I’m Back. Again.

Oh no I am so not looking forward to sorting through my photos. I actually managed to use up my 4GB Memory Stick, a first for me. But then again I was shooting at 7MP almost all the time (except for when I accidentally set it to 5MP at Roaring Camp – ARGH! Those were the nice photos) so I guess it should have been expected.

In the meantime, have a screenshot. Yeah, I have invites. Go on and ask for them.

 

Gonna download my copy of Office 2010 Beta now. My internet is being iffy though.

Have I Ever Mentioned How Gorgeous Zune 4.0 Is?

Words of wisdom from met2art (granted, not about this software, but anyway):

This looks very, very good. And I really don’t care who it’s from. I prefer to attribute excellence to a single product based on its merits, rather than the manufacturer or branding. Microsoft and Apple have had many failures, but also many successes in different areas. Are the tallies balanced? I do not know, nor do I care. But, I do know that to simply assign "win" or "fail" to any product, especially when just a rumor, based solely upon the imprimatur is arrogant and ignorant. For that reason, I find it difficult to accept the supposed awesomeness of the alleged Apple tablet, simply because it’s from Apple.

 

 

The fonts are only screwy in the screenshots because my system is in Chinese. I assure all English-edition Windows users that Zune will turn out to be the most beautiful media player you have used in a long time.

In other news, Microsoft should be releasing download links for Office 2010 Beta on Nov 30 (and ending the Technical Preview program) so Xeo and Sugi can go get it soon.

One Ring To Ping Them All + DirectX Comparison

Hey, Deepest Sender, what gives? You’ve deleted three of my posts already when all I wanted to do was change the category they were in.

So now I have to re-post the stuff it deleted. Here we go:

Selected posts from The Straight Dope, compiled into 1 image.

I will admit that I have only the foggiest idea of what DirectX does. I know you use it in games, and I know that the higher the version number, the better the results. But in my games I never really could tell the difference, mostly because I don’t play graphics-intensive games. (I tried turning on DX10 graphics in DDO, but couldn’t tell there was a difference). Still, the video is pretty nifty.

ScribeFire Fail?

[via Long Zheng]

So I’m trying out ScribeFire, which I last used when it was still known as Performancing. I use the WordPress.com backend and Windows Live Writer (for image-heavy posts) most of the time, but they’re both really slow. While Writer is feature-rich, it’s a bit too heavy for times when I just want to dash off a quick post. The WP.com backend is just…slow, even though I have Turbo (downloads common files to your computer via Google Gears or something) enabled. And I don’t think it’s my connection that’s the problem. So, ScribeFire it is (for now). It’s functional, that’s for sure, but it comes out pretty ugly on my system. Example:

Another thing that sucks is how the Firefox spell checker seems to be active, but I can’t right-click on words to – oh, wait, it seems to have fixed itself.

 

The extension does allow for adding images straight from your computer (you can choose to upload via FTP or the blog’s own API), Flickr and related media from Zemanta. However, I’ve always found Zemanta pretty useless unless you’re a news-focused blogger, so yeah. It seems to be having problems with uploading images. Sigh. I’ve tried three times already, and it gets stuck on "uploading" – which then prevents the entire post from being published. I just added in my API key. Hopefully it’ll work now. Nope. Still broken.

 

Heh heh. So now I’m writing this using Writer. Goodbye, ScribeFire.

New Yahoo! Mail + Office 2010 Stuff

Hmm. I went to check my mail today and saw a bunch of changes. Also near the bottom of this post there are some more Office 2010 screenshots about the equation editor. Jump for more.

Because I’m Bored: My Firefox Add-ons

Can’ Live Without

• Adblock Plus, together with the ABP Element Hiding Helper
• Greasemonkey – for the userscripts, naturally. You can find the below at userscripts.org
• Flickr Multi-group Sender – because Flickrites are lazy
• Yousable Tubefix – adds YouTube options
• Gawker Enhanced Comments (07-2009) – fixes a lot of things that wrong with the new comments system.
• LiveClick – Slide-up notifications! (I think they used to be called Growl-style, but I’m not all too sure what Growl notifications look like relative to the rest of the screen)
• QuickDrag
• PDF Download – the one I currently use is by Nitro Software, but there are many alternatives out there.
• Delicious Bookmarks
• StumbleUpon
• TwitterBar
• YouTube Comment Snob – Ah, YouTube bliss…
• Web Developer – Every time I want to uninstall it, something comes up which justifies having it around. It’s kinda spooky.

I Don’t Know

• Yahoo! Mail Notifier – It’s kind of useless because I keep Mail open in background tab, but I can set it to check more often. Of course I could use Postbox for that as well, but it’s still very much in beta and it’s got a lot of kinks that must be worked out.
• CustomizeGoogle – I keep it for the random options not related to ads.
• Web of Trust – it does come in handy sometimes…sometimes.
• LeechBlock – does it work? I don’t know yet. I keep tricking myself out of setting a combination.

Can Totally Live Without (i.e. uninstalled today)

• Sxipper
• Aviary (other than one-click screenshot capture and upload, it’s pretty useless, since Aviary went to a pay model eons ago)

Now, on to Low Earth Orbit satellites…

Office 2010: First Day

Yeah so as about 8 people know by now, I managed to get an invite to the Technical Preview of Office 2010, which I really wanted because since Office 2007 came out I’ve been wanting to ditch 2003. Jump for screenshots and stuff.

31% Geeky, apparently.

From Anton Olsen’s post on Wired, 100 Essential Skills for Geeks. I have a horrible feeling that I’m going to get less than 10% on this…

Here we go! Bolded means yes. Strikethrough means it’s not applicable. Prepare to jump.

Smooth Streaming HD Video

This is pretty neat: (Mostly, anyway) smooth streaming HD video.

http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming

I never really got the whole HD thing, but now I want to get a Blu-ray player. When is LOTR going to come out on Blu-ray?

How To Uninstall U3 on Vista

I bought a SanDisk 8GB Cruzer micro today. It’s quite pretty, and I like the sliding design, but it came with U3, a portable application platform. Sounds good, you say, until you realize that it’s a closed system, which makes it nigh impossible for casual developers to create portable apps for the platform. Also, it’s got annoying pop-ups. It had to be nuked.

 

This post is written in rambly prose, but I’ve bolded the main points.

 

The U3 Launchpad came with an uninstall utility. But it didn’t work, because whenever I tried it Windows simply told me that “Launchpad Removal Program has stopped working”. I tried this a couple of times, both with the uninstaller on the U3 Launchpad itself as well as uninstallers U3Uninstall.exe and launchpadremoval.exe from the SanDisk website and MyDigitalLife (if you need them, go do a search for the filenames). Same problem.

 

So I disabled the Launchpad from auto-starting (right-click the U3 icon in the system tray), removed the drive, and then plugged in the drive again. This time U3Uninstall.exe and launchpadremoval.exe agreed to run, but now they told me that “this program only supports one U3 drive removal” even though I only had one disk plugged in.

 

Turns out that the uninstaller recognizes all disk drives on the system as U3. Dumb, I know. I had to go to Device Manager > Disk Drives and disable all the other drives (my memory card readers). You’ll have to leave the U3 thumbdrive enabled, of course.

Run the uninstall utility again. Make sure you have admin privileges!