Like a lot of people, I'm pretty excited about HTML5, particularly for including audio and video in web pages. However, while it has great potential, there's still a lot of work to be done before it's easily usable by everyone.

It's often useful to be able to find out what your external IP address is. I often check when I'm at client sites, to discover if I'm behind a NAT, remind myself whether I'm browsing through an SSH tunnel, and so on. There are a number of sites available that provide this service, e.g. whatismyip.com and myip.dk, but I recently decided to set one up on Kitserve. It's accessible at https://secure.kitserve.org.uk/ip/.

I discovered today that the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has issued a proposal that Nominet's terms and conditions be changed so that they are contractually obliged to “suspend domains where Nominet has reasonable grounds to believe they are being used to commit a crime”. On the face of it this seems like a good idea, as there are an ever increasing number of sites out on the internet serving up viruses, attempting to steal confidential information, and so on.

Some time ago I was asked to provide some simple advice for non-technical users on protecting their data and office computer systems. Most people are aware that computer security has become a huge problem in recent years, but the sheer amount of (often conflicting) advice on the subject often drives people to ignore it - after all, if you're just trying to do your job, you don't want to have to spend a lot of time learning obscure technical information. With that in mind, this article outlines five basic things to keep in mind to stay safe online.

I've been setting up Ubuntu on my mother's laptop because the Windows XP system that it came with 5 years ago is grinding to a halt. With a 1.5GHz Celeron M processor it's not exactly a supercomputer but with a fresh new Linux system it can still be a decent, useful computer for several more years.

I went for Lubuntu because it's lightweight and easy to use.

1. Enable error messages to be shown by writing ini_set('display_errors', '1'); in your PHP code.
2. Most likely, you will be given this error message now: Php Fatal Error Call To Undefined Function Json_decode