Category: Geek Stuff

One of the hottest gadgets of Christmas 1997 was the Philips Velo 1. It was a Handheld PC (sometimes called a “palm top”) and it was absolutely tiny:

When closed, this bad boy was smaller than most paperback books. It ran a Philips MP3910 chip at a blistering 36.864 MHz (yes, that was sarcasm). It had 4 whole megabytes of RAM and 8 whole megabytes of storage space. It rocked a 480×240 monochrome monitor, had a built-in 14.4kbit/s modem and connected to your computer using RS-232.

It was, compared to even the cheapest Chinese knockoff electronic organizers of today, absolutely awful. But it was also bad ass! I could whip this puppy out at a bar or restaurant and people would crane their necks to get a peek at it. And connecting to the Internet via dial-up on this thing made a lot of people (even me) absolutely giddy! Seriously – it almost seemed like something out of a James Bond movie!

I once worked at place where I had a very specific job; it was made very clear to me by the management that if I had nothing to do, I was supposed to sit at my desk and do nothing. As a contractor, I was not allowed to have an email address. The company’s firewall prevented access to (literally) 98% of the Internet, and I was “strongly discouraged” from bringing in books or magazines to pass the time. So I’d sneak in my Velo 1 and connect to the ‘Net via dial-up. I’d check email and surf a few sites… but the main thing I’d do was talk to this 19 year-old Israeli girl I’d met on ICQ (and no, it wasn’t “that kind” of chatting; she just seemed to be online ALL THE TIME).

While I loved my Velo 1, the main problem with the thing is that it ran Windows CE 1.0. Just typing that made me wince! (Get it? Windows CE? WinCE? Wince?) That OS was a complete disaster. As you can tell by the above picture, the operating system looked just like Windows 95 or Windows 98… which would have been great, except Start Menus and taskbars and system trays are a horrible idea on a device with a 5.1″ screen. And the device, for some godawful reason, supported multitasking, which meant that you’d sometimes have to use the built-in stylus to manually move windows around… on a 5.1″ screen. I was able to eventually upgrade it to (IIRC) Windows CE 2.1, which was slightly better. But still, there just weren’t a lot of apps for WinCE out there, and many of the ones that did exist weren’t that great. And synching the device via serial port seemed to take FOREVER, even though the amount of data being transferred wasn’t all that much.

It’s really amazing that this device was almost “cutting edge” in its day… but less than three years later Compaq would release the insanely popular iPaq 3630. The iPaq had a vivid color screen, a 206 MHz processor, supported Wi-Fi via CF card, had a vast array of accessories (including a folding keyboard, which I used to take notes in meetings), and syncing with a desktop PC didn’t totally suck, either. The Velo 1 seemed like 1950s black and white TV, while the iPaq seemed like a late 1980s color TV. But a mere 30 months separated the two products!

It drives me nuts: you search and search for a video on YouTube… but when you finally find it, some idiot has encoded it in the wrong aspect ratio:

You can (sort of) work around this if you have the ever-popular VLC video player installed on your computer. Just open VLC and choose Media > Open Network Stream, paste the YouTube URL into the “Network URL” box and press “Play”:

When the video appears, keep pressing the “A” key until the correct aspect ratio is displayed:

This isn’t perfect, but it’ll work in a pinch!

There’s not a single definition of what a “smartphone” actually is. However, most tech historians consider the IBM Simon to be the very first smartphone:

It was developed by IBM in 1994 and was the first device to combine a mobile phone with PDA-like features. A concept model was shown off at COMDEX in 1993 and generated a lot of interest, even making the front page of USA Today’s “Money” section the next day. The device allowed users to make phone calls, send and receive faxes, emails and pages and had comprehensive address book and calendar features. It lacked a dedicated number pad, relying instead on a touch screen interface. Perhaps most amazingly of all, the device was able to do all this using DOS!

BellSouth got an exclusive for the device, and sold it for $899 with a two-year contract ($1,305 adjusted for inflation) or $1,099 without a contract ($1,595). The carrier sold 50,000 units before discontinuing the phone in February 1995.

