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A couple of times spam has appeared in the calendar of my mobile phone – a Galaxy Note running Android ‘Jelly Bean’. This was unexpected as I thought that app was private for my use only. Looking on the web I soon discovered that calendars are shared with your business colleagues, family and apparently the whole world. But that was not what I wanted.

The Superuser AppWhen you install an app you are asked to allow it access to various functions on your phone. The calendar app comes preinstalled on the Note and I found that it could ‘add or remove accounts, Google mail, use accounts on the device, add or modify calendar events and send emails to guests without owner’s knowledge, read calendar events plus confidential information, read your contacts, and read your text messages’.

I like the Note’s calendar (S-Planner) but I certainly didn’t want it to do anything that required such wide ranging access. I’ve no idea how the spam was inserted into my calendar but it was pretty clear that if I wanted to stop it happening again I needed to restrict those permissions. However this is an app that comes preinstalled and you are not allowed to alter what it can do or even uninstall it .. unless you ‘root’ your phone.

This article is about desktop virtualisation - running your own personal cloud computing environment at home. I've found it easier to describe how to do it than to explain why you would want to. It may help if I set out my problems and how virtualisation has solved them.

Old PCs under the deskOver the years computers accumulated under my desk at home. A Windows Home Server (WHS) streamed music around the house and backed up my home network. It had recovered my wife's PC following a hard disk failure so that box was essential. A Linux system backed up the ICUFR and other web sites on my internet server and ran an IMAP mail server. My old office laptop running XP had Quickbooks, Garmin maps and a few other applications that I needed from time to time. And finally there was my main machine - originally XP but now upgraded to Windows 7.

All three PC's and the laptop were wired into a 4 port KVM switch which let me switch the keyboard, mouse and monitor between them. At least two and usually three were always on. They kept my electricity bills high, contributed to global warming and were very noisy.

HTML5 Powered with Connectivity / Realtime, Device Access, Graphics, 3D & Effects, Multimedia, Performance & Integration, Semantics, and Offline & Storage

HTML5 extends the language used to create web pages with new features that allow designers to achieve effects previously possible only with Flash. But it is a new standard and it will take a while before all browsers can correctly display pages which include the new tags. Some recent browser releases can handle nearly all that HTML5 demands of them, but older browsers will struggle.

Here is a resource showing what your current browser can handle, compared with other leading browsers. For each feature there is a demo to show it in action. Click here to visit: HTML 5 Demos and Examples

Font ExploerI recently wanted to update the masthead of the ICUFR website, but couldn't remember what font I had used for the lettering. No problem I thought - someone on the web will have a site that identifies fonts. Sure enough there was www.identifont.com and the Linotype Font Finder (which looked very much like Identifont). These lead you through a series of questions that whittle the possibilities down to in my case about 30 possibilities. Unfortunately none of them were the font I was looking for.

Over the years I have let fonts accumulate and I now have 696 different fonts. So looking through them one by one was going to be a tedious business and I needed help. Windows 7 has a nice display of fonts installed on your machine, but it isn't suitable for managing hundreds of fonts. So Googling for font utilities led me to Font Explorer which I downloaded from Cnet.

This little utility is quick to download and install (on Windows 7) and ran without any problems. It displays your fonts page by page, but is smart enough to let you specify filters such as symbol, script, Roman or Swiss. The last two select serif or sans serif fonts. This cut down the number of fonts to examine and running my eye down a page of samples fairly quickly found the font I had used: "Impact".

   

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