Category Archives: Platforms

Kill the beep

When you want your PC to work silently, you switch Windows to a silent sound theme. But it still beeps at you for some things. Very irritating, especially when I’m trying to listen to music on headphones, to have an ear-shattering BEEP every time an email arrives or you dare to try and move the cursor beyond the end of the document in Wordpad. WhoTF decided it should beep for that anyway?

Solution 1: Double click on the volume control speaker icon. Options / Properties, and get it to display the PC Beep volume. Then mute the sucker.

But if there’s no sound devices on the PC, including a Virtual PC you’ve otherwise got the sound disabled on, you need to resort to other methods.

Solution 2: (Windows 2000 and later) net stop beep will stop the beeping for the current session.
sc config beep start= disabled will stop it permanently. Note the space after the equals sign.

(There are whackier ideas too, like recording silent WAV files to use for system events. And you could physically disconnect the speaker, if you have access to the hardware.)

It just works

I was very amused over the weekend to give an MPEG2 file on a USB drive to a couple of Mac addicts and watch them try to play it on their Macbooks. They were able to get the file off the drive with no problems, but Quicktime wouldn’t recognise it.

One of them ended up resorting to VLC, and it played… badly out of sync.

heh. Yeah. “It just works.”

Mind you, MPEG2 playback in Windows Media Player is choppy on one of my PCs, so I guess I can’t crow too much.

WTF is this icon?

This is driving me crazy.

Some process, somewhere, every minute is flashing up this icon in the status bar, momentarily grabbing CPU time and focus, and interrupting my workflow.

Unknown icon

I don’t know what it is. It’s too quick to right-click on to close or query it.

It’s even disruptive enough that I can’t capture it using PrintScreen; I had to grab it using a camera.

It’s similar in appearance to the MediaGate NDAS software, but that’s not it.

I think it only started happening a week or two ago, but you know how it is — I don’t recall what I’ve installed in that time. I know I upgraded iTunes, but I’ve already killed every Apple-related task I could find, and it’s still doing it.

Can anybody identify it?

WAIT A SEC. I did a search of all EXEs then scanned down looking at icons. It looks like it’s something to do with DivX. Hmmm.

Merry Christmas from Apple

My sister is fuming because she got an iPod Nano for Christmas, and apparently it won’t work with her 3 year old PowerPC MacBook, which runs MacOSX 10.3. Sure enough, the Nano specs say it needs 10.4.8 or higher. She’s got no real interest in paying and installing for an OS upgrade to get around the problem, so she’ll ask a friend to load her iPod for her.

Basically it means that Apple is saying you can’t have a new iPod if you run a version of OSX from before April 2005 (with the appropriate free updates).

Whereas it does run happily on Windows XP (SP2) or Windows Vista. So you need to have a version of Windows from no earlier than before October 2001 (with the appropriate free updates).

How does Apple get away with treating its customers like that?

Getting tricksy

Jeff Atwood reminds us of the consequences of tricksters taking advantage of unlocked computers, including installation of the joke Clippy, which pops up Office 97-style, but more annoyingly.

It reminds me of some of the tricks I used to play in my youth (well, my early career), back in the days of Windows 3.1.

  • Change the screensaver to call up Calculator, or Notepad, every few seconds (I wonder if you can still do this)
  • Change the mouse buttons, or the sensitivity on the X and Y axes — one really fast, one really slow
  • That old favourite, putting a desktop full of icons on as a background image, so you couldn't click the icons (significant in Windows 3.1 when minimised programs sat as icons on the desktop)
  • Swapping keyboards or monitors with computer next door
  • Swapping individual keys on the keyboard over (didn't work for touch typists)
  • Spoofing a frequently-used icon to look like it had sent an abusive message to all the network users (followed by another colleague tapping the victim on the shoulder and saying the boss wanted to see him in her office).
  • Emails advising of an imminent audit of pirated software (this caused a rapid deletion of files before anybody could stop the victim).

Low-tech tricks worked too. The pisstake-de-resistance was one morning putting a notice on a late colleague's desk to advise him that he'd been moved to elsewhere in the building. (This was met with an accepting “Oh.” and shuffled departure.)

The scary thing is that all of the above tricks were tried on one person, and he fell for them every time.

