Computer Solutions

As there doesn’t seem to be any Biltong available in China, I’m creating my own here in South Africa, so I can bring back for friends.

This makes about about 3-3.5kg of biltong once dry.
Our model for the day - my cousin Joel.

Instructions below:

Creating our Biltong Drying Box

First, go buy a plastic storage box, this needs to be fairly deep, as we will be hanging meat vertically.  Recommend buy something with an easily removable lid thats transparent for easier checking on biltong production.

We procured our box at Plastics Warehouse opposite Kenilworth Centre in Cape Town.  Carrefour in Shanghai has suitable boxes for those in China.

We prepared the box for usage, by drilling lots of small airholes in the side, and lid, swiss cheese style.  Recommend use a drill with a 1mm bit or similar.  The idea is that air can go in, but nothing else.

Once the airholes have been created, we drilled holes for dowels that the meat is going to hang on.
Dowels should be near the top of the box, and spaced appropriately.  Note that the meat cannot touch the sides of the box, so make sure to leave enough space on the left/right of the dowels for the thickest cuts of meat.  Our efforts are below:

Biltong Box

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As I’m currently in South Africa visiting my family, I bought a DVD player as a prezzie for mom.

LG DV340 Region free hack for the model I bought at Game is below:

1, power on the player with no disk in the drive
2, pres pause on the remote
3, enter “314159″ on the remote
4, enter “0″ on the remote (0 = all regions, 1 = region 1 etc)
5, press pause on the remote
6, power the player off and then back.

Hopefully this helps someone else!

(Info from http://forums.dvd-swaps.co.uk/archive/index.php?t-2327.html)

One of my clients called asking why all his image attachments were suddenly postage stamp sized.
We both use Mac’s, and to be honest I had no idea, until I tried to send an image attachment myself.

Turns out that in Apple Mail, the simple stuff eludes us “smart” IT types by being obscure.

After attaching an image in Mail, Apple sneaks a new menu at the bottom of the page where you can choose the image size.

See below for an example:

Once we had that changed back to a more reasonable default (Medium in this case), all was well in the land, and we both learned something new!

Notes for Apple (just in case someone’s listening):

I like the idea, but I think the implementation leaves something to be desired.  The UI for this is very non-intuitive, some kind of hinting wouldn’t go amiss here, or dare I say it, a total relocation of this to the top of the window with the other icons and menu options.

As people know, I do the odd bit of iPhone support.  Less so, since the 3G came out, as those aren’t really as good as the older 2G model for China purposes.

Today I had a query about SMS issues - a client couldn’t reliably send SMS’s.

As the iPhone is a standard GSM device, the usual not so publicised GSM commands work.
Dialing *#5005*7672# from the iPhone will tell you what the carrier prefers for their SMSC number.

Shanghai Telecom’s SMSC for my phone - an ancient 15 year old 139 number is +8613800210500

To set the SMSC, do:

**5005*7672*[number]#

eg

Dial

**5005*7672*+8613800210500#  to set the SMSC to the preferred number.
(To dial plus hold zero for a few seconds)

Hit Call.

Try send an SMS again, and voila, happiness.

Note that different providers here will probably use different SMSC’s - so those on China Unicom, or China Telecom will need to run the appropriate actions, and put in the appropriate relevant numbers.

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While I personally feel that a lot of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is hogwash, there are basic tenets to building well indexed sites.

The usual common sense ones apply -

• Making sure Page Titles are clear.
  Don’t forget to add relevant page descriptions to each page.
• Making sure that content is relevant.
  Lack of content is the number one issue most clients have.  They want to score highly in search engines, but they don’t have any relevant content.  This one is easy to solve, although it takes some time. Identify keywords that you want to be found by, and create content that includes those words.

  I also advise clients to take a look at their competition, and see who scores highly for the words that they want to be found under.

  Analyse the competition, or high ranking sites and see why they score highly.  This is the one thing that will improve your search relevance dramatically.

• Making sure Page names and navigation folders are human friendly
  eg - on our Computer Solutions site, we have file/folder names like:
  http://www.computersolutions.cn/en/Support/Mail Settings.html

  These are both search engine and human friendly.

  Bad Examples of this are things like:
  http://www.somebadexample.com/index.php?id=1&section=2

• Add SiteMaps for search Engines, and submit those to the Search Engines

  eg - on all our Sites we have a /sitemap.xml which lists all the pages in the sites, as well as dates on which they were last updated.  The CMS software we use makes these automatically everytime a page is updated.

• Using Flash in moderation, and making sure that site navigation is available via standard links if navigation is via a flash component.

  Flash sites are generally not indexable by the major search engines.
  Flash sites also take interminably long times to load.  They look cool, but potential clients aren’t necessarily interested in waiting for them to load.

• Don’t go too far
  Quite a lot of SEO is bleeding edge, and short term.  It may get you high rankings

While all the sites we create are pretty SEO friendly (and follow my general guidelines above), its good to have advice to give to clients, and potential clients.

While I’ve outlined the basics above, Google has made a free PDF file which talks about this in more detail, with things I mentioned above, as well as a few more that you may not know about.

Click here to download the Google SEO PDF

Computer Solutions participated in the yearly Chilli Cookoff at Bubba’s

We didn’t win, drat!, but we had a great time, and hope to participate next year also.

Lots of fun photo’s from the event over at www.sheed.com

Chilli Cookoff

I’ve just upgraded the webmail software on http://mail.computersolutions.cn to a new version of Roundcube.

Testing revealed no issues for myself, so its now live.

A few new features - check settings for more options that can be configured.  Remember to click Save (at the bottom of the page) if you change anything!

Complaints, comments below please.

Computer Solutions is not all website design, and IT support.
We also do a bit of artsy stuff too (although not as much as I’d like!).
As part of an internal “just for fun” project we’re doing, I bought a badge machine for the office.

Today saw the first set of badges produced, with a theme of Old 70’s era China, based on a post I saw at BoingBoing -> LP Cover Lover.

Without further ado, our first badges are below:

1RMB Coins sure are big ;)

and

为人民服务

The staff also made a set, but I think we can be saved from an image of Snoopy in blue.

Unless you look below

After playing around with unlocked and Sim Unlocked 3G iPhones for the last 2 days for clients, I can categorically say that until the iPhone can be unlocked in software, don’t buy a locked one.

Currently the only 2 countries that have unlocked iPhones out of the box are Italy, and Hong Kong.
Australia iPhones can also be unlocked, but that requires payment to an Australian provider.

I can provide Italian iPhone 3G if people want, but the pricing is expensive compared to the locked US ones in the market.

I’ve tested 3 different sets of Sim Unlocks for the 3G, and all of them have quirks that render them useless if you want full functionality like syncing in iTunes etc.

So, until the iPhone 3G is unlocked I recommend don’t buy a US one.

For China, the 2G is a better phone, its a shame Apple doesn’t make them anymore, and all thats in the market here is second hand.

For clients with iPhones - our mail system fully supports the iPhone, I use mine to get mail without issues.

We also provide firmware upgrade service and hacking for iPhones 2G, and 3G if clients need it.

For those of you who like to DIY, we have a iPhone site at http://www.iphonesim.cn

Firmware files, and iPhone hacking tools are on there.