You make me more and more productive everyday. Except when I have to hack the registry to enable audio line-in monitoring.

Just bought myself a shiny new PC from Dell that came with Vista pre-installed. I liked the GUI, very slick and intuitive. But within 3 days I’d been forced to do the following tweaks just to get things running the way I wanted..

• Hacked the registry to try & get the display to run at the native resolution of my flatscreen (1680×1050)
• Downloaded PowerStrip and used that, after the above didn’t work
• Disabled UAC (User Account Control) as it was preventing PowerStrip from working correctly
• Disabled IPv6 to try & get uTorrent to work
• Then disabled Windows Firewall, Network Topology Discovery…etc etc… (yet more registry hacks along the way)

uTorrent still didn’t work… Azureus also caused the network to hang. Noticed along the way that Vista seemed to be flooding my home network too.

So thought, sod it - blew the OS away and tried to install XP SP2… That of course led to another can of worms… First off, XP kept blue-screening after getting halfway through the install.  Guessed it might be something to do with disk drivers as the new box has SATA.  Disabled RAID in the BIOS and tried again.  Still no luck.  Found out from the web that XP doesn’t come with SATA drivers so you need to supply them on a floppy at boot time. Yes, a floppy… Who uses them any more?  So ended up slipstreaming the Intel drivers onto a new install CD using nLite.

Got the box up and running and all that was left to do was get networking up and running so I could download the rest of the drivers.  Intel “All in one” driver was 86 megs and that took an hour to download as their site was super slow.  (My first PC had an 80 meg HDD - oh how things have changed).

Anyway all up and running nice and smoothly now

Since moving to London I joined Be and am now enjoying 24 meg broadband… well it don’t actually go that fast but on a speed test I got 13 megs. Sweet.

“Volumouse provides you a quick and easy way to control the sound volume on your system - simply by rolling the wheel of your wheel mouse.”

Just installed it - it’s excellent.

We have one of these at work. It’s a WiFi-enabled bunny which lights up, wiggles its ears and plays tunes when people send it messages. It’s hooked up to a web service at http://www.nabaztag.com/ and also has an API which allows you to interact with it - so the other day I rigged it up to our monitoring systems at work… now it starts chattering away if we have any service problems… neat! Really want one of these myself - unfortunately they’re only available in France at the moment Update: they’re now available in the UK!

Been banging my head against the wall for the last few days trying to figure out why my Bittorrent downloads have suddenly become so slow. Turns out my ISP (Force9) has bandwidth-limited my P2P traffic because I racked up 60 gigs of transfers last month

Bandwidth limiting is probably a good solution to greedy users such as myself - still getting full speed HTTP so I can’t complain too much - the only thing that annoys me is the underhanded way in which they’ve applied it - previously was told that I had 100GB allowance per month, and this has changed without notice.

I’ll probably stick with them though - as they still have the best policies I’ve come across so far. Besides, in a few months our local exchange should be getting ADSL 2+, which means I can join Bethere.co.uk - 24 megs down, 1 meg up… and work is paying for it!

Here’s a list of extensions I use regularly (for work and play) and are well worth a look at.

* Web Developer - great for debugging HTML/CSS, forms, etc.
* keyconfig - lets you remap your keyboard shortcuts.
* Retro Find - search within textareas/forms - the default search doesn’t work (still an outstanding bug as far as I know)
* Adblock - block all manner of annoying advertising really easily
* Greasemonkey - rewrite pages as they come into your browser using javascript - super powerful and geeky
* Platypus - edit pages visually and save the changes as a Greasemonkey script
* TinyURL Creator - creates shortcut urls
* Adsense Notifier - shows how much you’ve earned through Adsense in the bottom corner of your browser
* Autofill - automatically fill in HTML forms
* Stumbleupon - social bookmarking site
* Sage - lightweight RSS aggregator

Just installed a new spam filtering plugin - hopefully will get rid of that nasty spam.

Info - Spam Karma 2.0

Bought this neat gizmo a few days ago. Allows you to hook up hard disks, cdroms, dvd writers, etc. (including laptop hard disks) through USB - great if you have old hard disks kicking around that you want to use, but can’t be bothered installing properly in your PC (in my case - I have a 20gig disk, which is very noisy - so I use it for backups etc.) Have a look here.

Found this great utility - free, and open source - to let you visually inspect your disks and see where all the space is going.

Download it here.

Screenshot.