Those of you that want an extra chunk of power to take anywhere may have looked at the power gorilla by power traveller before, a very well made product and one that promises a great deal, there is one problem, you cant really use it for desktop replacement laptops, as its amperage is seldom up to the task, for example most clone power laptops require 19v at 4.5amps, and the power gorilla only provides a max of 2.5amps when on its 19v setting, a strange situation as its precisely these kind of power greedy laptops that would benefit from an extra source of power, this is not a reflection of the power gorilla its self, i have one and love it, I use it to charge my phone, net book and AA/AAA batteries when on the go, but my main laptop (a Compal FL92) sulks and flashes power lights at me if its plugged in when already turned on, though it is happy to charge when turned off (power traveller do make this plain on the FAQ for the power gorilla, and it should be noted that power laptops with smarter power management’s systems such as the macbooks seem happy, although they still only ‘run’ rather than ‘run and charge’ ).

I was however browsing the power traveller site and discovered the soon to be released powergorilla silverback, a monster of a portable power supply that made me drool, but it did look a tad big even for me to lug around the place (though im willing to try it), and it would be a sod to explain at an airport, enter power travellers twitter account, I asked them about the problem, and was told that you can run 2 power gorillas in parallel with a y-spliter cable, much excitement, a travesty to my credit card latter, and im the proud owner of 2 power gorillas and an extra cable, and you know what, it worked, instead of the normal 2.5 amps, I’m providing with 5 amps~, I still seem to need to have them plugged in on start up, but this turns out to a spike drain that my laptop makes when a power supply is first plugged in rather than anything I can attribute to the power gorillas, now I have a full 2.5 charges to my laptop before its own battery is even touched, enough for a serious days work at full power, all for just over a kilo and without a reboot to swap batteries in sight (happy sigh)

I would have considered this tip a bit old school but as there still seems to be a huge number of us using XP in one way or another it might be worth a mention.

Like many of us I use multiple versions of Notes on my machine at the same time (7.0.3 for speed, 8.0.2 for clients server compatibility , 8.5.1 for preferred development), for a good and complete blog on this see Tony Austins blog post ,however i dislike the hacking around needed to get the change buttons to be enabled when you are installing the second/third version, I recently discovered, Windows Install Clean up which you can just run to remove the install information for lotus notes without removing the installation its self, this enables you to treat each installation a fresh which i think is far easier, As Microsoft has recently retired it, i thought i would just keep a copy hosted here in case anyone needed it

@formula is a fab thing, and some features just cant be beat, one of my faves is its

@Middle( string ; startString ; endstring )

Java has the normal substring stuff, but this format is a bit of a pain (I personally hate the whole “get indexof” rigmarole to do it), but with a bit of help from regular expressions we can just use this

private String getMiddle (String inStr, String startToken, String endToken){ 
String Expression = “.+” + startToken + “(.+?)” + endToken + “.+”; 
inStr = ” ” + inStr + ” “
return inStr.replaceAll( Expression, “$1”); 
} 

so say we have this String

String longString = “GD=testing~BSZ=567~ST=1~UNID=357DHFDC4DA4AE802574F60006F249~”

Then

getMiddle( longstring , “BZ=” , “~”) will give us “567”

handy eh?

N. B. If you want to search for any of the following characters [^$.’?*+() you need to put \ before each one (except for “” which only needs 1) as they are special characters in regular expressions (yes i should just alter the function to handle them, ill do it later)