I just tried to log in to my Amazon account and didn’t notice Chrome had already pre-filled in my password so I ended up typing my password on the end of the pre-filled password and in my rush hit Enter…it logged me in!? WTF?

I logged out of my Amazon account and tried logging in with a completely incorrect password and it was rejected. I then tried with my correct password but added some arbtry numbers to the end (123456) and it still logged me in! Seriously? If your password is only X characters long, Amazon only check the first X characters that you have entered in the password field?

For Example:

If your Amazon password is helloworld (mine’s not that btw) and you tried to log in using helloworld123456 it accepts it as your password, it’s not even respecting case sensitivity and is accepting HELLOWORLD. Likewise if you enter any of the following in the password field it will accept it and log you in:

• helloworldhelloworld
• helloworldblahblahblah
• helloworld_this_is_not_very_secure_surely
• HELLOWORLD
• HeLlOwORldABC123

Is this normal password verification behaviour? That’s the sort of password verification that I’d lose marks for implementing in my university coursework, not the kind of verification I’d expect from the World’s largest online retailer.

On Amazon’s help page there is a “Protect Your Password” section that states:

• Passwords are case sensitive. For instance, “PASSWORD” and “Password” are two different passwords.When choosing a password, remember the capitalisation you use.
• Passwords must be a minimum of six characters

UPDATE: I’ve just tried it on 3 different machines using Chrome and Internet Explorer and they were 3 workstations I’d never used before and it let me in. I then asked two other amazon users to try and it rejects anything but their exact passwords and is case sensitive for them.

Why would my account be different?

I just called Amazon help line and call centre lady suggested I try changing password to see if that helps. I told her I wanted to know why this was happening and get an answer from their web dev team before I change anything on the account. No point trying to change password, if that does resolve it then there’s nothing for their dev team to investigate.

UPDATE 2: It looks like this is a known issue and Amazon are yet to roll out a fix after it was first reported a year ago. It’s from an old password policy that flattened passwords so they were no longer case sensitive and also only the first 8 characters were checked.

THE FIX: Simply using the change password facility from your account section in Amazon and changing the password to the same thing it currently is will fix this issue. Why Amazon haven’t rolled out a background fix for this in the year they’ve known about it is beyond me.

My inner geek is telling me I need a Kindle. Even before the newer and cheaper models I’ve always been drawn towards a Kindle which is strange because I don’t read books, period!

I have an iPad 2 and several eBooks on that in both iBooks and Kindle app format. I’ve started to read books and then lost interest or been distracted by push alerts for a game of Words with Friends of Twitter alerts. That’s one of my issues with the iPad as a reading device, it’s far too easy to get distracted. I should really turn on AirPlane mode if I want to sit down and seriously read a book on the iPad but I just can’t bring myself to do that and I don’t know why.
Reflections and glare have always been my biggest gripe about the iPad and iPad 2, so much so that I recently bought and fitted an anti-glare matte film to my iPad 2 and I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner, I won’t go into the details but you can read more about that here.Then there is the big issue of readability/legability of books on the iPad screen. I’ve played with Kindles a fair bit and they hands-down beat the iPad in terms of having a natural book-esque quality to the screen and words. The e-ink almost perfectly mirrors a printed page and when I first saw an e-ink screen in a shop I thought it was a dummy display model until the page changed. e-Books were made to be read on an e-ink display like that found in the Kindle, it’s easier on the eye and there are no problems with glare or reflections.

The early Kindle’s suffered from slow page transitions but from what I can tell this is no longer the case on the newer Kindles. Like a real book there’s no illumination for the screen, no backlight at all, so if you want to read in low light in bed you’ll still need your bedside light on. That doesn’t bother me too much but it would be nice if they could make some kind of low power illumination similar to that used in kameleon remotes or the very old Psion Series 5mx palmtop I used to own.

I’d also be a little less precious about a Kindle I think, I don’t know if I’d buy a Kindle cover for it or not, the screens seem pretty robust even if the main unit itself is quite light and feels like cheap plastic. Having tried a variety of different iPad cases I’m sure I could find some Kindle covers I like.

At present I subscribe to a lot of magazines with Zinio and read them when I get chance. These wouldn’t port well to the Kindle’s black and white screen and colour is a must so I’m going to continue reading them on my iPad. However, I’m now teetering on the point of buying a Kindle to try and get me into the habit of taking time out from my busy tech life, leaving my iPhone, iPad 2, MacBook Air and other gizmos in the other room and sitting down to read a good book. I doubt I’d use a Kindle as much as some of my friends who rattle through one if not two books a week, I wish I had that much spare time on my hands but I don’t but I’d certainly like to get into the habit of reading a book a month at least.

