James McDonald

Check what your IP address is Online

There are many services that do this but looking in the Debian distributions package change logs I noticed that they are using http://checkip.dyndns.org/ to return your globally recognized IP address. And it returns a very nice sparse reply as follows. [code...

Website Speed Up

Just discovered my traffic to this website has dropped by about 50% not sure why, could be the vagaries of searching engine ranking. Update: Apparently there has been some 52 algorithm changes on Google in April alone so I think I may be the victim of the Google SEO...

Unmystify TLA’s with the abbr HTML Tag

Just discovered the <abbr> HTML tag a nifty way of inlining your abbreviation explanations. It allows you to unmystify TLA's with the abbr HTML Tag. You need to hover over the TLA to get the abbreviation. On my blog the abbr tag doesn't change the text colour to...

Online File Storage, Sync and Sharing Services

I have been using Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com) and Box.com (http://www.box.com) to share files with people. Dropbox has great Linux support and integration into the Gnome Nautilus file manager. Box is good too but is more Windows / Mac Centric and I think...

Opensource Barcode Generator in Pure Postscript

Opensource Barcode Generator in Pure Postscript

Update March 2015: It appears that Scribus' support for bwipp is now broken the control characters you need to insert correctly formatted barcodes now seem to be ignored. So I can't get a valid GS1-128 barcode by using Code-128 and inserting the correct Symbol start...