I do what I want ’cause a pirate is free!

Usually the first thing I do when I work with a new install of Windows XP is download Firefox. However, I haven’t done this yet on my new Vista laptop. Why? Because IE 7 has tabbed browsing and a sleeker user interface. I’ll probably do it eventually, but for now, Internet Explorer is working fine. One of the things I do miss is the spellcheck feature in Firefox 2 Beta.

Which platter will reach the finish first?

My laptop died again (This is what… the 4th time?). After performing several “Clicks of Death” and having some weird HD issues, it finally bit the dust and refuesd to boot Windows. Luckily though, I had another laptop hard drive readily available. Unforetunately, it meant the end to my Compaq laptop. I didn’t have a copy of Windows for it either. But then I remembered! You can get a free evaluation copy of Windows Vista off the Microsoft site. I went ahead and installed Vista, and was up in running in about 45 minutes. Vista runs pretty good on such a slow laptop. It doesn’t have any of the eye candy or cool themes since this laptop runs on onboard graphics. But it still looks much prettier than XP. I’m still mournin the loss of the other drive, since it had tons of information on it that I needed (school projects, Outlook contacts, some website stuff). I’m still hoping i’ll be able to salvage the data off it somehow. Maybe it’ll randomly work eventually. But most likely not =(.

I updated the My Computers page to reflect the changes.

A study based on 25 minutes essays (SAT style) found that High School students scored a good deal higher than a random sampling of bloggers who took part in the study. The average high school score was 3.6, while the average blogger score was 2.9. Victory for the students!

Full article here.

Lynx is an awesome, command line based text browser. You can download and play with it here.

Press G to type in a URL. Use the up and down arrow keys to navigate from link to link. Use PageUp and PageDown to scroll. It’s so much fun, and unneccesary!

Everyone I know that has upgraded to iTunes 7 have experienced awful skipping and distortion effects during playback, especially while playing games. I found a fix that appears to have solved the problems I was experiencing. It turns out that it wasn’t iTunes, but it was QuickTime that was causing the problems, and reverting to an earlier version of a particular file can fix the distortion and skipping problems.

Here’s a link to the forum post:
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=497963

Download the files there and stick them in the QTSystem folder of your QuickTime install directory and you’ll be good to go!

The new Nanos are out. They’re more colorful, brighter, thinner, and more scratch resistant. I want one. I might have to accidentally break or lose my shuffle. I think mine is dying anyway. It doesn’t want to work in my laptop’s USB slots anymore. The pricing on the Nano is nice too. 149/199/249 for 2/4/8 gigs. Good deal!

Apple also unveiled the new generation of shuffles. Now even more diminutive! The price looks nice, $80 for the 1 gig model.