I was looking for tips on my new iPod Nano recently. I scoured the Internet for a tip on how to enable my iPod as a hard drive. I found that most of the tutorials told me to go to Edit > Preferences in iTunes, then click on the iPod tab. Well, there was no iPod tab. It was missing, gone, kaput!

I played around with my iPod and iTunes thinking that iTunes just wasn’t detecting that I had an iPod connected to my PC. Then I discovered the setting in a much simpler location. Now in newer version of iTunes, all of the options you used to find under the iPod tab are available by simply clicking once on the iPod on the left pane and switching from Contents to Settings at the top of the window. From that window, I could then select the “Enable disk use” setting I was looking for.

There is a registry hack that allows you to make Windows Vista crash to a blue screen of death whenever you want.

1. Hold down the Windows Key and press R. Type REGEDIT.

2. Click the plus sign next to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
then SYSTEM
then CurrentControlSet
then Services
then i8042prt
then click Parameters

3. Double-click on CrashOnCtrlScroll and set the value to 1 to enable this feature.

Restart the computer. Now when you hold down the CTRL key and press the SCROLL LOCK key two times, Windows Vista will automatically crash to a BSOD.

An alternate way to make Vista crash would be to simply use Windows Vista.

I just got around to reading this article on the NY Times. It details the concept of people falling in love with and having sex with robots in the future. People say that the idea might be crazy, but aren’t people having sex with robots already? Maybe not humanoid robots, but there are dildos and other devices for men. Heck, there is a sex device called a Sybian that is pretty much a robot. There is even a love doll that is so realistic that people pay over $8,000 for them.

People will have sex with anything that enhances their sexual experience. Sex robots would definitely have a market compared to what the video porn industry is today. As for me, I think that I would be too scared to do anything with a robot. All that metal clanging around? I’d be afraid I’d get injured in a really bad way.

I’m beginning to wonder if a reliable web host exists at all. My Technipages site along with everything I had on my Dreamhost server has currently been down for over 30 hours. I have emailed them over and over and after giving me several responses that don’t help at all, they have decided to ignore me. Which I guess is pretty wise if they don’t want to deal with me. After all, they don’t have a phone number where I can call them and complain.

I moved to Dreamhost after my experience with iPowerWeb. A web host even more horrid than Dreamhost. Most email would never be responded to, and when they did answer they would solve the problem, then act like there was never a problem in the first place. I think there was a department whose job over there was just to make sure their customers feel stupid all day.

Anyway. I’ve read all the rave reviews on the net about Dreamhost. I don’t think I can trust them too much though, since most of the reviewers make money off of Dreamhost referrals. There are a lot of them out there too.

So is there a good web host out there? One where I don’t have to pay $100 a month to get actual service?

Did you know there is a setting in Firefox that enables it to try to guess which web pages you will be visiting next? It then downloads these pages and stores them to make them quickly available to you if you actually visit the page. I personally don’t like this setting. It can cause Firefox to use resources to cache web pages I may never visit. I disabled this setting. Here’s how.

1. Type about:config in the address bar and press ENTER.

2. Locate the entry for network.prefetch-next

3. Set it to false to disable this feature. Double-clicking on the setting will change it.

See also: Mozillazine - Network.prefetch-next

The world is officially completely impersonal. I didn’t receive any calls from friends over Christmas. Instead, my friends have elected to send me text messages to wish me a Merry Christmas. I’m sure the same thing will happen on New Years.

Nobody takes the time to call and talk anymore. Let alone meet face to face. We’re even too lazy to send real Christmas cards now. We send e-cards. Heck I even know a guy that had his girlfriend broke up with him over email. Maybe I’m getting too old. Is this considered normal now? It’s seems there’s only a matter of time before we completely stop talking face to face at all.

I recently created a post about making an icon to lock your screen. Since then I have been playing around with some of the RUNDLL32 shortcuts available for Windows Vista. One of them I found handy was this one to put Windows into Hibernate mode.

1. Right-click an blank area on your desktop.

2. Select New >Shortcut

3. Type ‘ RunDll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState’ for the Location.

Give the shortcut a name like ‘Hibernate’. Now you can just double-click the icon whenever you want Windows to hibernate. This command works with Windows XP and Vista.

One day I was feeling extremely stressed out at work. I couldn’t pinpoint the reason though. So I sat in my cubicle all day as the stress built up and finally, I snapped. My boss had sent me an email that just rubbed me the wrong way. I totally took the email to be a negative attack on me and I lost it. I stormed into his office and screamed at him for the tone in his email. How dare he email me such rubbish I thought. Later that day I was brought into a meeting and written up for my behavior. My boss told me during our meeting that he felt I had overreacted about the email message. Later I realized that he was right. I read the email again and it wasn’t the knock on my character that I originally thought it was. I was given the weekend off to think about things.

I thought hard about the past few weeks and how I had been feeling. I realized that I had been suffering from extreme mood swings. What could it be that was getting to me? My relationship was good with my girlfriend. Friendships were fine. The parents and I were getting along. I had plenty of money in the bank. Still I felt so stressed that I was grinding my teeth while sleeping at night. I couldn’t even chew food such as pizza on the right side of my mouth because it hurt from the constant grinding.

Click to Read the Full Post »

Apple took aim at the owner of Think Secret, a site that exposes secrets about Apple’s upcoming projects. Through the courts, Apple was able to shut the site down, but it didn’t work out the way they intended. They were countered in the suit and ended up having to settle out of court with the site owner. As part of the agreement, the site owner agreed to shut the site down. Read all about it here.

This may seem like a victory for Apple. After all, they shut down the site. I would disagree though. With the Internet, there is always somebody else in line to step up and build a web site on any subject. It just doesn’t make sense for these large corporations to constantly fight to have sites taken down. Another will always just spring up in its place.

The same goes for the RIAA. They spent years fighting file sharing networks only to find that Napster was replaced with Kazaa. Kazaa was replaced with Limewire and BearShare. Limewire and BearShare was replaced with Torrent sites.

The power is shifting away from large corporations to individual people. Now instead of corporations suing other corporations, they are suing average Joe. It’s a battle the large corporations just can’t win in the long run.

I was sitting at my desk, reading a book and realized that the glare from my PC was very bright and irritating my eyes. After playing with my screen contrast, I figured a darker theme would be the solution. So I right-click my desktop and select Properties. I didn’t see any themes that appealed to me. I then see an option for More themes online… . So I selected this option. I waited with great anticipation as Windows opened up a web browser. Instead of getting a list of glorious themes to choose from, I get a nice 404 error page. We’re sorry, but we were unable to service your request. You may wish to choose from the links below for information about Microsoft products and services.

How professional! A feature built within an operating system that is used by millions of people takes me to a 404 error page. I’ve been here before though. I can name countless times where a program that is a few years old has a URL built into it that no longer works. Just last week I was trying to update an old copy of The Sims for my girlfriend and the URL for the update they had provided in the Start Menu didn’t work anymore (a problem I see with many EA games).

It doesn’t take much to search for an update, but it’s fucking annoying to click on a button that was built into an application and get a 404 error. I understand pages have to move, and things change on web sites over time, but do they not know how to configure a 301 redirect to an alternate page?

Here’s an idea. How about having all of you software programmers get the web developers in a room and letting them know “Hey guys! We’re building this into the software. We need this link to stay active for the sanity of our customers.” It will prevent your company from looking like a bunch of jackasses that don’t care to support software that is more than 2 years old.