fter my recent post about making changes to your phone line to improve broadband performance, I thought I’d mention a helpful test facility that allows you to hear a quiet line (and hence check if there is any interference).

To access…

1. Unplug anything that plugs into your BT master socket.
2. Plug a normal touch tone phone directly into this socket.
3. Dial 17070¹, press option 2 (quiet line test).
4. You should hear ‘Quiet Line Test’ and then silence.

Hopefully, there should be no pops, clicks, whistles, buzzing, etc. If there is, though, make sure it’s not your phones connection to the socket (wiggle it about a bit) and that you are using the master socket.

If you are sure it’s the line making the noise then ring BT and report the fault – they should be able to sort it out. Remember that misreporting a fault (e.g. if it turns out to be your phone, extension cord etc.) may be chargeable.

1. If you have your “Caller ID” withheld, then the test system won’t know who’s calling (it will probably say there is no CLI detected). To temporarily override this, dial 1470 before 17070. [↩]

Firefox 3 is great. Particularly the new tag facility for bookmarks.

However, it would appear that this initial version is, possibly, a bit buggy. I say “possibly” because after reading some of the forums it would seem that these may not be bugs but intentionally done to “save the user from themselves”.

Let me explain.

This came about when I accidentally created an empty tag. I don’t know how, but I’ve recently found one way – delete it from the list of tags in the “Organise Bookmarks” window. Any shortcuts that had the tag in it will have it replaced with an empty one. This tag is then listed as “(no title)”. Now try and delete it. You can’t? No, and if you’re using Foxmarks, it will cause synchronisation to fail.

I looked for all sorts of solutions but, in the end, the easiest was simply to start again. And what I mean by that is to create a new Firefox profile, re-install all my search engines and plugins and then use Foxmarks to download all my bookmarks again from their server. Once done I deleted my original profile. It’s not neat but it works.

Anyway, it would appear that deleting tags generally can be a bit, erm, hit and miss. However, the suggestion is that this has been done on purpose to save the user from doing it by accident. Erm, yes. Ok. Doesn’t really make sense to me and I can only hope this issue gets fixed.

Why, for example, if I delete a tag is an empty one created for all those bookmarks that use it? Why isn’t the tag simply removed?

Maybe we’ll never know.

I’ve mentioned more than once before in my blogs about SyncToy – the free backup and synchronisation tool from Microsoft. I use it, by default, as a simple but reliable backup tool – with a command line version running in the background it keeps my PC synced with my NAS drive.

The only problem with it has been its bulk – version 2 requires Microsoft SQL Server, with all backup data maintained as a database. However, with this (and the latest version of it, now out of Beta) has come decreased speed. A recent update from my portable drive to the NAS took about 4 hours (the vast majority of which was SyncToy just looking for any changes – very little was in copying the differences).

Today I was introduced to SyncBack – a freeware alternative. There are also two improved, but not free, versions. Now, this kind of freeware I usually avoid because they tend to be simply crippled versions of the paid-for versions, with functionality lacking that I require. None-the-less I decided to give it a go.

For a start it’s not as pretty as SyncToy. It’s also not as sophisticated as SyncToy in its methods of determining changed files and folders – no database here. But what it does it does…. damn quick. Often the problem with copying tools is that they tend to leave traces of files and folders behind on the destination drive where something has been deleted from the source. SyncToy’s databases got around this – SyncBack appears to by a simple means of checking everything and then going back and clearing up the remains. It’s not sophistiacted but it works.

There is a command line version but you may not need that as there is a guide scheduling function but, if you do, it’s even better than SyncToy with the ability to schedule a whole load of backups to be run in one go. There’s also options to backup to an external FTP address, it works on network drives, you can compress the destination files and even email results.

So, I’ve transferred all of my copying from SyncToy to SyncBack. I’ve also taken the time to make it a bit slicker by reducing sub-folders down and splitting backups into smaller versions to avoid backing up excessive amounts of data  – one of my single SyncToy backups when split and optimised in SyncBack went from 28.4 GB to 11.1 GB, and no data that I required backing up was lost.

One thing I don’t like about SyncBack, however, is the facility to select sub-folders. With a large folder of sub-folders the list can become unweildy – SyncToy has the ability to collapse and expand folders so that you can more easily manage this. SyncBack doesn’t.

But, hey, that’s nothing compared to the glorious goodness that is the rest of SyncBack. I’m a convert.