Fortysomething.ca have a slightly different than normal Windows XP theme – Royale Noir.

UPDATE: Please note that the freely available Zune theme is very similar (and feels a lot more finished than this theme.

It’s not perfect – some bits like the scrollbars are still standard blue Royale, but it makes a change for those becoming-dangerously-rare times when I’m in Windows (without hacking uxtheme.dll).

And the reason you don’t have to hack that file is because this is an official signed theme by Microsoft – albeit one they hadn’t finished and didn’t intend to publish.

Yes, I’m slow to this. I saw it on Digg about a week ago and I downloaded it, unrared it and put it on my shared partition, but didn’t get round to actually installing it in Windows until now. 7-Zip will unrar it for you, don’t get WinRAR, it’s arguably evil (I shouldn’t have to pay to decompress files, it’s just ridiculous).

According to Ars Technica, the first crack for Vista and Office 2007 has surfaced.

Unlike a normal crack, however, this one just replaces some of the key Windows and Office files (presumably the activation and ‘revenue protection’ DLLs) with their contemporaries from the earlier releases. That means you can use Beta or Release Candidate activation keys on the final release and use the final versions.

Unfortunately the article doesn’t mention whether the cracked versions have the expiry date that the pre-release versions had (software with an expiry date? Now that sucks).

No doubt they’ll just block the beta keys very soon via Windows Update or Windows Genuine-we’re-going-to-make-you-run-some-stupid-software Validation.

Do you think I was going to wait for Red Hat to package the official Fedora version of Firefox 2.0?

Aside from Mozilla being silly about names, I absolutely adore this browser. What’s more, only a few of my extensions weren’t compatible and I’m sure they’ll be updated very quickly.

And it’s so much faster than 1.5.0.x too, and aside from still having ugly buttons in forms on Linux (and the Mac as well), it’s beautiful.

W00t! I love this browser! OK, fine, I’ll try and return to sanity, I know, it’s only a browser, but it’s an app I’m going to be staring at for a long time until Firefox 3.0…

I did it for (Ubuntu) Linux and now it’s the turn of Windows to get some screen recording love with pyvnc2swf. The installation procedure on Windows is also fairly simple, but unfortunately because Windows doesn’t ship with Python (unlike well, say, Linux and Mac OS X and most other Unix systems) we have to install that first.

So without any further ado, we’ll get going.

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When I reported on Gizbuzz about EA including spyware in Battlefield 2142, I obviously wasn’t happy about it.

Thankfully, though, BF2142 wasn’t a game I was planning on getting.

However, Joystiq seem to reckon that Need for Speed Carbon will also include this ridiculous ‘software’.

I was thinking about getting Carbon (on the Windows platform) when it came out. I’m not anymore.

Hey, EA, you just lost a customer! Well done…

Sorry about the title – but I am not happy with Microsoft today.

According to Slashdot, Windows Vista, the full (rip-off?) retail version of Vista, will only allow you to transfer it to another machine once.

Put in real terms – retail Vista will not allow you to have the freedom to move it around between your machines.

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Just had a very quick play with Firefox 2.0 RC2.

The new icon theme is nice and there are various enhancements to the feed functionality and UI and stuff.

But by far, the best thing about FF 2.0 I’ve seen so far is that it is fast

On an AMD Sempron 2600+ (this is not my main system, a P4 3.0 GHz) it goes from nought to loaded up and ready to go in 1.05 seconds. Compare that to 1.5.0.4 (yes, it’s old because it’s a SLED 10 system and I don’t have any updates on it) which hobbles along and gets there in 2.88 seconds.

I’m officially fired up about Firefox 2.0 now – the only bad thing will be waiting for extensions to get compatibility (though I might resort to tweaking the install.js files if necessary).

(Why am I so fired up about less than 3 seconds? Because it really does make a difference to have your app instantly respond to you.) I’ll have the same for Thunderbird, please (TB 1.5.0.7 is not very quick to start up either).

I like it!

Disclaimer: my timing is in no way scientific, I just used a stopwatch, so they’re probably really inaccurate. But you get the gist, it’s fast and if you still don’t believe me, download it and test it against the latest 1.5.0.x build.