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The patch that bricks

“CCP’s latest major patch to the EVE-Online client, Trinity, comes with an optional DX9-enhanced graphics patch that dramatically improves the visual quality of the in-game graphics through remade models, textures, and HDR. It also has an unfortunate bug: the incredibly stupid choice of boot.ini as a game configuration file, coupled with an errant extra backslash in the installer configuration. The result is that anyone who installs the enhanced graphics patch overwrites the windows XP c:\boot.ini file with the EVE client configuration file, bricking the machine on the next boot. Discussion in a couple of forums threads is becoming understandably heated.”

From Slashdot (via Lauren)

iPod Touch and the ‘classic’ geek blunder

The most famous blunder of all time, according to Vizzini from the Princess Bride, is “never get involved in a land war in Asia” but the most famous blunder, I think, for a geek is not to research fully the geek tech they are going to buy.

I treated myself to an 16Gb iPod Touch yesterday, I’ve been meaning to get an iPod for a few years and being a user of iTunes at home for my music collection it was a logical step. The iPod Touch is a great little device, not too heavy and has a great screen but hey you already know that because “we” geeks have read all the reviews, and if lucky enough to have a nearby Apple Store we’ve had a play with one.

So late yesterday afternoon I took a spin down Pitt Street here in Sydney to Next Bytes (Apple Reseller) and purchased my iPod Touch, I even bought a nice silicon protector for it. I resisted the urge to open it and play with it on the trip home and ripped the packaging off once I was in front of my PC.

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My Location

Google Maps My Location uses either GPS (if it's available on your phone) or triangulation from the closest towers to show where you are. And yes, it works in Australia.

But it's not as impressive as I first thought. When I tried it initially in the Melbourne CBD (where there are

lots of towers) on my non-GPS-capable Nokia 6230i, it showed the map and pinpointed to within a few hundred metres of where I was at the time, pointing roughly to the corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Lane. Wow!

Alas it turns out that it points to that location wherever I am in greater Melbourne. Oh dear.

Still, at least it got the right city and continent. That's a start.

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Fixing the time

Ed Bott on how to fix the time sync in Windows (and the godawful error: “The time sample was rejected because: The peer’s stratum is less than the host’s stratum.”)

He notes this list of alternate time servers in the US. It makes sense for reliability purposes to choose a server close to you; indeed some big corporates run their own time servers.

As it turns out, Microsoft has a KB article documenting a number of servers around the world: 262680: A list of the Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) time servers that are available on the Internet.

Choose one near you today!

Bloody convergence again

Follow up from this rant.

I got so sick of my stupid Dopod 838Pro being incapable of operating like a phone that I decided to have a trial separation. I borrowed a colleague’s mobile phone and thought I’d have a go at using a separate phone and PDA for a while.

The separation didn’t last long… I’m back using my converged device again.

I was amazed at how hard it was to do common tasks with the mobile. For example starting a text message required 5 button presses on the phone compared to 2 on my device. Then entering the message is so much simpler on the Dopod’s Qwerty keyboard. Admittedly I’m out of practice with numberpad texting. Having a large touch screen is a huge advantage for a user interface.

So now I’m stuck with trying to figure out how to make the Dopod behave better as a phone. I’ve uninstalled lots of apps that probably suck a fair bit of cpu. Hopefully that’ll help.

Windows Vista 64-bit Drivers

November 2006 was when Windows Vista was RTM’d and I’ve been a very happy user of it since then, with one exception: 64-bit Hardware Drivers. I’m not the only one who has had issues but the responses I’ve gotten from the various companies I needed drivers from hasn’t been as positive as I’d have expected.

I took the opportunity prior to getting Windows Vista to update my hardware by replacing my processor and motherboard and filling all of the memory sockets for a total of 4Gb. My PC was ready for Windows Vista but what version would I install, I was going to install Windows Vista Ultimate but in 32 bit or 64 bit or flavours? (What is the difference between 32 bit and 64 bit? Have a read of Paul Thurrott’s excellent overview of the differences)

I decided install the 64 bit version and spent a happy couple of hours installing Windows Vista. At the end of the install process I was amazed to find all but three pieces of my hardware had been installed. I had full network access, sound and screen drivers without having to install third party drivers. When it came time to install my HP 2510 PSC Printer in Windows Vista I found that I could finally throw away the useless HP Software that I used to have to wade through just to install the network drivers for my printer.

Whilst I had a functioning system I really wanted to install the proper keyboard and mouse drivers, graphics card drivers and I really did need access to my SC101 that held my backups. So off I went in search of 64 bit drivers for all my hardware.

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