But I’m sure that if, like me, you’ve been using PuTTY for a while then you’ve no doubt come to recognise its limitations. Firstly you have to open another PuTTY window to connect to another server, duplicating windows is at least pretty painless. Your profiles aren’t ordered by any manner that you’d want such as grouped by OS or function. You can’t run commands over multiple windows and I’m sure there are plenty of other features lacking… Well, not any more.

I was recently introduced to SuperPuTTY! A fantastic wrapper for PuTTY. To be absolutely clear, you need to have PuTTY installed and preferably have your sessions already configured, you then download SuperPuTTY, point it at PuTTY and it will pull in your profiles. Once they’re in SuperPuTTY you can then start to put them into folders based on OS, function, preference – literally however you want to group them. Once grouped you can generally find servers much quicker, you can also right click on a folder and connect to all of them simultaneously.

This is where it really starts to shine, SuperPuTTY has tabbed multi-window support. It will open them all within a tabbed environment, one which you can move around, tile horizontally, move tabs between tiles and so on. You can even save layouts for reuse later!

But then you have another problem, you’ve just opened 4 or 5 windows and they all want you to enter your details, well lets assume you use the same password across them all – you can use a text field at the top of the client to run commands or entries over all active windows! In fact, you can apply a filter to only run commands over selected active sessions.

Honestly, SuperPuTTY has made my life a thousand times easier and more productive, I recommend you get it NOW. I’ll try and get a quick tutorial up on it at a later date with some screenshots, for now go and check out their site for more details.

https://code.google.com/p/superputty/

I’ve been running it for a few weeks now and I have to say, its much more stable with problems like;

- Rapid battery draining

- Wireless locking up when trying to switch on in some conditions

- Random crashes

All seem to have either gone, or been massively improved.

Overall the phone is still running fairly fast and they even managed an email client update which is actually a major leap forwards against the last version.

So really, if it hasn’t landed for you yet then keep holding on, it will soon! Otherwise, go and download it now – hopefully you won’t regret it!

Samsung Galaxy S2

In Canada its started to roll out with users reporting it arriving as an over the air update (OTA). This is unusual in itself as Samsung normally uses its Klies software to push out updates. Singapore and a few other European countries also started to get the update through February.

A quick look at the Samsung UK site and you’ll even notice that the online manual for the phone has been updated to the Jelly Bean one! Hopefully it will land soon and as soon as it does I’ll try and throw and update here, if you hear of it rolling out anywhere else or in the UK then please comment below and I’ll update the post.

What happened next was a little odd and looking around the net it isn’t particularly well documented, its out there in bits and bobs but I thought it might be helpful to tie it all together in one place.

So the scenario here is that I’ve loaded the recovery console and chosen to go into the command line, my end game is that I want to run the SFC.

So your first step might be to run;

If you’re hitting the same issues as me there are two things you should notice at this point, firstly that the command prompt is set to some random hard drive letter. Secondly that it throws this error when you try to run that command;

In my case its because the X drive is just where the recovery partition has been mounted, obviously its not the boot partition. Next you might try the following command;

It seems reasonable to assume that this would force SFC to run on the C drive, however you may get this error;

Well, thats actually because you’re assuming that the recovery console has mounted the boot drive onto the same drive letter that you normally use, in fact its probably put it somewhere else, to find out you can just run the next command.

Nice and simple, this will return where the OS is installed, in my case it returned the following.

So now I know where my partition is hiding I can re-run the SFC command above with the correct detail and this time you should find it runs successfully Hope this helps someone!

It definitely wasn’t by using the bulk actions on 20 comments at a time. Instead I activated the Akismet plugin which has been hanging around my install for a while, albeit disabled.

Before you can get started you need to grab an API key from their site but its free for personal/non commercial use (double check the terms and conditions on the site though, don’t take my word for it )

Now the one thing that it doesn’t do is handle all your old comments automatically, but don’t fret! It can still go back over your old comments and clear out the spam. To do this you just load up your admin page, head over to the Comments tab on the left and at the top you will find a button, “Check for Spam”. If you press this the page will stay the same but the browser loading image will start to move. Word of warning, on my server with over 3500 comments to look through it took about 10-15minutes and that was spent entirely sat on the same page with absolutely no indication it was working. When it had finished I actually got a connection timed out page but once I reloaded I had just a handful of comments to moderate

Turns out the battery died a while ago and for the life of me I couldn’t get it to switch on or to charge, even when leaving it for a few hours at a time. Even the normal battery icon wouldn’t come up on screen when it was plugged in.

The answer is actually pretty simple, press and hold the power button until it switches on. Make sure it’s plugged into the mains before you do this but hopefully after about 20-30 seconds you should see it burst back into life.

Make sure you give it a full charge before you try to do too much else with your Nexus 7 and try to avoid letting it drain down fully again

For what its worth, the latest update seems to be pretty good so far with gesture typing on the keyboard and a few other performance tweaks and improvements. I have been experiencing a bit of screen flickering but I need to spend some more time with it to make sure I’m not imagining things!

The Specs;

• 7″ 1280×800 HD display
• 8GB or 16GB models available (16GB Reviewed)
• Weighs 340g
• 4325 mAh battery, rated for 8 hours of active use
• Quad-core Tegra 3 processor
• Comes loaded with Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)
• The usual other features, GPS, Microphone, front facing camera

Great specs and Google is reportedly producing the Nexus 7 at below cost price which explains its fantastic price tag of £200 (At the time of writing and for the 16GB version). There are some key features missing however, a rear facing camera and a 3G connection being the most noticeable.

