Pat Howe's Blog

The end of Google Plus as we know it

Last year, Google announced that they were shutting down the consumer version of Google+ (also known as Google Plus) from August 2019. The consumer version are the personal accounts available to individuals and not corporations. The reason that Google gave us was that it had not performed as well as a consumer product as they had hoped and the demands of consumers were difficult to maintain. Towards the end of 2018, Google discovered a second API bug during their own internal audit which they subsequently fixed. They have no evidence

Negatives and switching image colours in Photoshop

I quite often forget how to switch between a negative and positive image or how to do an exact colour replacement when using Adobe Photoshop. Each time, I need to, which is not very often, I spend a bit of time working it out. As this has just happened to me, I thought I would make a note of the steps and make that into an article. I needed to switch colours in a 2-colour logo to from blue on a white background to white on a blue background. This

Time is running out to secure your .uk domain

The .UK top level domain became available for general purchase from 10 June 2014 by Nominet. Nominet is responsible for all UK domain name registrations and had up until that date only provided second-level domains such as .co.uk or .org.uk. In fact the original intention for the UK sub domains was .co.uk for businesses and .org.uk for charities/non-profits before .me.uk was introduced for personal use. They also run .net.uk, .plc.uk and .ltd.uk for specialist use. The .uk domain is general purpose but they needed to make sure that previous owners

Dodgy WordPress new user registrations

Over the last 6 months or so, I’ve been getting a few new user registrations on my WordPress blog every day or so. When I got a few on the same day, I got suspicious. So, I checked them out and found they were all suspicious. The username caught my attention as I thought, “Why would anyone add numbers to their name when they don’t need to”. It’s not like I have a lot of users and all names have gone. I figured that they must have been automated. I

Using area maps within images in HTML5 web pages

One of the features of HTML5 that interested me is the area maps that you can plot on an image. This allows you to include functionality that you would normally find within a hyperlink. Such as clicking or mouse-over to produce previously difficult to achieve effects. This article covers the basics of HTML5 image area maps and the different type of areas that you can have within an image. It also walks through an example usage of area maps to find locations on an image map and give feedback on

Creating colour tints and shades for websites

What do you do when you have more colours required than you have brand colour available? This quite often happens when you have to show a chart and you are using colours to differentiate between segments. The answer is to use tints or shades of those brand colours. In this article I will show examples of applying tints and shades using RGB (Red, Green and Blue) colours as that is most commonly used on websites. I’ll write more about colours in the future. For now, I just want to cover

Setting up agile projects with functional teams

Introducing the agile software development methodology to companies or even to individual projects sometimes proves difficult. You might think it would be easy in a small company as there are less minds to change but it is often easier in a large company. In this article, I will share my experience of how and why to restructure your development resources for small or large software development departments. It’s written from a point of view of the person responsible for organising the resources and projects at a company and introducing agile

Consolidating many Excel sheets into one master sheet

A while back we had a situation where we had collected a set of information from various sources and wanted to get all of it into the same Excel Worksheet and I was asked if I could help. There were about 60 spreadsheets all with the same columns but with a variable number of rows and of course, different data. The requester had linked all 60-odd spreadsheets to a master Workbook and wanted to know how to get the information from each transferred to a single master sheet that he

How to hide the keyboard on return for Swift Xcode apps

Today, I will look at hiding the soft keyboard from the screen when entering information into a text field. It’s not a problem if you have a hardware keyboard which is the default for the Xcode simulator on the Mac or when you run on a device with a Bluetooth keyboard as the soft keyboard does not show. The issue is that once you are in a UITextField, the keyboard does not get dismissed by default and takes up the bottom section of the viewing area which quite often hides

Using Excel’s Paste Special Operations

In this article, I broadly cover Microsoft Excel’s Paste Special functions with an example using the Operations of Paste Special. Before we get to an example some background is needed. Each cell in Microsoft Excel is made up of three parts; values (data), formula and format. Copying and pasting from one cell (or range of cells) to another copies all three exactly as they are. The formula remains the same (but relative to the new cell position), the values/data remains the same (unless it is formula driven) and the format

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