Category: Geek Stuff

Tech tips for nerds!

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Guest Mode in Windows 7

Windows NT (and Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista) has always had a “guest account”. In theory, you could enable the guest account to allow friends, family members or house guests to access your computer without messing things up too badly. Unfortunately, Microsoft has never made it quite clear (to home users) just what the “guest account” is, and how access rights operate under that user. So most people just don’t bother using it at all.

Windows 7 has a groovy new feature called “guest mode” that’s like the guest account on steroids. It can do this because it uses an improved version of another Microsoft tool – Windows SteadyState – to take a before and after “snapshot” of your PC. As soon as someone logs in under guest mode, a snapshot of your system is taken. The guest user will not be able to change system settings, install any software, or write anyone on the disk outside their own user profile folder. Once the user logs off, any changes made to the profile folder are discarded by SteadyState, and you’re presented with a shiny “new” guest account again. Also, drives can be “locked”, and users would not be able to change anything on a locked drive on your system.

It’s a cool feature, especially for folks like me that are too paranoid to let anyone else use their computers!

Read more about Guest Mode at Lifehacker here.

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Stupid Region Codes

While the rest of us have been dealing with Hollywood’s stupid “DVD region system” for years, it’s only now that Tinseltown’s folly has hit the corridors of power. It seems that President Obama gave British PM Gordon Brown a basket of 25 “American classic” films during his recent visit to the US. Brown, not normally a film buff, was reportedly “touched” by the gesture… that is, until he actually tried to watch them. It seems that no one in the White House knew about regions, because when Brown popped one of the discs into his player he got the dreaded “Wrong Region” error message.

I find it hard to believe that no one in the White House knew about R1 vs. R2 (to say nothing about the NTSC\PAL thing). How hard would it have been to have someone order them from Amazon UK? Or have someone at the US embassy in London hit the nearest Virgin Megastore and Fedex them to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

This is our technology president?

Amusingly, one British journalist wondered if Clueless might have been included with the film…

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iPod Shuffle Update

Last week I wrote a nasty missve about the new iPod Shuffle. Much of what I said was based on incomplete information. Sadly, fresher information is actually making me like the new Shuffle less, not more.

I noted (as an update in the comments) that Apple will be making an adapter available for third-party microphones. What’s news is that adapters must now be chipped. That’s right – to use a different pair of headphones or to hook a Shuffle up to computer or car speakers, you now have to buy an Apple-approved accessory that has an Apple-approved chip inside. So your days of buying $1.99 iPod adapters off eBay are gone.

Third-party “Apple approved” headphones are now appearing, with the average price being $49. The latest estimates for the price of an adapter alone are in the $19 – $29, with $29 looking more realistic with every passing day. There again, why shell out $79 for the new Shuffle if you’re going to have to pay $49 for additional headphones? Why not just buy a Nano that doesn’t have that stupid requirement?

Also, word is that the new Shuffle’s battery actually has less capacity than the 1G or 2G Shuffles. Apple’s official specs for the 2G Shuffle were 12 hours per change, although 18 hours was actually more common in practice. Apple says the new Shuffle only gets 10 hours, and early reviews have indicated that it struggles to meet even that low standard.

Lastly, the new Shuffles simply don’t represent a good value. Paying the “iPod tax” was OK when the 1GB Shuffle was $48 and the 2GB was $68. But it’s just silly to pay $80 for a 4GB media player in this day and age (to say nothing about the now- needed accessories). You can buy a 4GB USB stick for $10 almost anywhere, and if it’s a flash-based player your after, there any dozens of other fish in that sea.

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There’s a camera in his eye!

BRUSSELS – A Canadian one-eyed documentary filmmaker is preparing to work with a video camera concealed inside a prosthetic eye, hoping to secretly record people for a project commenting on the global spread of surveillance cameras.

Rob Spence’s eye was damaged in a childhood shooting accident and it was removed three years ago. Now, he is in the final stages of developing a camera to turn the handicap into an advantage.

A fan of the 1970s television series The Six Million Dollar Man, Spence said he had an epiphany when looking at his cellphone camera and realizing something that small could fit into his empty eye socket.

via TheStar.com | Smile, you’re on eye-socket camera.

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The end of the megapixel race

For the past couple of years, I’ve been saying that the “megapixel race” between camera makers to push out cameras with ever more megapixels is silly and counter-productive. Although megapixels are important, they’re only a small part of what makes a digital camera good (or bad).

It seems that I was right. Akira Watanabe, manager of Olympus Imaging’s SLR planning department, has officially declared 12 megapixels to be “enough for covering most applications most customers need”. And Ars Technica agrees:

Throwing more megapixels at the digital imaging problem is akin to bumping up the processor speed on a motherboard with a slow bus and small amounts of RAM, or adding a turbo to a small engine on a car with lousy brakes and wobbly suspension.

It’s about time you guys listen to me! 😉

via The end of the camera megapixel race – Ars Technica.

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NEAT SOFTWARE: Fences

Some people keep their Windows desktops free of any icons. Others cram as many icons as they possibly can on their desktops. Most people, however, fall somewhere in between: more than a handful of desktop icons, but less than a screenful. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could somehow organize all those icons by project or type?

Well, now you can – thanks to the Windows UI tweakers over at Stardock! They’ve just released a new program called “Fences“. Fences allows you to create one (or more) containers for desktop icons (called “fences”). After you create the containers, you can drag whatever icons you’d like into each container; you can then move and\or resize each container as you see fit.

