It amazes me how bad some online shops still are. I’m sorry to start out on a negative note, but there are still a large number of resellers out there that don’t see the link between how their website looks and feels, and how many products they sell. Whats the the point in getting 5000 hits if 4998 of them are wasted because users don’t trust you? When I visit a web shop I immediately form an impression of the company based on their website. It helps me decide whether I think it’s safe to order a product from them or not. When I visit a site that looks like it’s been whipped up in FrontPage I lose confidence and immediately move on (this is measured as your site’s ‘bounce’ rate). Maybe it’s unfair but it’s a bit like eating out, if the restaurant looks rough and ready from the outside, I’m going to try the Italian down the road.

To highlight my point I’ve decided to go a bit old skool; I’ve been looking for a ‘real’ chess set (that doesn’t beep or flash) for the coffee table so I thought I’d try and buy one online.

As luck would have it chess resellers are a brilliant example (I’m sorry chaps). You know when you are trying to find something and all you keep getting are sites that look like they’ve been put together by an Eastern European gang just to steal your credit card details? Welcome to the world of online chess shops. That was until I [finally] found a chess shop that seems to have bothered with good web design; Regency Chess based in Bath. A shining example to behold perhaps?…..well yes, pretty much actually. They look like they’ve put a lot of effort into their site, they were quick when it came to delivery and they were really friendly when I spoke to them on the phone. When I’m impulse buying, I want (no need!) whatever it is I’ve ordered…yesterday.

I ordered a chess set from them at 11am on Thursday and….. alleluia…. it arrived at 10:15 the next morning. I’m no chess geek but the set they sent me looks really nice. It’s a 14” folding chess set with weighted pieces, the board is made from a chunky hardwood (I think it is Sheesham Wood) and it actually feels like it’s worth the £90 I paid for it. Yes, I could have bought something cheaper but some chess sets can cost hundreds, even thousands, and this feels like a good balance. It could easily pass for something twice as expensive. I got emails to tell me my order had shipped, communication was great and everything was properly packed.

I don’t often recommend or plug websites, not that many impress me, but I have to say I had such a good experience I felt compelled to use them as an example of a how specialist web stores should be. Take a look at their site, and then perform a search on google and look at some of their competitors sites. You’ll see what I mean. They’ve obviously spent a lot of time developing their site, making it easy to use without spending an absolute fortune.

Anyway that’s my geekout for today, Staunton Chess sets equal Regency Chess. Search Engine Optimisation PLUS good design equals better sales.

I recently had a problem with a computer located over 300 miles away, it had a nasty malware infection and I didn’t fancy a 6 hour drive. Very often, it’s easier to blow-away a computer and reinstall the operating system rather than spending days scanning and cleaning trojans, viruses and spyware, but sometimes that’s not the easy option.

I started to think about the possibility of cleaning the machine remotely, but I’d need control over the computer whilst it was in safe mode.… well it would have to be safe mode with networking, at least. I often use VNC for remote control (its open source), but as far as I knew I couldn’t get it to run in safe mode with networking….or could I?

This is a guide to using VNC in safe mode (safe mode with networking). Tested with ultraVNC (www.uvnc.com) on Windows, haven’t tested with realVNC: -

1.    Get ultraVNC installed on the target computer. Make sure that you are able to access it; it needs to be installed as a service. You can talk someone through this over the phone. Yes, you may need port forwarding configured at the target site; but if it’s part of a WAN you won’t necessarily have to do this. VNC uses port 5900. Check VNC is working properly.

2.    Download Bootsafe; This is a utility that will allow you to restart the machine in Safe Mode , and Safe Mode with Networking (which is what you need to use). Remember if you restart the computer you won’t be able to hit F8 remotely! that’s why you need to use bootsafe and it needs to be on the target computer.

3.    Open the command prompt on the target machine (Start, Run, ‘cmd’)  and enter the following:

REG COPY HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServiceswinvnc HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSafeBootNetworkwinvnc /s /f

This adds a registry key that allows VNC to start and work in safe mode with networking.

4.    Run Bootsafe on the target computer; select ‘Safe Mode – Networking’, click on ‘Reboot’.

If all goes to plan then you should be able to connect to the machine after it reboots in safe mode with networking. Use ‘ping –t’ ; you can see when the machine reboots and when it comes back to life. VNC Safe Mode !

Yes, there are other ways that you can achieve remote control in safe mode, but this did what I needed it to do. There are paid tools like logmein and you can also try VNCscan (I couldn’t get it to work). I’ve since cleaned a couple of machines using the VNC Safe Mode method and it has been surprisingly effective. If you’ve got malware problems try ComboFix combined with malwarebytes.

Standard warning: Step 3 adds a registry key to windows. Editing the registry could damage your computer. Do not edit the Windows registry unless you are confident about doing so.

