James's Weblog

Stopping BitDefender reverting your Hosts file

Fri, 14/10/2022 - 12:31 -- James Oakley
Bitdefender

Currently, my anti-virus software of choice is Bitdefender.

There's a file on a Windows computer called the "hosts file", that most people have no need to change. It lives at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. (Linux-based systems have a hosts file too, at /etc/hosts.) In fact, unless you have a need to change it, and know what you're doing, leave well alone.

Blog Category: 

Preserving window sizes for individual message in Microsoft Outlook

Sat, 17/09/2022 - 09:08 -- James Oakley
Microsoft Outlook Icon

This is one of those posts where I stick something on here to help me find it again, and because I won't be the only person trying to solve this.

The Problem: Size and Position of Individual Messages

Microsoft Outlook (msoutlook) is an email client, part of the Microsoft Office suite, and available as part of the Office 365 subscription. Do not confuse this with their online Outlook email service, which is the successor of Hotmail.

Blog Category: 

Consumer Warning: SodaPDF cannot be trusted

Thu, 15/09/2022 - 11:25 -- James Oakley
SodaPDF logo

I was a longtime customer of PDF software made by a company called Docudesk. After they got bought by SodaPDF, who in turn got bought by Avanquest, the software I'd paid for stopped working. This post details the problem, and how they eventually fixed it for me.

Blog Category: 

Facebook: Hacked versus Cloned

Wed, 07/09/2022 - 10:32 -- James Oakley
Facebook login screen on a mobile phone

“I think my Facebook account has been hacked. Sorry everyone.”

Anyone who uses Facebook, and has a decent number of Facebook friends, will see this message from time to time.

People get confused about exactly what’s happened, and therefore how to prevent this from happening and how to fix this if it does.

The key thing to understand is that there are two distinct things that can happen to you: Hacked, and cloned.

Facebook Hacked

This is when someone else is able to log in to your Facebook account.

Blog Category: 

Religious ends being used to justify immoral means

Thu, 11/08/2022 - 11:49 -- James Oakley

In Acts 23:12-22, Paul is imprisoned in Jerusalem, when a group of over 40 young men take an oath not to eat until they have killed him. They plan to request him to be taken for an audience at the Sanhedrin, and to ambush it en route. Paul's nephew hears of the plot, tips off the military commander, and Paul is extricated at night to Caesarea to foil their plot.

Blog Category: 

Acts 19-28: Moving from Proclamation to Defence of the Gospel

Tue, 09/08/2022 - 12:58 -- James Oakley

I have long found David Gooding's book, True to the Faith, a really helpful look at the book of Acts, mapping out how Luke's story unfolds and how it teaches us in the process.

As I look at chapters 19-28, he introduces his section on this with the following really helpful paragraph (page 338 in my 1990 edition; I'm not sure how much material has been added by the currently in-print 2013 edition to move the page numbers on):

Blog Category: 

Keeping track of upstream security issues

Sat, 06/08/2022 - 20:08 -- James Oakley

Drupal no longer releases a new version of Core when an upstream dependency fixes a security vulnerability. It is the responsibility of site maintainers to keep track of security advisories for all such dependent libraries. That is no small task, and a way to automate this is needed. This post looks into how this can be done.

Blog Category: 

Pages

Subscribe to James's Weblog
Additional Terms