Robert Cathles: 2012

2 November 2012

Best mobile phone deals: iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, Samsung Galaxy S3

[To be updated for more Galaxy S3 deals, prices correct as of date of posting]

iPhone 5

iPhone 4S

Samsung Galaxy S3

Some companies provide a discount with Vodafone hence the blue and 20% off entries ;)

20 October 2012

Teh Noms

I've only met 2 people in my life who are as fussy as me about food. Thought I would share some details. I've narrowed it down not to issues with taste, but usually texture. The black bullet points identify things I am not very fond of at all.

Potatoes - mushiness

Roast potato - hot and/or crunchy is OK
Chips - salty and/or crunchy and/or hot is OK

Peas - mushy
Onion slices

In burgers/tuna melt - OK - because they baguette is also crunchy
In tuna mayo sandwich - not OK - because they are crunchy, when sandwiches aren't crunchy
In lasagne/bolognese - not OK - because it is meant to be smooth

Sweetcorn - only on its own, not in/with anything - because it is both crunchy and smooth
Peppers, chillis, cherries - texture of the skin

Cherry flavour is OK
Anything moderately spicy is not OK

Egg mayo - texture of egg pieces
Banana - mushiness

Banana-flavoured foam sweets are OK
Not a fan of banana milkshake or ice cream

Chocolate ice cream (e.g. Ben & Jerry's)

Normal chocolate is OK
Melted chocolate is OK
Chocolate anything else is OK

Coffee, tea and any other hot drinks - can't handle hotness

Hot chocolate is okay when mild
Coffee flavour is not OK

Breakfast cereal with milk - soggyness

Separate milk in a glass, sipped with a spoon of cereal is OK

Apple crumble

Crumble is okay, but apple isn't right

More to come...

Compare Mac and PC: being realistic

PC: Dell, Alienware, HP, etc.
Mac: Air, MacBook, iMac

Pricing
Features
Stability
Protection & Backup
Ease of use
Design
Performance (graphics)
Third party support for applications/compatibility e.g. gaming, apps
Portability
Energy consumption
Recycling
Repair: Costs
Technical Support (availability/quality)

Would anyone like to contribute? ;)

Phone Signal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operators_of_Europe#United_Kingdom

Mobile transmission bands belong to these groupings in the UK:

Everything Everywhere (Orange, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile)
O2 (Tesco, giffgaff)
3
Vodafone (TalkTalk, BT)

Test: which is the best mobile phone provider, based upon greatest mobile phone signal coverage detected, given a normal transit from home to work.

Results (measured in percentage of coverage available):

Data:

Hardware used:

Nokia C1 (Vodafone)
HTC Wildfire (3, Orange)
Nokia 1110 (Tesco)

14 October 2012

Yogscast Favourite Clips

27 September 2012

Cure for the common cold?

Had a very bad cold yesterday but wasn't troubled by my runny nose today hardly at all (very minor sniffles and slight sore throat at times and tiny bit of a headache but nothing that interfered).
Here's a list of what I did yesterday to combat it:

Plenty of tissues to hand
No breakfast or lunch
Dinner: 'grab bag' pack of Doritos Hot, 1/2 Rubicon Mango 1 litre juice carton, Fry's Peppermint Cream, Tolberone (small), Muller Corner yoghurt (Toffee Hoops)
Trebor mints whenever I got a runny nose
Boots Cold & Flu powder blackcurrant with 1 large glass of water (I hate this stuff the same as I do Lemsip powder though! >.<)
2 Paracetemol (not same time as the Cold & Flu)
Rested for 6 hours (but not sleeping, just lying down working)
Normal sleep

Other methods I've tried which have been unsuccessful:

Sleep
Soup (e.g. chicken)
Garlic bread

Other things which probably do help:

Vapo-cream
Breathe steam under a towel

What's your remedies for a nasty cold?

4 June 2012

Best antimalware solutions: quick experiment

Here are some results of the 'best' antimalware solutions based on their ability to detect a new virus that entered the world wide web on 1st June 2012. So yes, this isn't an accurate method, but from the results you can clearly tell which companies may be faster at getting out definitions.

20120601

F-Prot - W32/FakeAlert.MC2.gen!Eldorado
NOD32 - a variant of Win32/Adware.WintionalityChecker.AF

20120602

AhnLab-V3 - Trojan/Win32.FakeAV
AntiVir - TR/Fraud.Gen8
AVG - Suspicion: unknown virus
ClamAV - PUA.Packed.ASPack
Commtouch - W32/FakeAlert.MC2.gen!Eldorado
Kaspersky - HEUR:Trojan.Win32.Generic
McAfee - FakeAlert-PJ.gen.aw
Panda - Suspicious file
Symantec - VirusDoctor!gen11
VIPRE - Trojan.Win32.Generic.pak!cobra

