Ever asked How do I change my Yahoo password? Here’s how:

Pick a new 8 letter password from http://clubefl.gr/games/wordox/8.html

Mix up the letters a little using the basic number/letter swap. Include at least one number, for added security use the symbols in place of letters, !@#$%&*, but not all websites allow this.

E=3 4=A I=1 or ! L=1 O=0 or @ T=7 and so on – for a guide see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

Now that you have your new password lets change the old one

1. Go to yahoo.com (or .ca or .co.uk, whatever as it makes no difference)
2. Click the mail icon
3. Login
4. Look in the top right for where it says options, click it
5. Look on the left side for Account Information, click it
6. Enter your current password again
7. (Switch to the ‘classic view’ if you need to, stupid Yahoo has not updated its site fully yet)
8. Look on the left for ‘Change your password’, click it
9. Enter your current password, enter a new 8 letter password.

As if you didn’t know today is Snow Leopard Day. Yes OS X 10.6 is out officially today. Yes all you lot who have been using the torrent versions, it’s time to go buy and get the real deal. At 29 bucks it’s a steal. Though not literally as that would be 0 bucks. Whatever.

So yes it is faster, takes less room and is all round smarter. How do you install it? The basic way is throw this disk into the drive and double click, OS X will take you through the upgrade process automatically. Make sure you have around 6GB of disk space free before you start, ideally 10GB.

Disconnect your external USB/Firewire disks but do connect your printers and peripherals; OS X will check these and install drivers for them automatically during the install process. Remember that Rosetta, Apple’s backward compatibility option allowing you to run PPC (G3/G4/G5) apps on your Intel hardware, is disabled by default. If you need it customise your install to include it.

If you want to take the better but more advanced route OS X is different than all the other versions so far, no ‘Erase and install’ option exists, or at least no automatic way. Here’s how:

After booting from the Snow Leopard disk choose Utilities > Disk Utility from the first Installer screen, and then manually erase the drive; you can then exit Disk Utility and proceed normally with installation.

Slightly more complex but considering this is designed as an upgrade to Leopard and the functionality is still included, I’ll let Apple off for that.

So I’ve got mine, have you yet?

Currently 50% off, today only. If you have an iPod Touch or iPhone then you really have to buy one of these. I can’t tell you how many times it’s saved my screen from getting scratched.

Seriously, buy it now using the coupon code memday09

OK so I checked CR this morning and the site worked but had no content. So I went into panic mode, got myself a coffee (decafe) and chatted about the weather for a bit. It’s lovely and sunny, thanks for asking. Then tried to find out what was going on.

The posts table was marked as crashed, I found out using myPHP, and it needed repairing. I did that via myPHP again and everything is all working.

Remember to do backups folks, you never know when something is going to go wrong.

I’m going to spring clean the backend server that hosts CreationRobot. It’s long overdue and the latest spanner that the server has thrown me is preventing me from editing old posts. Pretty frustraiting.

While I do this I’m going to update pretty much everything, including the theme. I’ve already done this with WordPress. It’s a good idea to keep that patched at all times. I’ve also done it with my plugins, so the theme is my next big step.

I use a modified version of Cutline, so I’m going to have to take the modern version of Cutline and hack it to work with CreationRobot. This will take time so please bear with me if you see some oddness or Cutlines default graphic at the top of the page here. The title graphic will probably be the last thing I change.

Anyway, lets blow off the digital cobwebs and get going.

Cutline 2.2 is UGLY. I’m going to investigate other options because I’m not using that terrible theme. Grey URL links? You thought that was a good idea? Really?

Just installed intense debate, a plugin that connects your blog to other social sites, facebook, flickr, twitter and so on. Has anyone used this plugin and seen if it is effective?

My profile on intense debate is http://intensedebate.com/people/jackdaw.

You still don’t believe in UFOs? Well I do, in the literal sense. As in, a lot of stuff we just cannot identify, which means in simple terms it is undentified. If the unidentified object happens to be flying, then it is a UFO. OK, so now in the literal sense you believe in UFOs? Good. On with the posting:

“On February 21, 2006 (the paper was only published recently), the venerable space telescope spied a UFO in an area of space where there should have been nothing at all.

Stranger still, the object disappeared almost as mysteriously as it arrived, about 100 days after the initial observation. It got very bright over time, to the 21st magnitude, then faded just as fast. Kind of like an explosion… Not much else is known about the celestial phenomenon, and it hasn’t reappeared since 2006.” Gizmodo.

The mystery object did not behave like any known kind of supernova. It is not even in any detectable galaxy. “The shape of the light curve is inconsistent with microlensing,” say the researchers. They recorded three spectra of it — and its spectrum, they write, “in addition to being inconsistent with all known supernova types, is not matched to any spectrum in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database” of vast numbers of objects. “We suggest that the transient may be one of a new class.” Sky and Telescope.

Some deep space explosion? Star wars? Bueller? Who knows.

Via Sky and Telescope.

Space is screaming – It’s some 6 times louder in space than anyone predicted.

In the words of Alan Kogut from the Goddard Space Center, “The universe really threw us a curve. Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming ‘noise’ six times louder than anyone had predicted.”

Of course, there is no sound in space. What NASA’s ARCADE system received was actually deafening cosmic radio background, and the source is completely unknown at this time. Normally radio telescopes pick up electromagnetic chatter in the 10 MHz and 100 GHz, coming from what are known as “radio galaxies.” But according to our existing models and theories, the signal shouldn’t exist, as there are “not enough radio galaxies to account for the signal.”

As detailed by Jesus when this story initially broke earlier this year, NASA said that to create this signal, “you’d have to pack [radio galaxies] into the universe like sardines. There wouldn’t be any space left between one galaxy and the next.” That’s obviously not the case.

The discovery, while amazing, also carries with it a substantial negative. Remember all that cool stuff about dark flow and the edge of the universe from earlier? Well, the BOOM complicates our efforts to detect it more accurately.

Originally via Gizmodo.