After checking thru the logs for the site, I noticed a few of the articles were attracting a small but steady trickle of visitors. This is probably due to the titles being close to a couple of fairly common searches. In light of this I’m rewriting the two that get the most hits.

The main reason for this is vanity. I don’t want visitors clicking on a link to this site from a search engine and then discovering that they’ve wasted their time. When people arrive here I want them to find what they’re looking for, I want this site to be of use to them.

Seeing as one of the posts is only one sentence long it shouldn’t be too difficult to knock it in to shape. Basically it needs to be the article you would expect to see from reading the title.

So the aim for all future articles is to be useful and informative. Oh yes, and pay close attention to the titles to make them catchy and relevant. (There’s more to this blogging malarky than meets the eye…)

I’ve got a need (rather than a whim) for some 3D modelling in the near future, and seeing as I’m not about to splash out on any expensive CAD software it looks like it’s going to be Blender. Again. Only it appears I’ve forgotten pretty much everything I learnt.

The first time I used Blender, I couldn’t get it to do anything. The user interface is so utterly incomprehensible to the novice user that it was a struggle just to shut it down again. Over quite a time I built a usable level of competency, if not flair. Hopefully the learning curve won’t be quite as steep this time… Now, where did I put that 20″ monitor?

I’ve been looking for some easy solution to the problem of storing sensitive data securely for quite a while now and think I may have found the solution with Wiki on a Stick. Everyone knows what a wiki is, like Wikipedia, it’s a collection of pages that can be edited from the pages themselves.

Here comes the science… Wiki on a Stick takes this concept a step further by putting the wiki and everything it needs to function into a single self modifying HTML file. Add to this the option to save the page contents with some fairly hardcore encryption and you have a pretty ingenious tool.

The best thing about this single file wiki is that only needs access to a browser to be viewed or edited. As the name inplies you can drop the file on a USB stick and carry your personal encrypted wiki with you wherever you go. Neat, huh?

Well not any more…  Having discovered a spare keyboard I thought I’d take the opportunity to improve my touch typing skills by using some solvent to remove the letters on the keys.  Not having anything that seemed to make any impression on the paint, the Dremel was brought into play. Half an hour later, job done…

I’ve got to the point where I know where all the keys are by touch alone (even if I don’t hit the one I mean to all the time…) but I can’t help looking at the board for a little hint quite often.  So now I’ve removed all the temptation, no point looking now, nothing there to see!  The only downside is that I now can’t type anything without putting my hands in the correct position… Not so good if you only want to tap a key or two…

Still, it’s not quite as extreme as this one.

Finally got round to changing the title of the blog to reflect the fact that it’s really being used as a blog proper now. (I’ve dropped the ‘wordpress test installation’ bit if you were wondering…) It’s no longer a test, it’s for real. I think I’ve proved to myself that it’ll do what I want it to do, and that tweaking the themes isn’t too onerous a task.

Speaking of which, I’ve been playing with the comments to make them look nicer. They had a distinctly half finished look about them. Take a look at them now. Pretty, huh? Other things of note are the navigation at the bottom of the page, which lets you get at older posts, something that was missing until recently. Also the title bar in your browser should have a more meaningful title now, it was kind of working but I seemed to be suffering from a case of extra ‘»’ now and then. All fixed now…

Hopefully this makes the site look a bit more pleasant and professional, let me know what you think…