20120603

Norman - W32/Troj_Generic.BZWOM

20120604

Avast - Win32:Malware-gen

BitDefender - Trojan.Generic.KDV.638540

DrWeb - Trojan.Siggen4.2452

F-Secure - Trojan.Generic.KDV.638540

GData - Trojan.Generic.KDV.638540

McAfee-GW-Edition - Artemis!FF21268DF387

nProtect - Trojan.Generic.KDV.638540

TrendMicro-HouseCall - TROJ_GEN.R4AB1F2

Undetected as of time of this post

Antiy-AVL -

ByteHero -

CAT-QuickHeal -

Comodo -

Emsisoft -

eSafe -

Fortinet -

Ikarus -

Jiangmin -

K7AntiVirus -

Microsoft -

PCTools -

Rising -

Sophos -

SUPERAntiSpyware -

TheHacker -

TotalDefense -

TrendMicro -

VBA32 -

ViRobot -

VirusBuster -

https://www.virustotal.com/file/729675ab9460d7e07d294156ae3ae367eb3c07047ab7b87021e158e7c69bfdae/analysis/1338636214/

https://www.virustotal.com/file/729675ab9460d7e07d294156ae3ae367eb3c07047ab7b87021e158e7c69bfdae/analysis/1338811003/

17 May 2012

Word 2010 Error: "Problem with the contents of the file"

Update 1: There is a solution that may work for some people from Microsoft (released 18/02/2013, nearly a year after this post). Download the Fix-it from this page and see if it repairs the file for you.
Update 2: Also there is a similar blog here which explains the same as I've done (also dated later but describes in a different way)

There is a bug in Word 2010 I've come across for the third time now to do with XML validation on documents when they are saved over a network.

You may have seen this before:

The file 113 Honey Lane brochure.docx cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents.

The XML data is invalid according to the schema.

Location: Part: /word/document.xml, Line: 2, Column: 0

Some online articles report this as a problem with the table of contents, however I've worked with documents that don't have a table of contents. Also I cannot see any Microsoft response to this issue and I hope to get their attention to get this fixed.

Word does have an 'Open & Repair' option, however this only tries to read text from the document, so this doesn't help us at all and leaves us stranded with a 99.99% valid XML document but unable to use it - that is one of the pitfalls of XML I guess. But really this is a bug that Microsoft needs to correct.

How to fix

1. Extract the DOCX file using an compression program (i.e. 7-zip) to a new folder.

2. The 'Location' on the error dialog is where the problem is. However as it says Line 2 Column 0, well, Column 0 is right when the main body opens - which means the actual XML problem could be anywhere. If we knew where it was, we would just need to go to Line 2, Column 286 or whatever, and correct the XML. However when it is like this, we need to validate the XML instead. I recommend Oxygen XML Editor:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/download_oxygenxml_editor.html
(30 day free trial licence sent over email address, 90MB download)

3. Open up Oxygen and open the word/document.xml file from the extracted folder.

4. Validate the XML.

5. Right at the bottom of the validation report are the important errors. Some errors are permittable.

The ones in red are the ones we need to fix. The ones in green are fine.

6. Fix the XML. CTRL+L can take you to the location in blue (Line 2, Column 365...) Here is one example of XML that needs to be fixed but in general the problems I've seen have involved incomplete tags and missing closing tags.

Here, the < mc:Fallback > tag doesn't have a closing tag. Also, there is no closing < /mc:AlternateContent > tag before the new < w:p >. Here is the corrected version. The first 4 validation errors from above, I actually couldn't fix, so I just removed the < mc:Fallback > block altogether (it is a fallback so it is not important anyway).

We can see that the same block is now validated to be OK (there is no longer a red dotted line under the tree leaf on the left). I had to add 2 closing elements and Oxygen actually autocompleted them as soon as I typed < / so I didn't need to type out the whole thing ;)

After saving and validating again we can see there are 2 more errors somewhere else in the document, again these just need some more closing tags.

7. When it validates so there are no more major errors (not to do with namespaces/context), just zip up all the files again in the extracted folder (must be using the ZIP format, other parameters don't matter) and rename to docx. Now open it in Word and the error is gone.

Online articles

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-word/word-2010-document-will-not-open-illegal-xml/0d6d05df-d201-4537-a154-7b2a3df4e32a?msgId=c4b8dd1b-2fe4-4245-aa39-d6df9ed6cbe7

http://help.wugnet.com/office/Word-2007-XML-error-message-ftopict1173860.html

http://help.wugnet.com/office/open-docx-file-content-error-ftopict1081932.html

http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/office-open-xml-file-docx-cannot-opened-t3714016.html

Robert Cathles

2 November 2012

Best mobile phone deals: iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, Samsung Galaxy S3

20 October 2012

Teh Noms

Compare Mac and PC: being realistic

Phone Signal

14 October 2012

Yogscast Favourite Clips

27 September 2012

Cure for the common cold?

4 June 2012

Best antimalware solutions: quick experiment

17 May 2012

Word 2010 Error: "Problem with the contents of the file"

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