Category Archives: Technology

Firefox extensions

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Currently there is only one extension that I find really useful, and that is Download Statusbar. Are there any other useful extensions out there worth having installed?

At the moment I’m toying with a few additional extensions together with Firefox 2.0.

  • ChromaTabs – Colors the each tab with a different color depending on the domain
  • del.icio.us – Adds “My del.icio.us” and tag buttons
  • Tab Catalog – Shows thumbnails of the pages for each tab similar to the new IE7 feature

I think the Tab Catalog one will the first to go since I can’t really come up with any good uses for it. But the other two I might keep. Having two small buttons for del.icio.us instead of an entire Bookmarks toolbar visible is nice. The only thing that could cause issues is if it starts crashing the browser as some previous version did when I tried it with Firefox 1.5. And the colored tabs looks really nice and adds a very easy way to distinguish between different sites when I browse forums and so on.

Fall Xbox 360 dashboard update

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With the improvements made in the fall update I can finally say that I’m really happy about my Xbox 360 purchase. The update has fixed some things that has been nagging me now and then.

  • Lightning-fast enumeration and listing of all Xbox Live® Arcade games on the console.
  • Optionally disable notifications from Xbox Live while watching DVD movies.
  • Better handling of unreadable discs.
  • Added new page for viewing content size by category.

And added the one feature that I’ve really missed.

  • Stream WMV video from a Windows PC running Windows Media Player 11, Zune software, or Windows Media Connect.

With the streaming capability it now really is the media hub in my living room in addition to being a great gaming machine.

To be able to stream video to my Xbox 360 from my PC I currently convert my video to WMV I’m using VideoLAN and the batch file found here. I’ve added it to my SendTo menu for quick access. It’s not the fastest and most easy to use solution but it works, and once the transcoding is done the video player on the Xbox 360 works really well. Much easier to use than hooking up my laptop to the tv.

When TVersity supports on the fly transcoding to WMV I’ll probably use it as server instead of Windows Media Player 11 which should make things even easier to use.

Configure the Firefox 2 beta 2 tab close button

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 Just a little note for me if I decide to try the latest beta, from a comment at slashdot. 🙂

  1. Start Firefox.
  2. In the Address Bar type “about:config” and press Enter.
  3. Right-Click and select New->Integer.
  4. A box requesting the Preference Name will popup and you should enter “browser.tabs.closeButtons” (without the quotes). Press OK to continue.
  5. Now you need to select the type of close button you want:
    0 – display a close button on the active tab only
    1 – display close buttons on all tabs
    2 – don’t display any close buttons
    3 – display a single close button at the end of the tab strip (Firefox 1.x behavior). After entering the value corresponding to your preference press OK again.

Synchronizing Google Calendar with my phone

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I’ve finally found an application that can synchronize Google Calendar with my phone, SE k750i. It’s a java application for phones called gcalsync, and from my initial testing it seems to work just fine.

Previously I’ve tried using Remote Calendars for Outlook and then from Outlook to my phone using the sync software I got with my phone. But Remote Calendars didn’t work very well, and on top of that the two step sync process isn’t very user friendly.

Maybe things would be even easier if Google added SyncML support to Google Calendar, but right now it looks like there are no such plans.

Custom file name separator for Windows Media Player

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After a failed attempt at finding out how to use a custom file name separator using google I located the registry value where Windows Media Player stores the separator using RegMon. So simple I really should’ve tried that first 🙂

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\
Preferences\CDRecordFileSeparator

I’ve only tried setting the value to ‘ – ‘ which works just fine, but any other string probably works too.  

Google talk themes and non-admin accounts

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Today I go the new, 1.0.0.92, version of Google Talk. There are a few new features, avatar images and chat window themes. Looks really neat.
Unfortunately it does not work 100% with non-admin accounts. Only the classic chat window theme is available. Not sure what goes wrong, it has happened on all my computers, but at least there is a simple fix.

Find the google talk settings directory on the administrator account used to install google talk, when logged in with that account.The “local settings” part is localized, so for a swedish OS it is “lokala inställningar” instead.

c:\document and settings\username\local settings\application data\google\google talk

Then copy the themes directory to the same location for any non-admin accounts and change the permissions on the directory to match the parent directory. And that’s it.

StarForce is great

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Helped a friend today who had some trouble with his computer. Whenever one interacted with “My computer”, right clicking or viewing didn’t matter, the computer completely froze for a few minutes. After I had looked through the list of running processes not finding anything really suspicious I checked on a hunch if he had the StarForce drivers installed. They were installed, so I used the StarForce Cleaner Utility to remove it. And to my surprise, or maybe not, all his troubles went away. Or at least, the computer stopped freezing every now and then.

A brand new phone

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This monday I finally got a brand new SE k750i. Hurray! Hopefully this one will not break as the previous one did.

First I waited until after the date I got in a letter from OnOff that said that servicing my phone would take longer than expected. Then when nothing happened I called OnOff’s phone support and they said that the service partner was waiting for a replacement part so they could fix the old phone. This got me a little bit worried so I went to the OnOff store where I left my phone for replacement. You see, you can’t call the store directly, and the central phone support apparently does not know anything.

The salesman at the store, who seemed to really want to help me, contacted the service partner and they said that they were not trying to repair the phone as OnOff phone support had claimed, instead they were doing nothing at all. So the OnOff salesman got me a new phone from the store and a 200 SEK giftcertificate since he thought it had taken to long. Couldn’t agree with him more. Too bad they couldn’t just have given me a new phone the first time when I left my broken phone with them. OnOff or Sony-Ericsson, don’t know which, had already approved that I was going to get a new phone instead of them trying to repair the old phone once more.