My other draw towards getting a Kindle is to see how they cope with PDFs. In work my employees have dozens of technical engineering journals to read every week, they used to be delivered as hard copies in the post but almost all have now converted to issuing PDF only copies of their technical journals. This isn’t a problem for me on the iPad 2 but none of my staff have iPads and I’m not likely to buy them all one any time soon. I have toyed with the idea of buying an office Kindle or two that they could load their PDFs onto and take home to read at nights/weekends but when I last looked into this, the early Kindle’s didn’t handle PDFs very well at all. From what I can gather now though, the latest Kindle have native PDF support and it’s simply a case of drag-n-drop your files via USB.

I have watched several YouTube videos that say in practice PDF viewing on a Kindle should be simple but in practice it’s not. Since the PDFs are not in kindle format you can’t mess around with font styles, font sizes etc and many PDF documents we have are published with text in columns across the page. The Kindle doesn’t appear to have a mode to extract that text to read in a flat page so you end up constantly panning around the page which isn’t very natural or efficient.

Long story short, I’ll still probably buy one of the new Kindles for experimentation and to see if it helps get me into the habit of reading books on a regular basis. Watch this space.

I recently had an employee whose AutoCAD was playing up. Clicking file open didn’t load the usual windows file browser, the command was asking you to type the file name you wanted, not exactly the most productive way to open a file.

Fortunately there is a very quick and simple fix, you just need to change the filedia flag from 0 to 1.

To do that press escape so you are back at the normal command prompt in AutoCAD and then type:

filedia (when you press space afterwards it should prompt you with “Enter new value for FILEDIA <0>:)
then type the number “1″ and hit <return>

That should be it, when you go to file open, the file browser should now show again.

I’m not sure why this happened, my employee came to me with this problem and they definitely hadn’t entered filedia in the command prompt before and then 0 to turn it off so it must have been from an earlier crash or system fault?

Having used a naked Xoom for a couple weeks I hastily purchased an official Folio case, which has been doing it’s job, just. After a couple weeks of use the Folio case is providing excellent protection when travelling, but it’s nothing less than awkward when trying to use the Xoom with it fitted! A desk-stand it is not! Having looked at various options for a replacement Xoom case I decided the SD TabletWear case was perfect. A faux leather (this case is only £20 remember) outer skin with soft innards and a decent mechanism for using the case as a desk stand, it ticked all the boxes.

My concern around the case being too flimsy were quickly dispelled as the case is reinforced with some pretty stiff material inside. It’s not as protective as the hard plastic of the official Folio case but it’s not as ugly either! Book-style cases suit tablets really well and the solid magnetic fastener on this one keeps the case firmly together whenever required.

The case has all the required cuts to enable access to the rear camera, flash, power button, speakers, front camera, volume control, head phone jack, light sensor and card slot while the case is on.

Fitting is a 5 second job as the sizing is flawless, there’s even a velcro safety strap which locks the tablet safely into the case. Once fitted the case feels surprisingly tight and secure, I’d actually prepared myself for a looser fit so this was a pleasant surprise!

Due to it’s construction material they’ve had to put a fair amount of stiffener in the case so it does add around 1 cm width in total to the tablet. Although fairly hefty this is a necessity for a case of this type if you want any protection from it.

Speaking of protection, when the case is closed the screen is sat flush to the inside cover which has 6 useful business card slots and a nice moleskin-effect finish.

The overall quality of design means I’m happy that when closed the screen is very well protected from the elements! The corner protection provided by the case is satisfactory but I wouldn’t count on it surviving too many drops. The back cover seems to be the major protection for the corners so an awkward angle drop (as these things always are) could prove to be asking too much from it.

I do see this as a formal case compared to the rugged Folio case so I see this as a fair trade-off! If I’m going camping I’ll take the Folio case, and if I’m on a train or in a meeting I’ll use the SD TabletWear case.

The case really comes into it’s own when you want to use it as a desk stand, the case has 20, yes 20, different viewing angles.

Compare this to the 2 angles of the official Motorola Xoom case and you realise it’s a big improvement! The optimum angle for use can be  dictated by desk and chair height, light reflections from above and distance from tablet, so having all these options is perfect. One angle for my work desk, another on the train, different in the office and different again at home. Excellent! The real test will be the old test of time. The huge number of angles are achievable via a piece of corrugated plastic stitched into the front of the front cover.

