Print a Bank Deposit Ticket with Excel
I do a lot of banking by mail—mainly depositing checks that I receive in the mail. I have run out of deposit tickets from the back of my check books, and I resent the idea of having to pay for more to be printed. I took a look online and didn't find anything particularly satisfying, so I made my own.
LeapFrog: My Own Leaptop
I hate the crapware that comes with modern toys. They try to make it seem like they're doing you a favor. They try to make it seem like it's going to make the toy better. But in fact it's just rubbish. It's poorly written and adds minimal value.
Comparison Christmas Shopping: Amazon versus Tesco
This isn't a post advertising one thing or another, but I was really surprised at the difference in prices when doing some Christmas shopping online today. Here's four of the toys we were considering and the prices offered at Amazon.co.uk versus tesco.com. You figure that prices do vary from site to site, but I've never seen them vary enough that it mattered. Today, anyways, it mattered plenty.
Skype for iPad as Business App of the Year? Puhleeze.
The folks over at IT Pro had their IT Pro Awards 2011 recently. They awarded a few different honours. Some innovative, others pretty predictable. I struggle to care that Microsoft won "Vendor of the Year"? What does that even mean? And if it's a category that Microsoft won, who else even had a chance of winning it? Oracle? IBM? HP? And those are 4 of the biggest anyways, so it's not like this award will create some new recognition or awareness of a vendor.
The only thing I think awards are useful for is if you understand why they are awarded. What did candidate A have that candidate B did not? The IT Pro awards appear to be a simple popularity contest. That is, random web site visitors had a set of candidates to choose from, and they chose for whatever reason. If the candidates were judged on criteria (e.g., originality, fitness for purpose, reliability, value for money) I would love to see how the winners (and losers) scored. But these awards are meaningless. There's no judging. Just popularity of clicks.
iOS5 Security Restrictions
The restrictions feature of iOS 5 are pretty weak. Here's what's wrong and what someone needs to do to fix it.