A while back I got an invite to Windows Live Mail Beta; basically, Hotmail 2.0. So I’ve finally got round to doing a short screencast showing off its interface, a couple of new features and me explaining my thoughts on the new service.

First of all, I’d like to apologise for the fact that the Firefox window is cut off and subsequently there’s some of the window that you can’t see. It’s not a major issue, but still, annoying and not worth re-recording for. Next time I’ll resize the window to exactly 720×576 to prevent this problem happening again (it’s an Adobe Premiere Elements thing).

Stay tuned for full size 720×576 XviD version, it will be available for download soon.

XviD 720×576 version now available for download. Download now!

Quick update – if you remember, I had problems getting Windows 3.11 for Workgroups running on top of FreeDOS in VMware (wow, long sentence).

Well, a kind friend donated me an ancient copy of MS-DOS 6.22 (on four floppy disks, may I add) which has helped me actually get WfW running inside a VM (thanks James).

It involved a bit of hacking, but now I have WfW running inside VMware.

Basically, the MS-DOS install goes fine, but on rebooting I found that it wouldn’t boot – the PC speaker started making a horrible noise and garbage was printed to the screen. If you press F8 inside the VM while booting, you get the option to control what happens at boot up. Answer no to all the questions, and you will boot into a DOS environment (albeit limited to 640 KB RAM).

Then insert the WfW disk, and run:

> A:
> setup

Then run through WfW setup as normal. Now when you restart, you need to press F8 again while booting MS-DOS and answer the questions as follows:

DOS=HIGH [Y,N]? Y
DEVICE=C:\\DOS\\SETVER.EXE [Y,N]? N
DEVICE=C:\\WINDOWS\\HIMEM.SYS [Y,N]? Y
COUNTRY=044,,C:\\DOS\\COUNTRY.SYS [Y,N]? Y
DEVICE=C:\\DOS\\DISPLAY.SYS CON=(EGA,,1) [Y,N] Y
FILES=30 [Y,N]? Y
LASTDRIVE=Z [Y,N]? Y
DEVICE=C:\\WINDOWS\\SMARTDRV.EXE /DOUBLE_BUFFER [Y,N]? Y
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\\IFSHLP.SYS [Y,N]? Y
STACKS=9,256 [Y,N]? Y
Process AUTOEXEC.BAT [Y,N]? Y

After this point, answer yes to the rest of the questions (your country line may differ slightly or be absent completely depending on which country you chose during MS-DOS setup). Now you can run win from the command line to boot into Windows.

Now you can open Notepad (in the Accessories group) and edit C:\CONFIG.SYS. Remove the offending line
DEVICE=C:\DOS\SETVER.EXE. (In fact you could do this using MS-DOS’s edit, but this is presuming you want to install Windows anyway).
Now MS-DOS boots perfectly and I can be nostalgic with Windows 3.11! Remember, if you add the line win to the end of file C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT, Windows will start on boot.

WfW screenshots? Oh go on then, they’ll be here soon. UPDATE: See the whole set.

Recently, I made the move from Microsoft Office Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client. Yes, I know, webmail is cool and everything (I’m on Gmail and the webmail is awesome), but I’ve always preferred a desktop email client.

My problem is/was that I use both Windows and Linux and want my client to be updated with my latest mail on both operating systems (previously I had to be in Windows to use Outlook to get my mail, which is partly why I switched). Now an IMAP server would be a great way to do this, but Gmail only offers POP access or standard webmail.

So I wanted a solution that would synchronise my profile across Windows and Linux so both clients had the same set of messages.

Mozilla list a series of solutions for doing this, but I chose the easiest and less hack-involved solution.

Basically, I have a dual boot machine with Windows and Fedora Core Linux. I have loads of partitions here and there, one of which is a FAT32 partition for easy file transfer between the two OSs. That looked like the obvious choice to do the syncing.

In theory this process should also work for Mac OS X, but since I don’t yet have a Mac or access to one, I don’t know where the Thunderbird files are stored and/or whether this works in practice (Mac users fill me in with the details and I’ll update this post – would be useful for Boot Camp’ers I’m sure!). This also assumes Thunderbird is installed in the default locations on Windows and Linux and you’re not already running some groovy multi-profile setup.

So this post is really to recap my steps so that anyone else with a similar setup can set up sync.

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