Nostalgia time: Timex/Sinclair computer simulator in a web browser. (via Rick)

Just ‘cos you can: Dismantle your mobile phone.

A documentary series about the video game industry? Hope they show it here. Maybe I’ll order it on DVD. Take the Name That Sound quiz (I was crap at it).

GoDaddy.com has .info domains for US$1.95 (Via Lex). Doesn’t stop them being the poor cousin of .com .net and .org though.

Method 1: Install Acrobat Reader 6, then Trim out all the extraneous plugins. The same method apparently works with Acrobat 5, if you still have that.

Method 2: Downgrade to Acrobat 4 5.05, which does all the essential PDF-reading stuff, but is smaller and quicker.

OldVersion.com is a boon for finding old versions of freeware. For years I used ICQ98, since it was tiny and advert-free. I’m such an early adopter I have a 7 digit ICQ number 🙂 Now I generally use Trillian, since it’s multi-IM-standard, so I can talk to people on MSN and ICQ and Yahoo with only one multi-megabyte IM program sitting in memory.

I got my Ipod today.

It doesn’t work – refuses to talk to my PC or my PC refuses to talk to it. All I get is the error message ‘Can’t mount Ipod’. I’ve followed every suggestion I could find on the net and still nothing.

Apple only have paid customer support on Saturdays, I have to wait until Monday if I don’t want to get slugged to get my new machine working.

Looks like my first purchase from Apple may also end up being my last.

I’m converting my music collection to play on Itunes (go on, guess why). Currently they are in WMA and Itunes wants to convert them.

Fair enough. There’s 1570 odd files to convert so I set it running. It gags on one file about 100 in and rather than continue with the next file it stops stone cold. And there’s no resume option. And it doesn’t delete the WMA file once it’s converted so you double the size of your music library. 1570 files will take about 12 hours to convert but how confident can I be to let it run overnight? Knowing my luck it will choke again once song after I head off to bed and I’ll have to nurse it through tomorrow.

Not impressed with this supposed Apple brilliance.

I’ve been singing the praises of Lookout for a while now, although I was beaten to the punch on this blog.

Well it seems Lookout has some competition and after just one day of use I’m impressed.

The free Copernic Desktop Search allows you to search across the contents of your PC including files, emails, attachments, music and video. It’s lightning fast although the search tool it can install on your task bar can make it a little cluttered, especially if, like me, you’re running Google Desk Bar and have Windows Media Player running in minimised mode. Unfortunately it doesn’t index Firefox bookmarks or history, only IE, nor does it index OneNote files but with any luck and an avalanche of requests that will hopefully change.

From what I’ve read it’s offering what Microsoft plan to include in some future version of Windows and what Google are planning on offering in a tool called ‘Puffin’. Why wait though? It’s small, fast, works and is available now.

ONE HOUR LATER…

More and more impressed – wanted to find REM’s ‘Bad Day’ in my disorganised music folder, I swear it was displaying the result before I finished typing the ‘y’.

A while back The Age (and other Fairfax Digital sites) introduced a free registration requirement to get to read pages with any meat on them. I can kinda understand their motivation in this, it probably makes their web advertising more valuable knowing who’s looking at what.

Three problems with it though. Firstly it discourages casual viewers. While it’s relatively invisible once you’re registered, it is a pain to have to remember yet another e-mail/password combination, especially if you move around a lot. Have pity on the expat Aussies roaming from Net cafe to Net cafe.

Secondly Google News is now counting some Fairfax sites as “subscription,” putting off more casual viewers. (Curiously the SMH is labelled as subscription, but The Age isn’t.)

Thirdly one day last week I tried to look at an article in The Age and the authentication system had broken down, barring entry. Surely they should realise that they’re in the content-delivery business, not the web subscription business, and if the authentication system fails, waive the requirement to check my logon, and just show me the damn page.

Oh yeah, and why is their up-to-the-minute fast-breaking Technology Daily e-mail bulletin filled with stories that are two days old?

Having problems accessing some email accounts this morning. The exchange with their tech support ended with this :

Your connectivity is perfect. All I can suggest is using another email client, another PC and if possible disable your firewall if you run one. If you can connect just fine at http://mail.yourdomain.com then the issue must be client related.

That’s the geek way of saying “I’ve run out of ideas, you’re on your own.” One reset of the computer later and all is fine.

No doubt this is preaching to the converted but it has to be said.

Start using Firefox.

Go and download it, install it, love it.

Now.

I bought a new USB key yesterday and plugged it in. All went well and then I received the following message :

Your device is installed but may not function properly until you reboot.

How many people these days would know what boot/reboot means? Don’t most people ‘start’ ,’shut down’ or ‘restart’ their computer? It’s similar to the icon tray icon for Microsoft Money – ‘Run Money’ is one of the right click choices. Most people these days would ‘start’ money.

Computer related language has changed and we geeks need to take this in to account when letting non-geeks know what’s happening with their software and hardware. It’s time to unlearn.