The UK government has been publishing UK postcode data for nearly a year now. It is available for free here from the Ordnance Survey and is branded as Code-Point® Open. Essentially the data provides 1.7 million UK postcodes, with their British National Grid Reference, local authority and ward listed for each. The most interesting data is the grid reference, supplied as a full Northing and Easting value. These can be used to calculate distances between postcodes, as well as being …
Blog: Tools
Screengrab tools
Was on the hunt for some software that would let me take multiple screengrabs. Eventually settled on Grab them all, a Firefox extension. Here’s the story! Step 1 was to create a list of URLs that needed screengrabs. I wrote an small PHP that printed a list of URLs (one per line) which I then saved to a text file: http://www.siteroom.co.uk/ http://www.consil.co.uk/ The first tool I came across was WebShot. The GUI interface is simple, but there’s far more flexibility …
nLite – Windows Installation Customizer
I came across this neat Windows application today. It is basically a tool for creating customised Windows installation disks. I’ve seen similar tools for slip-streaming service packs into disks, but this one goes a step further and makes it dead easy to include drivers and various other Windows tweaks. It is all very straight-forward to use: Point it at the original Windows disk. Tell it what you want to change (point it at service packs, drivers, etc.) Tell it to …
Transferring files from a failed laptop – puppy power
I was recently tasked with transferring files from a failed laptop. The laptop kind of worked, but some bad sectors had started to appear in a number of vital system files, so it was very unstable. This was an old WIndows 98 system, and I could not simply plug in a USB drive, because there were no Windows 98 drivers around for the external USB drives that I had. In the end the disk had to be removed, and connected …
In Search of a Newsletter System
This search has gone on for years. I am looking for a newsletter system that is easy to install (to most likely LAMP-based), allows sign-up to multiple newsletters, and is reliable and flexible. The most important thing is that once configired, I need to be able to hand over the keys to a client so that they can manage it from that point on. That is the hardest part, because no matter what I try, there are always highly technical …
PDF tools for web servers
This article lists some of the PDF tools we have used on our server projects. They all have one thing in common: they can be driven from the command line, and therefore can be run on servers lacking any kind of GUI. Please note that I won’t be publishing every comment that starts “I work for XYZ and we have a PDF product…” (especially if I see the same posts listed on a hundred other sites with ‘PDF’ somewhere in …
Password Manager
Found this great lightweight password manager: KeePass: http://keepass.info/ All very self-explanatory. A master password locks the database. Plenty of plugins to make life easier for you. So far I’ve only tryed using the Firefox >> KeyPass importer which in turn requires you to download the KeyPass XML importer. I experienced problems when trying to directly import from Firefox so I downloaded the Password Exporter addon. This exports your Firefox passwords into an XML file which the Firefox >> KeyPass importer …