Scoubidoo laces, scooby strings, scoobies, whatever you want to call them, they are a craze that seems to be sweeping through Schools up and down the country at the moment.

So, if like me, you have a young relative who asks you to find out how to make them, then hopefully I can save you some time surfing.

First you need a starting knot, then you can start "stitching" with either a square stitch or a round stitch.

How to make Scoobies

I found some basic Scoubidou knot instructions for beginners on a scooby strings guide site.

Someone on another website summarised the making of Scooby Strings as follows:

"What you do is take 2 lengths of thin plasic (the cord from inside old telephone wire works if not) and fold them both in half and tie a knot at the folded end to produce a loop. Hold the loop in your left hand (for right handed people - swap if your a leftie) and place the (now 4) stips of plastic at 12, 3, 6 and 9 o'clock. The pattern is then 12 over 3 (pic the 12 o'clock wire and move it over 3 oclock to 4:30), 3, over 6, 6 over 9 and then 9 through the loop you made when you moved 12. Then pull all four strips to tighten the knot and start all over again."

Once you get confident with the basics, you could then try one of the many advanced scoobidou techniques, and even build some scoubidou animals!

Who said there was no such thing as a free lunch? In my experience I have found that the some of best Windows programs are in fact the ones that are completely free, (winscp, putty, firefox etc...) which is why I like this idea so much. The OpenCD is a collection of high quality free and open source software designed to run on Windows. If you don't feel brave enough to make the switch to Linux for your main system, then this is a good introduction to open source software that will run on your current Windows machine.

I had the misfortune to reverse into the corner of my shed the other day by accident and smash the rear windscreen on my little car.

I hate it when things like that happen! But I called my insurance company who managed to "Quote me happy" just a few short weeks earlier and pressed 2 for glass damage.

Shortly after I was put through straight away to a very helpful member of their call centre. He was evidently very well trained and reassuring he guided me through the whole process of what I needed to do and offered to have someone come out to fix the car where it was. I opted instead to bring it into my local branch as it was perhaps going to take up to 7 days to get the glass because they didn't stock my rear window. So he arranged with the local Autoglass centre for me to drop the car in to them then he gave me directions.

Upon arrival it was evident that there must have been a good centralised IT system because just 5 minutes later they had all my details ready and they were waiting for me. They took the keys and checked my details, they then apologised that it may take up to 7 days and told me they would call me as soon as the glass arrived and when it was fitted.

Sure enough they did, in fact, the next day they called me to ask if I was free in half an hour to collect because they had already finished! 6 days ahead of schedule :) I couldn't have been happier. So I went to collect and found they had also fixed a small chip on the front windscreen free of charge to help stop it spreading into a crack. The car was vacuumed clean with a nice new window on the rear.

Overall I have not seen such good service from any of the companies I have dealt with recently and I thought it was worth a bit of praise. Credit where credit is due, well done Autoglass!

Do you find it a pain having to pay for a cd burning program like Nero when you just want to rip or burn an iso file. Well I've found the answer... Check out ISO Recorder 2 Beta.

Wow I did it, I passed the test and now that makes me a Google Adwords Qualified Professional. Technically that means we know lots about adwords and how to use it effectively. It was actually quite good because I learned a few new things I didn't already know like how adrank works (Max CPC * CTR * Relevance?).

I have always been quite annoyed at the web standards FTP is among the worst of them and whilst SSH has had it's fair share of bad news it is sensible that all web traffic should be secured where possible.

When Paul showed me WinSCP as a great alternative to FTP I was well chuffed mainly because we haven't really been able to get to our servers via FTP as hardly any run FTP servers but also because I can use my SSH key to authenticate rather than remembering passwords which I almost never use because they are so hard to remember.

The people behind this project should be proud it is definitely one of my favorite apps.