posted by SpongBo on March 18, 2010 at 9:30 pm in Uncategorized

What. The. Hell?

Thanks Zune. After getting rid of the annoying, distracting, attention-grabbing taskbar text animations in the 3.x series, Zune 4.x now brings it back in force, with no obvious way to disable it.

Every time the text changes, my attention is drawn to the taskbar. This isn’t remotely cool. This is distracting. That the option was there and is now gone tells me you don’t care about me.

Thanks for nothing.

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posted by SpongBo on March 15, 2010 at 2:27 pm in Uncategorized

Well done guys, you broke the spectacle pretty comprehensively.

Bahrain was a boring track at the best of times. Adding bumpy corners that extend a lap is not really that cool to watch.

But now, with no refuelling… there is no strategy. It’s a freakin’ train.

It had better get better soon. Otherwise, F1 will have squandered the most compelling driver lineup it’s seen in recent years.

Popularity: 1% [?]

posted by Shifty on March 13, 2010 at 1:17 pm in Windows 7

Because they never crash, because they don’t have bugs like Micro$oft Windoze.

On a fresh install of Tiger, with all updates, I get this crash every 30 mins or so. I have no non-Apple software installed.

I was at a friend’s house last weekend, and he has become quite the fanboi. He demonstrated his Mac to me, to prove that I should get one. It locked up and had to be rebooted 3 times during the half hour I was in front of it. Applications had to be Force Quit. This did not weaken his faith, if anything it strengthened it. He blamed the crashes on one of either 2 possible causes:

1. I had plugged in my USB hard disk, which had been formatted on a Windows computer. Micro$oft bugs caused the crash
2. He probably had a Safari tab open with Flash on it. Flash caused the whole computer to crash. Adobe are bad, Steve said so.

He also questioned why I would have a USB hard disk instead of the vastly superior Firewire.

Popularity: 1% [?]

posted by Shifty on January 6, 2010 at 10:28 pm in Uncategorized

This afternoon, STARSCREAM, my trusty Windows 2003 server, breathed his final breath. He was due to be replaced but I did not yet have all the parts to build a new server. Sad times.

One of the big problems with which I was immediately faced is this: due to being an idiot, I had made several of STARSCREAM’s hard disks Dynamic Disks. This means that I couldn’t just plug them into another computer and use them. I couldn’t access my data.

After a bit of forum reading and googling, I came across a life-saving post at My PKB entitled How to non-destructively convert dynamic disks to basic disks. Within 5 minutes I was happily copying my data to another server, a happy boy indeed. All standard warnings aside, it is a testament to the documented process that my Thank You comment was #294.

Popularity: 2% [?]

posted by Shifty on October 25, 2009 at 6:16 pm in Uncategorized

I have been working on some new sites and designing them with the 960 Grid System, and I am officially in love. It drastically reduces the effort required to layout a page, and also reduces the amount of maths that you have to do in your head. To completely eliminate the maths, I have created an image that shows the grid sizes for the 12 column grid. Click the image below for a 960px wide version.

If, like me, you want to print this out and put it on the wall, I have created an A4 PDF that will have nicer fonts when scaled to print size. The boxes and pink lines are slightly blurry, so if you are a fancy graphics person please feel free to fix it and I will upload your better version here.

Download the PDF here.

Now I have to redesign Pinkjoint using 960.gs

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posted by Shifty on August 30, 2009 at 6:20 pm in Windows 7

I have been using Windows 7 since RTM and I have to say that I am impressed. It seems quite solid and there have been many “that’s nice” moments.

One default that I have disliked is the logon wallpaper image. It is a bit, how do you say, ghey. I tried out a few methods of changing it involving manual resizing of images and registry editing and it all seemed a bit too hard for such a minor thing. Then I found Tweaks.com Logon Changer for Windows 7 and my life changed for the better. Within 2 minutes I had a beautiful background from my wallpaper folder and am already impressing everyone around me.

The process couldn’t be easier. You download the file, unzip it, and run the single executable file contained within. You press Change Logon Screen, choose your image, click Test, and voilà, you have a lovely new logon screen. If you ever change your mind, you can always run Logon Chnager and click the “Revert to Default Logon Screen” button and return to the factory setting.

Well done, Tweaks.com. 4½ stars.

Tweaks.com Logon Changer for Windows 7

Download here

Popularity: 3% [?]