Do you middle click?
Do you use the middle button on your mouse to click for a special function?
I use the middle button on my Mighty Mouse to click on web links to open them up in new tabs in the browser. It’s very handy and I miss it when I use a trackpad or a mouse without a middle button.

Like the new trackpads on the latest Mac Notebooks or that touch sensitive rodent the Magic Mouse.

But help is at hand, those Mac geeks at the Mac Observer’s ‘Mac Geek Gab‘ podcast featured an app called middleclick.app in their latest pod cast.

The idea is you tap with three fingers to get a middle click function. It works really well.

I had dismissed the Magic Mouse just because of it’s lack of a middle button, but I may take another look now that there is a work around for this vital function.

It’s been reported by the BBC that Stephen Fry may quit Twitter.

Apparently Mr Fry was upset by a comment from a Twitter follower, I don’t know who, that complained that Fry’s Tweets were boring.

Get a life anonymous Tweeter! If you find some one a bit boring on Twitter do what everyone else does, stop following them. Don’t abuse them.

I find the Fry tweets interesting and an insight into his hectic life.

Stephen, please keep going.

UPDATE: Fry has changed his mind as is staying with Twitter, and he has made up with his follower (@brumplum) who thought he was boring.

So that’s all right then.

I am amazed that this made the news, it must be slow for ‘real news’ at the moment!

I had not realised how much Flash content was imbedded into web pages until I turned it off.

I installed the plugin for Safari that turns Flash off. Instead of those annoying adverts I now get a plain grey box with “FLASH” written on it. I click the box to play the Flash. Or not. Mostly not.

Look here for the ClickToFlash page. Similar plugins are available for Firefox and maybe IE.

Why should you care about this?

It costs you money. Yes really, your hard earned cash is being frittered away by Flash. Flash makes your CPU work harder, it takes more energy, so that’s electricity you are paying for. It takes up bandwidth on the web, bandwidth you indirectly pay for with your broadband subscription. If you surf on a portable using 3G WiFi from the cellular network you are directly paying for the bandwidth.

Your browsing experience will be much faster without Flash.

If we all block the Flash perhaps the perpetrators of this crime will get the message and stop putting Flash all over the web.

BAN FLASH!

Apple launched some new products yesterday.

A gorgeous looking new range of the iMac, with superb high definition screens. The MacBook laptop gets a makeover and looks really nice. The Mac Mini gets a speed boost and now they do a server version. (I have had three Mac Minis, a firm favourite of mine.)

And a mouse.
What can I say? Apple can’t make pointing devices. I have a Mighty Mouse, it sucks. I HATE it. It does not click correctly, the scroll feature keeps clogging up and jamming, the side buttons are useless, IT’S RUBBISH APPLE!

The new mouse looks like it they put a Mighty Mouse and trackpad in a box and allowed them to breed. The result looks like the worst of both devices.

It’s really easy Apple:-

Go to PC World, pick up a cheap £10 mouse.
Take to the design labs and copy it.
Make it white plastic.
Don’t do anything else to it, less is more with a mouse.

OR

Farm out your rodent production to Logitech.

I have my iPod first generation up for sale on eBay. I have had to re-list it because I got scammed on the sale. I spotted the scam just in time and informed eBay so all is well but this is what happened.

The auction was just about to close, five minutes to go or thereabouts. I received an email stating that the item had sold. Here is the email:

Hello seller,

I will like to inform you that am the winner of your item on eBay and will want you to please get back to me with your email address so as for me to be able to make payment via PayPal.

Thanks

Dora.

-dora.smith3232.32

The scam is that the seller thinks it’s sold, sends the ‘buyer’ the PayPal info. The then seller gets a spoof email from PayPal that looks like the item is paid for.

The sting comes with the seller sending off the item thinking it’s paid for when it’s not. The double sting is the possibility of following a spoof link to PayPal and revealing the users password.

It could be very easy to get caught on this if the seller did not check directly on eBay but took the spoof email as proof of the sale. As I was logged into both PayPal and eBay as the auction closed I spotted immediately that I was being scammed.

There are reports in the news that Hotmail, Gmail and other email services have been compromised. (Reported online by BBC news)

This is interesting as I was discussing passwords with some friends only a few days ago. I was amazed that one person uses ‘vvvvvvv’ as his office password; that IT department needs to check their procedures!

Password strength has always been an issue. If you have ever worked in an environment where the office system forces a password change at regular intervals and does not let you reuse previous passwords, or indeed some of the characters from previous passwords, you will know what I am talking about.

BUT, if the user falls for a phishing scam, that user can have a 64 character UPPER and lower case, numerical and symbol password but it may as well be ‘fred12345′ (Look at your keyboard for the significance of FRED) or even ‘password’ because the user is giving away the password to the bad guys.

If you get an email and it looks like it’s from your ISP, email supplier, Paypal, bank, credit card or ANYTHING secure DO NOT click on the link. Go to a saved bookmark or type the address in manually.

I checked the emails my own bank and credit card company send out and they don’t have links in them. They just ask me to login to my account.

Strong passwords are good, but education of the user is even better.

I had an excursion into central London this morning to perv at support Lady Godiva with her naked plinthing.

I took my trusty Apple MacBook Pro and used my 3G MiFi device that I acquired from the Three network recently. I had never used it in anger before as the ’3′ network is poor in Bricket Wood.

It works really well. No need for drivers, no need for wires. It connects wirelessly to the notebook. Connection speed was good, I streamed video from the net, chatted on Twitter and surfed all at the same time.

With this device wireless broadband has come of age. The MiFi put’s a ‘bubble’ of your own personal wireless internet around you, use a laptop, iPod or iPhone or indeed all three at the same time to connect to the web.

It makes an iPod Touch running Skype very close to an iPhone but without the costly monthly subscription.

So far the wireless USB dongles have been less that inspiring, but this raises the game. True wireless for ANY WiFi enabled device.

The ‘Mac Format‘ magazine has published one of my letters. Very excited to get into print, even more so as it’s this month’s ‘Star letter’. See my prose on page 20 of issue 213 – October 2009.

As if that was not enough those veterans of all things Mac and geeky Dave Hamilton and John F Braun over at the ‘Mac Observers Mac Geek Gab‘ used an audio clip of mine in the show broadcast on 14 September 2009 – show number 218.

These things usually come in threes, (in a strictly secular way of course) so I am waiting the next item on the list…

Derren clearly did not predict the lottery result as he did not show the numbers until AFTER the draw.

There are a number of ways he could have proved he had the numbers correct.

Do the show in front of a live audience.
Get an independent adjudicator.
Buy a ticket!

But he did none of these things. Clever trick, but it was just that, a trick. It has got him a lot of publicity which I am sure will help his show business career.

I have yet to see an illusion or magic trick which leaves me totally baffled, I can usually work out how they are done. I suspect Darren used a camera trick to hide the balls being put in place by an accomplice, hence the lack of live audience or adjudicator. But it takes courage to do it live, it all had to work exactly or Darren would have looked a fool.

5/10 for the illusion.
10/10 for courage.
10/10 for generating publicity.
0/10 for bullshit explanation.

“NEXT…. ”

I got bored with ‘Scruffy’.

So here we are with Ahren Ahimsa.
I quite like it at the moment but one of the nice things about WordPress, if you get bored, it’s easy to change the decor/