I’m moving…

Since I have been able to update my old blog at http://johnbfrommemphis.ellerbestyle.com ,  that’s where I’ll be blogging from now on. So I will not be posting here any longer. All posts can also be found at the new location. So have fun and I do hope that you find something interesting and stimulating and hope to hear from you soon. Thanks!

Phenom II @ 6.5Ghz

Weird Things Afoot in Assassin’s Creed

I finally received my replacement video card for my recently deceased 7950GT .. eVGA sent me an 8800GT! It’s more awesome then I’ve even heard from other people, in short I love this card but here’s what’s going on. Assassin’s Creed is playing in a window on my new 8800GT even though the game itself has no controls for playing in a window or fullscreen and should always run fullscreen. I have no idea how to fix this slight problem so any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Way to go Disney!!

My Dad purchased a copy of Wall-E for my 2 daughters for Christmas. It was the 3 disc edition with digital copy. Only problem is that the leaflet with the code to acquire the digital copy wasn’t included. I’ve always thought that the digital copy feature was instituted in an attempt to stem the tide of movie piracy. Disney, if I’m correct then why is it obviously so unbelievably difficult to include everything your customers need to allow us to take advantage of the digital copy feature? I’m not the only one that has purchased dvd’s thinking I’d be able to just slide a dvd in my dvd-rom drive and get a pristine iTunes compatible copy ready to sync onto an iPod. I can’t

I guess you’re going to eventually go back and treat your own customers as thieves again right? Is digital copy just another trojan horse to “induce” people to commit crimes under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act? Even though it’s illegal under the D.M.C.A to use anything or do anything to break copy protection, it’s also against the law to put a law in place that supercedes laws that have come before it.

So thanks a lot Disney, I think you just lost a customer……… for good. Have a nice day!

Songbird 1.0 Review

I first heard about Songbird via an article at Cnet, oh I’m not sure maybe back during the first part of 2008. I really liked the fact that it’s built on top of Firefox, being the Firefox fan (note that I didn’t say fanboy =))  that I am. You have add-on support and available skins for installation called feathers, they are available directly inside of Songbird via the browser. Yes that’s right, this nice media player has it’s own browser. All you need to do is open the add-ons menu, then click “Get more extensions”. That web page open in it’s own tab from within Songbird, from there it’s just like Firefox, click the big install button, click the install button in the popup dialog and then restart. I really like that kind of simplicity.

Installation is very straightforward and if you can choose from Fairplay playback and WMA DRM playback support among a few others. In my case, once the Fairplay playback support is installed it will try to detect if you have iTunes installed. If you have, it’ll give you the opportunity to import your iTunes library, very nice and simple. You can add tracks to your iTunes library and Songbird can scan for library changes such as track adds or removal and make those changes to your Songbird library. It also has profile support for some multiuser love.  The only drawback to this is that once Apple decides that they need or want to upgrade Fairplay DRM, it will most likely break Fairplay support in Songbird. Also you must have iTunes and Quicktime already installed for it to work properly. I did try having Quicktime 7.5 installed without iTunes, but my tracks from iTunes weren’t playing properly. Once reinstalling iTunes + Quicktime and those files starting playing properly again. Hmm notice how much Songbird looks like iTunes? Actually, the bar at the top containing the playback controls as you see in the picture below is placed at the bottom by default and a setting change moves that to the top as you see here.

All in all I’d have to give Songbird 1.0 a  4 out 5 for it’s extensibility, great audio quality and the large burgeoning commuinity surrounding it.

Vista SP2 Beta Reg Hack

Copy this into a txt file and rename it with a .bat at the end and you should be good to go.

@echo off

reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\VistaSp2 /f > NUL 2>&1
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\VistaSP2 /f > NUL 2>&1

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\VistaSp2 /v Beta1 /t REG_SZ /d C21A5C64-2530-CC19-042F-9ABDB4ED27F9 /f
IF NOT %errorlevel% == 0 ( goto ERROR)

:SUCCESS
@echo.
echo ================================================== =========
echo Windows Vista SP2 registry key has been set successfully.
echo Please check for updates in Windows Update.
echo ================================================== =========
@echo.
goto END

:ERROR
@echo.
echo ================================================== =========
echo FAILED to set Windows Vista SP2 registry keys.
echo Please run this script by right clicking and selecting
echo “Run as Administrator”.
echo ================================================== =========
@echo.
goto END

:END
pause

UPDATE!! – The Windows Vista SP2 Community Preview Program has been made publically available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd262148.aspx