Since I received my new iPhone 3G, I’ve been wondering why Apple didn’t add an option for text message delivery reports to the iPhone 3G software (SMS delivery reports). Sometimes when you send a text message you just want to know that its been delivered properly! I used to have delivery receipts turned on permanently on my Nokias and was disappointed when I found I couldn’t turn on delivery reports with my first iPhone (running on vodafone).

Now that I have switched to O2 I’ve discovered that there is a way to get delivery reports for individual text messages! Although this isn’t the blanket solution (built in option) that I’d hoped for it is still useful when you want to confirm that someone has received your text message.

To request an SMS delivery report in the UK (O2) simply add *0# to the beginning of the text message and continue the message as normal. When the SMS is received a delivery report (delivery receipt) will appear as another iChat bubble on your iPhone; below your original message (you get a text message back).

SMS delivery report codes are different for each mobile network and each country. Some mobile networks do not offer SMS delivery report codes. These codes will work on other phones as well as iPhones. Here are some codes for other networks. You need to type the code before your text message, and its probably best to leave a space as some providers require this. They are also case sensitive:

UK Mobile Networks
O2 prefix *0#
Orange prefix RCT
T Mobile prefix *0#
Orange prefox RCT
Vodafone – No code exists for Vodafone
Virgin prefix *0#

US Cell Networks
T–Mobile prefix *noti#

If you have other codes, please post them in the comments and I will add them. Thanks!

Procuring an iPhone 3G on launch day is absolutely as hard as you might imagine. It’s been a rollercoaster of a week, an experiment to see what people will go through to get their technology fix. I was lucky, but many weren’t.

“ Monday July 7th, 8am. New email; O2 now accepting preorders. 8:34am my order is placed, I have a confirmation email. iPhone 3G will be delivered on Friday before 10am.” …was that too easy?…..

Monday

O2’s website worked flawlessly when I used it, but for many it just collapsed. Users were left wondering whether their order had gone through, and were pulling their hair out. By the afternoon the website was closed to pre-orders. iPhone 3G sold out.

Tuesday & Wednesday
Tuesday and Wednesday saw fever pitch speculation over on the O2 forums. Many users had orders in-progress, some [seemingly] failed orders were suddenly appearing, and others were having orders randomly cancelled. We weren’t happy lambs.

The mood was lifted when orders started to change from “in-progress“ to “complete”. I had a sudden addiction to the O2’s order status page and the refresh button.

Thursday
By Thursday we were flapping, many orders were still “in-progress”. Speculation was growing. Why hadn’t our order status changed? did O2 actually have enough stock to fulfill it’s preorders?

I spoke to O2 customer services on three separate occasions during the week and their staff were always polite and helpful. They reassured me the iPhone would arrive on launch day and I wouldn’t be disappointed.

By 5pm on Thursday it was clear it wasn’t going to happen. A final call to O2 confirmed it; they couldn’t fulfill my order and weren’t sure when they would be able to. Their website was talking about availability “by the end of the summer”.

Carphone Warehouse To The Rescue: At 5:15pm I phoned Carphone warehouse and explained my plight. It was a long shot. Their reply? “No Problem”, they would have an iPhone 3G delivered tomorrow …… and do you know what?…… They weren’t joking. I placed an order at 5:15pm on Thursday and received it at 8:30am Friday.

Thoughts
It’s been a difficult week for O2. Nobody is entirely clear how many preorders they took, but there were a lot. Many have criticised O2 for raising expectations and dashing them. It was always going to be hard for O2 to cope, but IMHO their order system should have been capped. They should only have accepted pre-orders for phones they could deliver. But could anyone really have coped with the insatiable demand? probably not.

“Was the iPhone 3G worth it?” don’t ask silly questions!

UPDATE: I’m disappointed to hear that my Carphone Warehouse order may have been fulfilled at the expense of other CPW users who ordered on Monday! in the same way that my 8:30am order with O2 on Monday was passed over for later orders placed at 1PM. Come on guys its not that difficult!

When my new Siemens KG39NA90GB Fridge Freezer arrived on Thursday morning, it would be fair to say I was more that a little impressed. Aesthetically its a stainless steel marvel, and in terms of engineering? well it had to be fantastic….its German for goodness sake.

Unfortunately my excitement was short-lived. After waiting 24 hours for the gasses to settle I finally turned her on last night. For the first 20 minutes all was fine, she was making a quiet humming noise….
…… Then she got angry and started making this noise. If you listen to the complete track the silence in the middle is when I open the fridge door. Now I’m not a fridge engineer, but I’ve got a fairly good idea that this isn’t right - especially when you’ve spent £900. Whatever happened to quality checks?