Although there is an aesthetic cost, I’ve always been function over form, and the plastic is the same colour as the skin so it’s not an eyesore.

There’s then a magnetised flap on the back of the case which eases out to create the stand.

The flap is sturdy enough although it’s slightly flexible as opposed to completely rigid so it might not age well. The bottom edge of this flap is the edge which sits in the corrugations and I’m a little weary as to how quickly this will go from being ‘very sturdy’ to ‘prone to the odd slip’. It’s worth noting that the flap has a ribbon so if you deploy the flap but don’t use the corrugations you still get a nice shallow angle which works well when using a full screen keyboard (the split keyboard for the Xoom is far superior anyway!).

Overall impressions are that it’s an impressive case for the £20 cost. The quality of design, fitting and materials for a budget case is nothing short of exceptional. It certainly raises the bar and will make some other similar Motorola Xoom cases struggle to justify their £70+ asking prices.

Initially he thought it was just one of his Safari plugins but even after disabling all Safari plugins the [SP] still appears as shown in the screen shot below.

I suggested it could be to show that it’s a Secure Page hence the SP but it shows even on non-https pages and can clearly be seen on the basic vanilla Google homepage in the screenshot above.

If anybody is able to help shed any light on this please leave a comment below as he seems to be one of only a handful experiencing this strange problem.

UPDATE: Shortly after publishing this post, @benmarsh managed to solve it all on his own…he’d enabled the Debug tools in Safari and unchecked the option to “Use multi-process windows” so the [SP] stood for Single Process.

benmarsh Ben Marsh

Aha! [SP] refers to Single Process – I remembered I unchecked Debug -> User Multi-process Windows yesterday! D’oh!

I noticed TomTome HOME software had a “Backup my device” option which is meant to just take a complete snapshot of your device to allow for a full restore at a later date.

After clicking to run the backup I was presented with a progress bar:

and then after a few mintutes I was told the backup had failed “An error occurred. Unable to create the files required to copy this item to your computer”

with the option to click to view further details, which look like:

ERROR: DesktopLib/FileCopy/Error: An error occurred. Unable to create the files required to copy this item to your computer.
@ .\controller\FileCopyThread.cpp(161)
An error occurred while reading this file: “F:\autorun.inf”
An error occurred while writing to this file: “C:\Documents and Settings\\My Documents\TomTom\HOME\Backup\ONE\Backup01\InternalMemory\autorun.inf”
Access is denied.

in .\controller\FileCopyThread.cpp:161
Stack:
0. chrome://tthome/content/ui/bindings/commit.js:82
error(textOrException);
1. chrome://tthome/content/ui/bindings/ttwizard.xml:1061
this._commitFailed(i, commitPage);
2. chrome://tthome/content/logic/util.js:79
return func.apply(obj, arguments);
3. chrome://tthome/content/logic/dllUtils.js:77
this._errorCallback(e);
4. chrome://tthome/content/logic/dllUtils.js:69
this._errorFatal(error);

Time: Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:15:29 GMT

Straight away I knew what the problem would be, my anti-virus and anti-malware software. The first error occurred reading a file called “autorun.inf” and it seems trying to copy this to my local disk. Auto-copying an autorun.inf file will almost certainly set alarm bells ringing in most good anti-virus software.

After disabling the anti-virus software

and running the backup option again it all went through without an error.

Versions:
TomTom Home v 2.8.2.2264
Windows XP SP3
TomTom One IQ Routes Edition
Trend Micro Worry Free Business Edition

Sky+ HD is one of the most popular packages but how does it compare to similar set-ups from a Freeview HD or a Freesat HD box?

Remember it is only worth subscribing to Sky HD if you have already invested in a HD ready LED or LCD TV, otherwise the picture will still be shown in standard definition, even if it is from a HD signal.

The basic Sky+HD package comes in at just under £30 a month and gives you a whole range of entertainment, news and music channels to choose from.

The picture quality is fantastic and you have the ability to pause, rewind and record live TV programmes, an excellent feature that means missing your favourite shows is now a thing of the past.

However, you are tied into a contract, where 12 months is usually the minimum length you can sign up for. So in total a year with Sky+ HD would cost you around £360 for the basic package – far more than the other two options.

A Freeview HD box costs a one-off fee of £140 to buy and allows you to receive a smaller range of channels but still all the essentials. Likewise a Freesat HD box would cost you around £70 – though this can increase depending on what model you buy.

