Part 2. Took the day off to pick up the machine. My friendly computer shop guy let me know he’d found a better keyboard/mouse bundle which saved me a few bucks, so the total cost was exactly $1200.

12:25. Just the basics plugged in — monitor, mouse, keyboard. Power it up. Certainly boots into XP fast. “27 days left for activation.”

Fiddle around with the defaults. The shop thoughtfully named the main account after my company name, but I want it to be Daniel… try renaming it, but the Docs & Settings subdirectory won’t rename. MyDocuments can be moved, but not its parent. So eventually I just create a fresh account for myself. Accounts for the kids too — no Administrator privileges for them, oh no.

14:10. Speakers plugged in and working. More playing about with settings (Hello Windows Classic theme). Tested a DVD. All works well though the eject button on the drive isn’t overly responsive. Hooray, the bundled PowerDVD happily grabs frames, something I sometimes want to do. The bundled Nero looks a bit light-on though… will want to be getting a real copy for DVD burning.

That’ll do for now, other stuff to do.

Rumours flying around the internet thanks to Mr Russell Crowe that the iTunes Music Store will finally open for business in Australia tomorrow, April 28th. (See the article – free registration required).

The pricing mentioned (AUD$1.50+) means I’ll probably only be using it to buy individual songs as purchasing the CD, which has no restrictions, is much more appealing and better value than purchasing an entire album online. Still, it will be great to finally catch up with the civilised world, even if my Visa card doesn’t agree.

Bad news for the web design community – Adobe has just announced it is acquiring Macromedia. I fear the worse for the wonderful products I use the most – Dreamweaver and Fireworks. Dreamweaver will probably survive, it’s the market leader and Adobe have all but shown they can’t compete but with the Adobe stable of bloat ware image processing applications the lean-mean webcentric Fireworks will probably be put out to pasture.

I guess I’ll keep the install disc safely for as long as I possibly can.

Today’s fantastic free utility is brought to you by Tango FTP. It’s a free utility that allows you to set up FTP drop boxes. These boxes sit on your screen and anything you drop on them is FTPd to the server you have associated with that box. Simple, handy and free. Check Tango Drop Box for a demo and your free download.

(Via Lifehacker)

A mate of mine, Nigel – the copywriter to the stars, sent me a Region 2 encoded DVD. My AV set-up is good, but the DVD player is dated. It’s a six year old Sony that is locked in to Region 4 and has no software unlock.

I tried the DVD in it anyway, ’cause sometimes R2 play in R4, but it didn’t work. I plonked it in my PC – Windows Media Player asked me to change the DVD drive region, leaving me with 4 changes. I tried it in the DVD burner, same thing. I tried to unlock it with DVD Shrink but that wanted me to change the region too.

Then I tried my least used media player – Real Player (get it from the BBC Real Player download page, it has no spyware or annoying ‘features’ if you get it from here) and it played the disc with no problems.

Cam and Mick at The Podcast Network’s G’Day World have scored an interview with net legend Howard Rheingold.

Whoa… a Lego Rubik’s cube solver… from the Serious Lego web site. But damn, the video seems to be offline. (via Phil)

The Howard Government (AU) plans to clamp down on anonymous political content on web sites after apparently being irritated by sites such as johnhowardlies.com.

Daniel has gone and got himself and iPod. Fellow podders, what does Daniel need to know?

Let me kick this off.

This afternoon I had a minor disaster. One minute my 13 month old Samsung monitor was working, the next it was just a blob of green on the screen. I bundled it in to the car and took it down to the local PC shop where I purchased it, Standard Computers on Millers Rd (who are excellent in the prompt way they have a look and let you know what’s going on, all with no charge) and they assured me the LCD panel was fine, it was most likely the electronics and they are covered by a 3 year warranty.

Now, Samsung, you’ve started behind the pack ’cause your call centre closes at 5:00 PM, which is a ridiculously early time this day and age, and I wanted to call you at 5:15 so let’s see how you can win me back tomorrow morning. I’m not impressed my fairly recent monitor can just stop working, you’ve got a job ahead of you to make me buy Samsung again.

UPDATE

Wow.

I’m impressed and probably a Samsung customer for life now.

They are giving me a brand new monitor. A better monitor than I bought 13 months ago, and within 48 business hours (although with a long weekend this makes it a bit longer, why didn’t it fritz two days ago!). The company dealing with it will come to my house, I hand over my old monitor, they give me a new one. No fuss, no being made to jump through hoops.

Well done Samsung, you’ve got a convert.

The Westpac banking site is down at the moment, fair enough these things happen. But is there any reason I have to attempt a login before I’m redirected to a notice telling me that banking is not available?

Here’s a hint Westpac – don’t waste your customer’s time. If online banking isn’t working tell us where we try to login.

Google Desktop Search finally works with Firefox.

Unfortunately it still doesn’t work with my anti-virus software and I can’t be bothered disconnecting from the net, uninstalling the AV, installing GDS, rebooting and then reinstalling the AV to get it going. At least not today I can’t so I’ll be sticking with Copernic Desktop Search for now.