Life and stuff

Fail

Matt Little — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:17:00 GMT

Screen shot from an online bank:

Which button does it tell me to press?

Where's that then?

George Cheshire

Matt Little — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:23:00 GMT

My Grandfather, George Thomas Cheshire, passed away today.

He will be sadly missed.

Windows 7 and how to slow down a login

Matt Little — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:37:00 GMT

Bizarrely, if you set your desktop to be a plain colour as opposed to a fancy wallpaper, it takes an extra 30 seconds to login! Glad to see that they tested that one.

Details from Microsoft here.

I've folded

Matt Little — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:07:00 GMT

Ok, I've joined the noughties and I twitted a tweet-thingy or whatever the yoof's terminology is this week.

Ok, enough is enough

Matt Little — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:34:00 GMT

Right, all this snow was really good fun whilst I was on holiday and could go sledging but now I need to get to work, can it please stop now?

Thank you.

Pedal for Scotland

Matt Little — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:52:00 GMT

I've completed the Pedal for Scotland Glasgow -> Edinburgh bike ride a couple of times and was intending to do it again next year. They've thrown a bit of a spanner in the works this time though; in addition to the 51 mile course, there is now a 100 mile course.

Details here.

Am I mad enough??

And the chance of a white Christmas is....

Matt Little — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:48:00 GMT

...available here.

30% for me at the moment.

Google buys ReCAPTCHA

Matt Little — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:48:00 GMT

Following the stories below, Google has decided to purchase ReCAPTCHA in an effort to improve its own programme of digitising literary works.

I guess that we are going to see a whole load more CAPTCHAs soon.

Captchas are NOT getting silly.

Matt Little — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 10:44:00 GMT

Thank you to Keith who posted a comment on the blog about why the article below may have been a little unfair.

The link to a YouTube presentation highlights the work of the Re-Captcha project; the project aims to combine the basic requirement of a captcha (only humans can read them) with a useful purpose - helping decipher words that OCR (optical character recognition) programs can't decipher.

This work aids the digitisation of many ancient books and other works such as the digitisation of the entire back catalogue of the New York Times.

In order to prove you are a human, it offers you two words in the captcha - one that it knows the answer to so as to verify that you aren't a computer and one that comes from the digitisation project. The reason that they are difficult to read (as highlighted in my previous post) is that the OCR software can't work out what the word is and they need some help!

If you get the first one correct, it doesn't matter about the second one - someone just needs a bit of help with their homework.

Captchas are getting silly

Matt Little — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 20:46:00 GMT

I like captchas. I use them. But they are getting silly.

Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.) are pictures that make it hard to design a computer program to fill in online forms. Without them (and there is one on this site) you get spammers filling your inbox with rubbish as people can write simple programs to fill in contact forms offering you pills, etc. The idea is that you have to be 'human' to read them - and that is the point - you have to be able to read them

Can you read the right-hand two of the four words below? I can't.

And for info, this isn't the NSA or something, it is the Peppa Pig Live website.