So, for example, you could have a fence called “My Computer” that holds all your default icons (My Computer, My Documents, Recycle Bin), another fence called “Downloads”, another fence called “Political Science Term Paper” and another called “Jones Realty IT Upgrade Project”. You can then drag related icons onto each fence, which will keep them nice and organized. What’s even better is that you can double-click your desktop to make the fences (and their icons) disappear or reappear (you can also exclude certain fences from this behavior, so that your “My Computer” fence is always displayed).

Here’s my desktop at the moment:

(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)

Fences is free for personal use and runs on 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. For more information, click here.

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A Virtual Unknown: Meet “Moot”

The bar is in New York’s Chinatown. It’s a recent Saturday afternoon. It looks beer-stained and sweaty with the lights on, packed with plastic folding chairs and power cords. A giant disco ball hangs above an audience of 425 who are all on their MacBooks. They talk, blog, tweet and text during presentations in one fluid, convergent communicative stream. Even virtual people like to have actual conventions.

There are a few people at this conference who qualify as Internet celebs — people you either have or haven’t heard of in direct proportion to how much time you ever spend online: Obama Girl is expected to be here; so are well-known bloggers, fontmakers and stunt artists. (Hey, there’s the guy who once a year inspires hundreds of people to ride subway systems at the same time, without pants.)

But the guy everyone really hopes to meet is named “moot.”

via A Virtual Unknown: Meet ‘Moot,’ the Secretive Internet Celeb Who Still Lives With Mom. – washingtonpost.com.

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Nifty WordPress Feature: Press This

“Press This” is a bookmarklet you can add to your Internet Explorer favorites or Firefox bookmarks (a bookmarklet is a small computer program that can be run via a bookmark or favorite).

What makes Press This so handy is that you can highlight some text on any random web page, then click the Press This bookmarklet and a window will pop up, containing all the highlighted text from the original page in a WordPress “new post” window. You can then add your own text (if desired) and click the “Post” button to quickly post the text to your blog. For example, most of the posts currently on the front page were added via Press This (look for posts that say “via [some link]” at the end of the post. If you like, you can also add pictures and videos to your Press This posts as well.

To add Press This functionality to your browser, just go to your WordPress dashboard and click the “Tools” link in the sidebar: you’ll find complete (simple) instructions there.

Once you start using Press This, you’ll see how handy it is. It’s almost as fast as Facebook’s “Share Link” function, and it’ll save you all kinds of time and hassle with cutting and pasting!

Note: there is a bug with Press This in WordPress 2.7.1. If you follow the instructions on your blog and get an error message when using Press This, let me know, and I’ll send you a link to a fix.

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REVIEW: LG 600g Mobile Phone

Tracfone is, as I always say in these posts, “America’s largest prepaid only mobile provider”. They offer pretty good deals on prepaid wireless with some of the best terms in the industry. If there’s a problem with Tracfone, it’s the phones themselves. Tracfone’s hardware is years behind the times. This is most likely because the company wants to get the best possible prices on older, popular and proven designs, although Tracfone’s customer base isn’t exactly cutting-edge, either. Tracfone’s cheapest handset – the Motorola c139 – looks like something from 1999, save for the low-res color screen. Their second tier phone – the Motorola w370 – is a slightly thicker version of Moto’s RAZR, the hottest phone of 2004.

Recently, however, Tracfone has offered two new phones with some groovy new features: the Motorola w376g and the LG 600g. Both phones offer Bluetooth and VGA cameras, a first for Tracfone. A bit of a warning: Bluetooth on the Moto phone is crippled, in that it can only connect to Bluetooth headsets. The LG, on the other hand, can connect to most any other Bluetooth device, including desktop PCs, so you can use your computer to shuffle pics and ringtones back and forth instead of SMSing them to yourself. For this reason, and for the external screen (another rare feature on Tracfones), I decided to ask for the LG for Christmas. For what it’s worth, the Moto phone also comes with a built-in FM radio (a feature you think you’d like, but end up never actually using).

So… Santa was good to me, and I got the LG! I transferred my airtime to the new phone quickly and easily (but more on that later). I also ordered a few accessories, such as this Bluetooth USB adapter ($5.94 shipped) and this Bluetooth earpiece (around $25). Now that those accessories have arrived… I can do the review!

Continue reading “REVIEW: LG 600g Mobile Phone”

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Introducing DFS

Distributed File System (DFS) is a feature of Windows Server that existed in Windows NT 4.0, but didn’t really become useful until the release of Windows Server 2003.

At its simplest, DFS is a technology that allows you to create “virtual file shares” and add what amounts to symlinks or junctions to real file shares to it. So if, for example, you had a situation where you needed to share ten folders off seven different servers, you could instead create a DFS share and create links to the real shares. As far as your end-users are concerned, it’s only the one file share. That way, all users have a “S: drive” with the same folder structure, instead of one group (Finance) having one set of mapped drives and another group (Marketing) having another.

What’s even better is that you can map a DFS link via WAN connection, so people in two different offices can have the same file shares regardless of location. You can also build redundant DFS shares: just create a new share, robocopy the existing data to the new share, then add both shares to your DFS root. That way, if you ever need to take one of those servers offline, end users will still be able to access the data. In fact, they shouldn’t even notice a difference!

Although DFS was created for corporate customers, I have found one neat use for it at home. As you might know, I got a new computer for Christmas. That computer runs Windows Vista Home Premium; it therefore cannot join my local SBS 2003 domain, which has around 8 total shared folders. As you might also know, Windows networking has always been pretty crappy. After a week of owning the new computer I got sick of getting the dreaded “multiple connections to the same server using more than one set of credentials are prohibited” error with all the different file shares (even though I was only using my domain username and password). I therefore went in and created a DFS share for my local domain. I now map the DFS share as a drive, and Windows only asks me for credentials when I first map it – from that point on it’s smooth sailing!

Learn everything you could ever want to know about DFS here.