I’ve been playing with my Nexus 7 for a couple of weeks now and the combination of the Tegra processor with Jelly bean is wonderful, it is quick and smooth to use and with the constant evolution of the Android OS all of the niggles of ICS have evaporated. For example there is no longer a couple of different menu’s to change the display icons, quick launch icons or wallpaper. Everything is done just by long clicking, dragging and dropping and the cool new flicking feature where you can just throw icons about.

But you don’t use a tablet just to create a lovely desktop, right? I’ve found the email client great with Exchange or POP3 email accounts with the usual features you’d expect from a larger screen such as your mailbox folders down the left and your emails along the right.

Chrome is now included as the default browser and is pretty much identical to the desktop version which is a nice touch, increasing the consistency between my desktop and tablet experience on the internet.

Sound quality is good, it won’t replace a speaker system in a hurry but as far as integrated speakers go it certainly fits the purpose and doesn’t let down your Spotify playlists!

Obviously as this is a Wi-Fi only tablet you will want to ensure that you keep some content downloaded for offline playback and at the moment all Nexus 7′s come with Transformers: Dark side of the moon pre-loaded. As an introductory offer (I’m sure this will end shortly) Google are also giving all customers £15 of credit to spend on the Google Play store to get them started after purchase which is a nice touch.

All in all I’ve used my tablet mainly for email, internet, some games and IRC. I’ll go into more detail on the apps in another post and I also have a really solid case for it which fits it like a dream that I’ll review later on.

For now, all I can say is that if you are looking for a tablet but don’t want to spend the earth, want to get email and the web but won’t be too worried about using it out and about then go for the Nexus 7. Even if you do want to roam at least you can always tether it to your phone for data on the move.

Overall I’d rate this at 4.5 stars, the only reason I’ve not given it 5/5 is purely because it is lacking a 3G connection. Without this it is still a magnificent beast, just that it is tied to wherever you can find Wi-Fi.

The last response I received from Samsung was to do a complete factory reset as “sometimes old settings remain after an upgrade”. Obviously I completely disregarded this as it sounded rubbish, especially after they had initially told me there was a known issue with the battery (and then sent me an identical battery). Anyway, I will give you the steps to do what I did in full and hopefully it will help you get a usable phone back;

• If you are using a Samsung phone, plug it into your PC and use the Klies software to do a full backup of everything. Bear in mind that your apps may be listed on Google Play but it won’t restore them after a reset so have a look at some other apps that will do that for you (there are a few knocking about).
• After your backup head to your settings folder on your phone and select “Accounts and sync”. If you have a Samsung account listed here then select it and delete it by clicking on it and pressing remove account in the bottom right. It will still exist, but you have to remove it from your phone before starting the backup (don’t ask me why, it just throws an error if you don’t delete it first).
• From the main settings folder, select “Back up and reset” and then choose “Factory data reset”. This will start the process of restoring your phone.

After it has done its magic and you’ve got everything set up again, you will hopefully find your battery life improved dramatically, as per the screenshots below. If this works for you please feel free to leave a comment below, would be great to hear if this is working for people.

My efforts to try and get it resolved have been shot down at practically every turn, the final solution I have now been offered is a downgrade to the last version – but no acknowledgement that anything is even wrong!

So, for whatever little this may be worth, I would be very interested to gather feedback from others with the same battery problem. Not much detail is required, all I am really interested in is your name with some detail on your phone model details, if it was bought with ICS or an upgrade from the last version and some bits on your battery life and support experience. Please fill in the below as I hope to take this forwards to try and get some sort of detail or more coherent response on the problems afflicting ICS. The fact that I cannot make it 6 hours without needing to put my phone on charge is frankly ridiculous.

Update: Read here for an update on how to fix the battery draining problem!

I’m sure you’ve felt it, the sinking feeling as an army that looks unbelievably large suddenly builds a land bridge over to your precious little island and you know its all over. The trick to preparing for this or to counter it is to expand your land early, away from the coast-lines nearest your enemies and to make sure your tribe is set to build.

This will ensure that they will expand across the island as quickly as possible, you may find that sometimes they start to cram into a corner or take ages wandering to find space, no problem! Set a waypoint in an unoccupied corner of your island, set your tribe to gather and when there are a few of them in the corner with others heading over the island, change them back to building. This will cause them to build on any unoccupied group they are stood on thus expanding your territory across a larger and more open area, making it quicker for any newly spawned tribesmen to find fresh ground to settle on.

So thats the basics of expanding early covered, but how to attack? The game almost tricks you into thinking that launching an attack is a final action by setting all your men to war, but in reality this should be done in short bursts. You want a sizable territory to ensure a healthy number of spawned tribesmen but at the same time you want your open territory to fill shortly before launching an attack. This will result in a number of wandering tribesmen, ready to move and surplus to requirements. Once you choose the option to look for a fight they will all head directly to the enemy, again you need to be the first to make the attacking move. By doing this you can choose where to build the land bridge and to ensure it is at least 2 squares wide to get enough of your men over but small enough to bring it down quickly if it all goes wrong.

After your initial attack you will want to choose to build again, this will allow for a small beachhead within the enemy territory consisting of captured buildings and newly built buildings where your tribesmen were stood on unoccupied group when you switched their orders to build. After a minute or so you will want to launch your next attack. Whilst this is going on you can use distraction tactics to try and draw the enemy away from your attack and back into the heart of their territory. If you have any of the large area fire or lightning attacks then launch a few across the furthest away part of their land. Doing this will destroy many buildings and tribesmen, the enemy will then look to build again on this freshly unoccupied ground to ensure they keep their supply of tribesmen coming, however this will cause their men to turn away from the front-lines thus leaving them open to your onslaught.

These are just some tactics I have developed over the past few weeks since the skirmish mode hit the game that have had the greatest success, balancing your early growth, attacking and pausing between attacks is the hardest element of this and will require practice and adjustment depending on how the land is generated.

Happy Reprisal-ing!