From this evidence it would seem that if you are after just the basic set of channels the Freesat and Freeview packages would be the best buys in terms of what you get for your money.

However, Sky has an advantage if you are looking to subscribe to more than just the standard package. Specialist channels such as sports and movies can be bought on top of your basic subscription with Sky+HD, which gives you almost everything you would want from your television subscription.

Any sports fan or movie buff would benefit from these add-ons, though it comes at a cost – the basic subscription plus the sports package with a Sky+ HD box currently costs £51 a month.

Don’t forget though that the picture quality on LCD or LED TVs varies greatly depending on the model purchased. So your choice of TV is just as important as your choice of HD signal.

If you really value your 25 hours a week in front of the box and want the best choice available then the Sky+ HD box is the package for you. However, if you are only really interested in the basic set of channels and can live without the ability to pause and record live TV, then the Freeview and Freesat alternatives fit the bill perfectly.

Username is in use – the program cannot connect you at this time

Your only option is to click OK which isn’t very helpful. Even after a full system reboot the same thing happens. Note that I use Sage 50 Accounts Plus 2011 (v17) but I’ve had the same thing happen before in Sage 2010, 2007 etc and the principal behind the fix hasn’t changed so give it a try.

After half an hour on the phone to Sage support, there is a very simple solution:

1. Click on Start–>My Computer
2. Double click on the C:\ drive or which ever drive letter has your \Documents and Settings\ folder on and double click to go into the \Documents and Settings\ folder
3. Double click to go into the \All Users\ folder
4. Double click to go into the \Application Data\ folder
   [if you can't see an \Application Data\ folder and the first in the list alphabetically is \Desktop\ then you need to click on Tools in the menu bar, the Folder Options, then click on the View tab and look in the list for "Show hidden files and folders" and select this option, then you should be able to see the \Application Data\ folder although it might look feint or greyed out.
5. Once in the C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\ folder scroll down and then double click on \Sage\ folder
6. Double click to go into the \Accounts\ folder
7. Then depending on when you first setup the account click to go into that year, in my case I have a \2010\ and a \2011\ folder but my data is in the \2010\ folder so double click to go into the year.
8. You should then see a \Company.000\ folder, I assume that if you have a license for multiple company accounts there may be several of these, one for each company accounts but in my instance I have a single user and single company licence so I just have one \Company.000\ so click to go into that
9. Once in \Company.000\ click on the \ACCDATA\ folder
10. Nearly there.... I am now in the following directory:
    C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Sage\Accounts\2010\Company.000\ACCDATA\
11. There will be lots of files with a .dta file extension in here, simply scroll down to until you see QUEUE.DTA and select it.
12. At this point you could (but don't)  just delete QUEUE.DTA as this is the file that is locking you out from Sage and will be recreated when you next login and no company information will be lost at all. But rather than just deleting the file, it is better practice to rename this file to something different so that if it does break something, you can rename it back to the original and no harm is done.
13. Right click on QUEUE.DTA and choose rename.
    
14. Type in a new filename, in this case I'll rename it to QUEUE.DTA.OLD and hit enter.
15. Now try logging into Sage Account again and you should be all fixed.

I much prefer using VLC (free) to listen to my streaming audio and it’s possible to listen to the Radio 1 stream using VLC but it proved tricky to try and locate the URL of the live stream so for those that are struggling:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/listen/live/r1.asx

Depending on the options you selected when you installed VLC, you might be able to simply click the link above which should load in a new page and then auto-launch VLC and start playing Radio 1 live stream. If clicking the link above doesnt work, in VLC’s top toolbar, click Media and then Open Network Steam and simply paste the URL above into the window and hit play. Alternatively if you like keyboard shortcuts, just hit CTRL+N to open the network stream window and paste in the URL above.

The next time you want to listen to the Radio 1 live stream in VLC, open VLC as normal and then hit CTRL+1 to reload the most recently listened to stream.

Some YouTube users, myself included, are having issues when they upload a video to YouTube. Once the video has been processed the first few seconds are just grey/pixelated. Fortunately there is a simple solution…just add audio! I only get this problem with videos I upload to YouTube with no audio so I tried just adding a single 1 second audio sample at the start and reuploaded the file to YouTube. That resolved the issue.

Original upload without audio and hence faulty at the start:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

To fix this I simply added a 1 second sound effect from iMovie’s collection to the start of the video and reuploaded, works fine now:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Don’t waste time like I did trying to export from iMovie in a different format, that didn’t work either, adding a tiny audio clip seemed to be my only resolution.