But the funniest thing about it was that it was the first phone to come with the ability to run third-party apps. An Atlanta company called PDA Dimensions developed “DispatchIt”, the only app ever developed for the platform. The app required a desktop PC client ($2,999) and a phone client ($299). Adjusted for inflation, the desktop client and one Simon client would cost $4,788 today! Not surprisingly, PDA Dimensions sold exactly two copies of the software.

If there’s one thing in this world I hate it’s the default wallpaper that large OEMs like Dell and HP include with their server products. It’s bad enough that you have to spend $6,000 (or more) on a server, but now, every time you log in remotely, you have to see this:

It’s not just that it’s a visual annoyance. Loading that wallpaper takes time and bandwidth: the Dell wallpaper is around 1.3MB, and having it load every single time you log on to a server gets old.

The thing is, in most cases the OEMs have configured the servers to display the wallpaper, even if you don’t have a wallpaper configured at the console session. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to remove this. Just open REGEDIT and go to

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop

Look for a key called WALLPAPER in the right-pane. If you’d like to remove the wallpaper entirely, just delete the WALLPAPER key. If you’d prefer to just change the wallpaper, change the value of the key to the location of your preferred wallpaper. For example, the default on Dell servers is \windows\system32\DELLWALL.BMP. You can change this to whatever you’d like, no reboot is necessary. Once you’ve changed the key, the next time you RDP into the server the wallpaper will be gone, replaced with the default color background.

OK, I’m probably the last person on earth to find out about this, but if Firefox is crashing on you, restart the browser in safe mode by holding down the SHIFT key when clicking the Firefox icon (if necessary – I find that Firefox rarely crashes when displaying the “Session Recovery” page; just open a new tab with Session Recovery open). The next step is to type about:crashes in the address bar and press enter. If you’ve submitted your crash reports to Mozilla (and you have been doing that, haven’t you?) you’ll see a list of your crash reports:

Reports are listed by the most recent, so in most cases you’ll want to click on the one at the top of the column. When you do, a new page will open, connect to Mozilla and download the report:

It might take a few minutes for the report to be retrieved and downloaded. But when it does, you’ll find a wealth of information about the crash, hopefully enough to get you headed towards a fix.

Firefox recently started acting weird on my computer… mostly by crashing every 8 hours (at first), then every 15 minutes, then every 5 minutes, then every 45 seconds. Poking around the ‘Net for a solution, I found out about “about:crashes”, and my crash reports couldn’t have made it any clearer: adblockvideo.dll, part of the AdBlockVideo extension I’d recently installed, was causing the crash. I disabled the extension, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since!

OK, this might be the lamest tip ever, but did you know that you can change the default setting for the “Shut Down” button in the Windows 7 Start Menu? Just right-click the Shut Down button, select “Properties” and choose whichever action you’d prefer from the drop-down box:

Kind of nifty, especially if you use a pre-Windows key keyboard like myself:

If you’re one of the 14 people still using Internet Explorer, you might have noticed an annoying new “feature” that Microsoft introduced in IE 8 and continued in IE 9: when you save images from different tabs, IE always defaults to the user’s “Pictures” folder instead of the previously used folder.

For example, say you’re at an imageboard like Reddit, and you have opened a bunch of funny images you want to save in to different tabs. You right-click the first image and choose “Save Picture As…” and IE opens the save dialog box in the Pictures folder. You navigate to your c:\MyStuff\pictures\reddit\funny folder and save the image. You then go to the next tab, right-click that image and choose save… but instead of the previous location, IE has defaulted back to the “Pictures” folder. So you have to navigate to the your preferred location. And then repeat the process for all the other pictures in open tabs.

