However ahving said that I now find that this is one of my must haves. This little gem is well worth a look.

The DSL link to my website is partially broken and is constantly going up and down so you may have ingtermittant problems accessing it. My son recently married and moved into a new unit with his lovely wife and got ASDL 2+ connected. It is not working quite as well as he hoped!

Yea, g'day.

Welcome to my Tech Blog. My personal blog is here and contains such things as movies I have seen, books I have read, things that happened to me, and my persopnal views.

This blog is strictly confined to technical issues af an IT nature.

I have been working in the IT industry for about 15 years and have a wide range of experience, although I tend to the Unix envoronment.

Bye for now,
John