We are four days into the New Year and I have already had two enquiries from people asking if I know of a site that lists all the different emoticons. In particular, one person wanted to know what the emoticon for a hangover was – obviously still suffering from the effects of the Christmas and New Year celebrations. High-Tech Dictionary Emoticons seems to have the most comprehensive list and has many more than the one I printed off in 2000. I particularly like the Homer emoticon ( 8(|)

If you have bought a new laptop, and are wondering if yours is affected by the latest series of battery recalls, this posting on Tech Talk gives links to the relevant pages on manufacturers’ web sites. My particular model of Toshiba seems unaffected but I shall be monitoring the Toshiba page in case that changes. For the Tosh machines the batteries do not burst into flames – they just stop working.

Tech Talk also has information on Dell’s free recycling programme, an inititiative that Dell have completely forgotten to tell me about in the numerous emails and newsletters that they send me. The link in Tech Talk takes you to the US site but a quick check on the UK Dell pages revealed that it is available over on this side of The Pond as well. You can use the service to recycle defunct Dell equipment, or if you have just bought a Dell you can recycle your old equipment regardless of manufacturer. Looks promising. In my location one has to pay for computers to be collected for recycling so I have filled in the form and am awaiting further instructions.

Apologies if you have already seen this on the LIS discussion lists or on the UKeiG blog.

Some of you will have noticed from the auto-replies to private messages sent to me that I have been on hols for about 2 weeks. I am now back. That’s the good news – OK, I know that’s debatable 🙂

The bad news is that a couple of hours after I had downloaded two weeks worth of email my PC’s hard disk crashed in spectacular fashion. Of course Sod’s Law was in operation and I had also deleted the downloaded email from my ISP’s server. Deleting everything from the ISP mail server was a I habit I developed in the early days of the Internet when ISPs charged an arm, a leg and several pints of blood to store more than a few kb of messages for more than a few days. A practice that I have today abandoned!

Everything that I received up until midday 29th July was backed up but anything between then and midday August 15th has gone. So if you have sent me any emails during that period could you please re-send them? Especially those of you who sent me emails requesting user names and passwords for access to the members area of the UKeiG web site.

Many thanks

Karen Blakeman

Expect to start seeing sites in the .eu domain within the next few days. The new top-level domain goes live on December 7th but only trademark holders and public bodies will be able to register during the so-called “sunrise period”. Registrations for the domain, which will be handled by Eurid, will be open to the rest of us on 7 April 2006.

ProcessLibrary.com – The online resource for process information!

If you have ever wondered what on earth all those “processes” that appear in Windows Task Manager after you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del are doing, this is the site for you. Type in the full name of the process, for example dragdiag.exe, and ProcessLibrary will tell you what it does and whether it is legit, spyware, a virus or a trojan.

The database is free and maintained by a company called UniBlue. They sell a program called WinTasks Pro which helps deal with any nasty processes that you may have on your computer so they have a vested interest in providing the database. If, though, you are not sure how to remove the bad guys from your system or they just keep popping back up, it may be worth investing USD 49.95 in the program. In any case, the ProcessLibrary is still a very useful resource.

Cellular Networking Perspectives: Irreverent Acronyms

I came across this little gem while checking up on some telecoms related sites. My favourite “alternative” definitions of acronyms are:

AOL – Acronym Overload Land

Internet- In no time everyone’s raiding nearly everyone’s trash

WAP – What! Another Protocol?