This happens because Microsoft used a method it calls “Loosely Coupled IE” (LCIE) to spawn new instances of IE every time you open a new tab. In other words, every time you open a new IE tab, Windows treats it as a completely new instance of IE. Which is why new tabs revert to default locations, but saving multiple images from the same tab don’t exhibit this behavior. And the reason Microsoft did this is for stability: if one of your open tabs crashes, only that particular instance of IE is killed, not the other instances of IE. So LCIE makes IE much more stable generally, but adds a huge annoyance for saving images.

Can you change this behavior? Yes, but you need to read this first: Trust me, it’s not the usual techno-babble yadda yadda yadda.

You can force IE to run as a single process, but this has two important ramifications: for one thing, all instances of IE will run as a single process, so if one tab crashes, all tabs will crash. Also, forcing IE to run as a single process disables Protected Mode in Windows Vista and Windows 7, because IE is running as a single process, instead of separate instances which Windows can run at different integrity levels.

Continue reading “IE and the Default Save Folder”

In Windows XP, it was easy to configure Task Scheduler to run a certain event on weekdays only:

Windows 7, however, doesn’t have a “weekdays” option, just “Daily”, “Weekly”, “Monthly”, “One time”, “When the computer starts”, “When I log on”, or “When a specific event is logged”:

So… how do you configure tasks to only run on weekdays? It’s totally counter-intuitive, but you choose “Weekly” and then choose which day(s) you want the task to run on:

It doesn’t make a lot of sense at first, but new method is actually far more powerful than the old “XP way”. You could, for instance, easily create a task that only runs on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays using this method, whereas in XP you’d have to create three individual daily tasks that run on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Or if you had a business that was open every day but Sunday, you could easily schedule a backup to run Monday – Saturday with this method.

Play around with it – I think you’d like it better in the end!

Virgin Mobile USA, the Sprint-owned prepaid cellular company, has three product lines: “Beyond Talk” (for smartphones and advanced feature phones), “Paylo” (for basic feature phones), and “Broadband2Go” (for mobile adapters and hotspots).

For some reason, Virgin has chosen to sell prepaid cards for each service. And the market for such cards – at least in the Charlotte area – is oddly segmented. For example, my local Walmart used to sell Beyond Talk cards next to other prepaid cellular cards from Boost Mobile, Net10 and Tracfone. But Walmart stopped carrying them for some reason, and now only sells Broadband2Go cards in the computer accessories section. Walgreen’s still has $25 or $50 Beyond Talk cards, while the CVS across the street only sells the “you choose” $10/$30/$50 Paylo cards. Lowe’s, across the street from CVS and next door to Walmart, sells Paylo cards in $10, $20, or $50 amounts.

So here’s the tip: it’s not a secret – in fact, it’s printed right on the front of the cards – but you can use any Virgin Mobile prepaid card to add funds to any Virgin Mobile account. If you have Beyond Talk, you can use a Paylo card. Or you could use a Beyond Talk card to add money to your Broadband2Go account. As I say, the front of the cards clearly states “adds money to any Virgin Mobile account”. But it wasn’t that long ago that I didn’t know there wasn’t a difference between them. I figured someone out there might not know either, and have the same question.

I have a desktop computer running Windows 7 Ultimate with Aero enabled, and a netbook running Windows 7 Starter without Aero. So when I use my netbook to connect to my desktop over Remote Desktop, the desktop has to switch from Aero to Classic mode. And when I log back in to the console session on my desktop, Windows is supposed to switch back from Classic to Aero.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Just the other day I was in bed and decided to use the netbook to connect to my desktop so I could go through some RSS feeds and tweets in Outlook. But, after I disconnected, the desktop remained in Classic mode… which is just ugly. I knew from previous occurrences that I could just reboot the computer, but I had a lot of stuff open and didn’t want to do that. So I tried shutting down and restarting Explorer (the shell, not the web browser), but that didn’t help. I had a flash of inspiration and tried restarting Desktop Window Manager session service… and it worked!

If this happens to you, all you need to do to fix it is open a command-prompt with admin privileges and type the following (be sure to wait for the “service stopped successfully” message before entering the second command):

net stop uxsms
net start uxsms

If you know of a more elegant way to fix this, please let me know!