This won’t mean much if you weren’t in to computers in the UK in the 80s and 90s. If you were, however, you’ll probably be sad to note that PCW - the magazine we all used to read - has ceased publication. Guy Kewney has written an obit for TheReg and here’s another from former editor Gordon Liang. Finally, here’s a picture of the first issue. Read ‘em and weep.

When I first set up this site back in 2005 I looked around for a blogging platform and chose ExpressionEngine. After years of bad experience with PHP (it’s such a mess) I was relucant to use a platform based on PHP but EE is a good and well thought out system. (BTW EE is about to release version 2.) So there we were.

The Mumbler: says a lot but never transmits any information.

It’s been a long time. I’m back. It’s all new. More later. Whoop!

On the Mac you can change the DVD region code 5 times after which no more changes are “allowed”. There’s something fundamentally wrong with hardware that disables itself. Or hardware that essentially dictates to the owner (the owner!) what it can be used for. Anyway, some searching turns up the means to reset the code. The below applies to Pioneer drives. My Mac has a Pioneer DVR-117 drive there’s seems to be no specific firmware for this drive downloadable on the net but some searching on the forums makes it clear that we can use the DVR-108…

If you get the error “AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘xyz’” in Django. It probably means you’ve added a new app but forgot to put the __init__.py file in the app’s directory.

I wept

Google have released their chart API. Here’s a few alternatives for Python:

• Matplotlib
• ChartDirector
• jpgraph
• dislin

See also vtk and MayaVi

How to change the number of pages (NumPages) displayed in Word documents. Edit those field codes.