Category Archives: Tech

How F@ckin’ much?!?

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The pricing for Xbox 360 has finally been announced:

Core System priced at $299.99 (299.99 Euros / 209.99 pounds) – with Wired Controller (how last year is that??)

For $399.99 (399.99 Euros / 279.99 pounds) you get the Delux version with 20GB drive, wireless controller, headset, and remote.

Funny that if you do the maths – we’re getting robbed in the UK / Europe – prices are £45/€58 and £60/€77 more than the direct conversions from $

Peripherals aren’t cheap either:

Hard Drive (20 GB) – £69.99/€99.99 (pretty pricey don’t you think?)
Memory Unit (64 MB) – £22.99/€34.99
Headset – £14.99/€19.99
Wireless Controller – £32.99/€34.99
Rechargeable battery pack – £9.99/€14.99 (lasts for 25 hours apparently)
Wireless Networking Adapter – £59.99/€79.99 (eek!)
Universal Media Remote – £19.99/€29.99
SCART AV Cable – £17.99/€24.99
VGA HD AV Cable – £19.99/€29.99

– props to Joystiq for the prices and the conversions to € and £!!

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Microsoft SyncToy – is it any good?

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The answer would seem to be Yes…. and No….

I installed it a couple of days ago – but couldn’t quite be bothered to do anything with it…. it all looked a bit clunky and not very nice to use (plus it kept objecting – spuriously I might add – to me selecting a folder on a UNC path)

Well, last night I sat down to have a proper play with it, and it’s actually quite good – for certain specific tasks…. taking a backup of your music collection for example – it doesn’t change all that often – but the sync is a manual job… so you need to remember to run it after you rip some more CD’s.

Not being able to schedule syncs is a bit of a bummer – but I have SyncBackSE for my regular backups, and this will do nicely for keeping my music collection and important documents available when I travel.

So for a 1.0 BETA release of an unsupported and free PowerToy I’ll give it 7.5 / 10

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IE7 Beta 1 with IE6 – Part 2

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It looks like the instructions I linked to in my first post also work if you use WinZip which is nice – saves another download 🙂

However, the pop-up blocker behaves slightly strangely – I can’t seem to turn it off for this site – so the WordPress admin stuff doesn’t work properly. I’m not sure if this is a consequence of running it “locally” or if it’s a “feature” of the current Beta – but it’s enough to make me think twice about loading IE7 over the top of my current build.

One other thing – make sure that your SP2 install has completed before you try to run IE7 – or you get some very weird results!!

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Blogging Experiment

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I’m posting this as a part of an experiment that John Walkenbach is conducting….. he’s trying to find every site that links to to the post below:

http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/attention_bloggers/

He plans to publish a list of everything he finds – and investigate any that are reported as unfound. Should make for an interesting little experiment.

Thanks to randomelements for the heads-up

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Cool search add-on’s for IE7

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How cool is this? Over on the IE Team Blog there’s a post on how you can add custom search engines to the new Beta of IE7 (apparently Beta 2 will include the ability to do this without hacking your registry… nice!!) They use MSDN search as an example…. and I’ll bet it’s easy enough to bodge it to use Technet instead – how handy would that be?

Sean Alexander has posted a link to a zip file that enables you to automatically add 32 – yes, you read that right 32! – “custom” search engines!! He also (very kindly) includes instructions on how to create your own entries, and some other tips for using the search functionality of IE7.

Very, very cool – and user extensible…. as Thomas Hawk would say “Hot Donkey“!!

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Vista Install 2 – The out-come

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Well, the install of Windows Vista Beta1 on the Compaq D330 failed – an error copying files apparently – which means I have to start again….. you’ve NO idea how annoying typing in the product key gets at the 10th / 12th time of asking…..

I tried the 2 dvd’s I burnt originally and then tried a freshly burnt one too….. so I’ve got the hump with that machine for the time being!!

I’ll just have to go back to using Virtual PC on the old machine I think – although it’s painfully slow…..

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Longhorn – Install 2

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I’m trying it on some spare kit here now – a Compaq d330D P4 2.6 with 512Mb RAM – just as a straight install – stuff the Virtual PC idea….. I’ll post on progress in a bit – in the meantime I need to find my install key …. off to MSDN I go again….. I really should write it down somewhere!! 🙂

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Pocket PC / Multi-Monitor / Aux Display Hack

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I’m guessing that I’m not the only person who’s going to tie all this together – but I’m amazed at the sudden buzz around SideWindow from Innobec I had a bit of a play with it some weeks ago, and I wasn’t all that impressed to be honest – but maybe I wasn’t thinking far enough outside the box…..

Ed Bott suggests that you could “take as many as nine Pocket PCs and use them as mini-monitors on your desktop, dragging a different widget onto each one” – but who has 9 Pocket PC’s lying around spare… not to mention that many USB ports!!

Phillip Torrone – the ultimate hacker of hardware (and the only man likely to be able to say “I do” to the questions above) comes up with this superb idea for using a Pocket PC and SideWindow to “Make a Windows Vista (Longhorn) Auxiliary Display (now)” it’s just pure genius – and I’m almost tempted to try it our for a laugh!!

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Vista Beta 1 – Install completed!

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Well, I left the Windows Vista Beta 1 install runing overnight, and it finally completed – and I have to say, I’m fairly impressed!! Given that it’s running in a VM on a 1.7 Pentium, performance is acceptable – the rest of the box is useless whilst it’s running – but what the hell!!

Installing the Virtual PC add-Ons makes a big difference – the graphics are much improved, and performance seems a touch better as well. I suspect that I might have to load it on my 3.4 P4 at home as well – see if that makes things a little happier!!

All in all, not a bad start to the day!

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