I phoned John Lewis this morning and they have arranged for an Engineer from Siemens Bosch to call out on Monday. The guys over at the UK White Goods Forums think its sounds like the evaporator fan may have been dislodged during transit or it is hitting some insulation.

UPDATE: It was the evaporator fan, it just needed reseating. The engineer from Siemens Bosch was very helpful and fixed it in 5 minutes. Its be fine since!

In a bizarre turn of events Virgin Media has joined forces with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) to harass customers that the BPI claims have illegally downloaded music tracks using Virgin’s Broadband service.

Up to 800 warning letters have been sent out to customers by Virgin with the warning “if you don’t read this your broadband could be disconnected”. The letter is part of a wider ‘three strikes and your out’ campaign by the BPI and has left some Virgin customers scratching their heads wondering whether they are paying Virgin Media for an internet service or a ‘re-education’ programme.

The move has been widely criticised, with some talking about ‘a PR disaster’ and ‘biting the hand that feeds it’. Whilst other ISP’s, including the Carphone Warehouse, have sent the BPI away with a flea in it’s ear, Virgin appears to have readily ‘offered-up’ it’s customers, sparking more privacy fears and concerns over loyalty.

This latest debacle comes as yet another blow to Virgin Media’s reputation following the Phorm fiasco, in which it was revealed that Virgin planned to sell its customers browsing history to the advertising company Phorm, Inc.

Whatever Virgin Media’s intentions, this appears to be advertising gold for the UK’s other ISP’s.

A user on the digitalspy forums has successful upgraded the hard disk in his V+ box. The Poster known as jamjam has extended the recording time from 80 hours to an astonishing 400 hours.

The stock 160gb hard drive was replaced with a new Seagate 750GB Ultra IDE Drive (Model No. ST3750640A). From the forum discussion it appears that the upgrade was relatively straightforward, and simply involved physical removal the old drive and replacement with the new drive. Jamjam reported that on first boot the V+ box automatically reformatted the new drive without any user input - which has been working perfectly since. The only minor niggle is that the V+ menu only displays 80 hours of available space after upgrade, although this number only decreases to 79 hours after 5 hours have been recorded. It would seem that V+ calculates the number of free hours based on the percentage of free disk space.

Check out the details here.

Please note that V+ users do not own their V+ boxes. V+ boxes remain property of Virgin Media, therefore this is one of those ‘do not try this at home’ upgrades.

This coming week sees the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, and the most eagerly anticipated announcement has to be the new iPhone (the iPhone 2.0).

According to MacRumors the second generation iPhone is expected to adopt 3G for faster internet access, along with a number of ground breaking features. These could include a forward facing camera for video calls and a GPS receiver for satellite navigation. As always there has been much speculation as to the design of the new iPhone, with a number of ‘leaked’ photos circulating the Internet.
With the actual launch expected to be sometime in late June or July in the US, UK users are left wondering about possible launch dates in the UK and whether it will be long after the US launch. Many have speculated that it’s likely to be soon after the US because of its predecessors popularity.

On a personal level the first iPhone has been such an amazing buy (despite the critics views) that I can’t wait to get my hands on the iPhone 2.0. I may even consider switching to O2 and signing up on a contract (I currently use an unlocked iPhone on Vodafone). My only gripe is the duration of the existing O2 contracts, which appear to be around 18 months (far too long). Either way it seems extremely unlikely that second iPhone will be made available on any other network, at least to being with.

There seems to be a big debate about the use of the rel=”nofollow” tag when linking to other websites. I’m no SEO expert - so I’m in no position to comment! but in this post I will tell you how I added a checkbox to wordpress admin that allows me to make new sidebar (blogroll) links nofollow links. In my case I opted to use nofollow for linking to a few big websites. I haven’t used nofollow for linking to smaller sites that need the juice.

What is the rel=”nofollow” tag?
Simply put the rel=”nofollow” tag can be used when linking to other web sites to tell google and other search engines not to follow that link as part of their crawl. Thats the oversimplified explanation anyway, the reality is that it tells google not to add any weight to that page’s pagerank / ranking because of your link to that site, which it might otherwise do.

How I added rel=”nofollow” to selected sidebar (blogroll) links
If I want to create a link on my sidebar I usually go to ‘write’ and then ‘links’ from with WP Admin. At the bottom of this page there is a subtitle - “Link Relationship (XFN)” and beneath it is a text entry field with the tantalising word ‘rel’ (hmmm I want rel=”nofollow”)…… Unfortunately WP 2.5 won’t let me type anything here. I have to tick a checkbox beneath the text field for anything to appear in it. I guess I need a tickbox called ‘nofollow’. How do I add that?

To do this I downloaded and edited the ‘edit-link-form.php’ file from the wp-admin folder on my webserver. I inserted the following line of code: