Apple Leopard on your PC!

Since almost day one that Apple had Intel CPU’s you have been able to run OSX and XP or Vista on your shiny new Mac. Well some clever little chappy has done the opposite – the latest version of OSX – Leopard – running on a standard PC!

Hack Attack has the details on how to do it in 3 steps – seems a fairly simple process but one that I am not wanting to do – I don’t like using OSX so I doubt that this version would change my mind.

Good or bad? Would anyone want OSX on their PC if you could do it legally and easily?

Sneaky Microsoft Update changes settings

The other day (well last week), using my PC at home as usual, I got notification that there was an update for my Vista Premium – I only have it checked for Notification and not to download or install and only for Windows Update.

I checked what the update was for and found that Office Update(I think, maybe, it’s called Microsoft Update)  was enabled and ready to download a tonne of stuff. I checked the Update setting and it had been changed to include all Microsoft stuff (Office) and was set for Full automatic downloads and install – not what I had it before.

It seems that maybe, Microsoft has pushed another (or maybe the same one) Update silently without users permission and it has changed these settings.

Not a nice thing to do Microsoft. I thought it was strange but just set it back to how I want it and forgot about it but now I have read that others are reporting this as well and Microsoft has replied saying  “no, it’s not me”! Too many saying it has happened to just say”not me” I think.

Coffee powered Vista

Stuff’n’Stuff has written a pretty funny article about Microsoft Vista. In his rant he covers all the versions of Vista available – ones that you probably didn’t know of.

According to the adverts, I thought I was buying something like the Super-deluxe but as it turned out it was more like the Utter Crap one (seriously, I have no problems with Vista and actually prefer it over XP – but it isn’t a huge leap forward).

Vista Standard Edition

Features: Has everything except anything that you might consider cool, interesting, or useful

Cost: Low

Vista Business Edition

Features: Watches what you are doing and reports when you are slacking off or viewing pornographic sites to your boss.

Cost: Medium

Vista Millennium Edition

Features: Appears to be good because it has the word “millennium” in it, but it’s actually a trick and nothing works.

Cost: Medium-High

Vista Super-Deluxe Amazing Ultimate Banzai Power²

Features: Uses a potent combination of 3.0GHz processors and OxiClean to quickly perform tasks and remove tough stains. Call within the next 15 minutes and we’ll throw in TWO free copies of Windows 95! That’s a $2.00 value, FREE! 1-800-525-5555

Cost: 37 easy payments of $29.99 _{Allow 2-8 months for shipping.}

Grande Mocha Frappuccino Ristretto Vista Edition

Features: Vista served with a shot of espresso mixed in with chocolate and topped with whipped cream.

Cost: $5.99

Vista 300_bit Edition

Features: This is compatibility… It can Dual-Process! Dual-Process…?

THIS… IS… VISTAAAA!!!! This version is so great, it kicks Mac computers right down a bottomless well.

Cost: A mix of loyalty and blood

Vista Quasi Omniscient Omega Edition

Features: Uses the power of quantum computing to bypass normal thresholds of space and time, allowing you to save and print documents before you even write them and receive error messages from programs that haven’t yet been installed. Safety not guaranteed.

Cost: Hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus your soul.

Vista Utter Crap Edition

Features: It’s basically XP, only you give Microsoft more money and most of your programs don’t work.

Cost: Low

Windows Media DRM cracked again

I have posted many times about fairuse4wm and how it enables you to copy protected windows media files.

Well over at Doom forums , where they discussed the previous versions, there is talk about a new tool for uncovering the individual keys from Microsoft’s DRM blackbox components (“IBX”), up to version 11.0.6000.6324 , that will work with Vista and newer versions of the media player (v11?) and Zune software. It has also been convirmed to work with Vista 64 as well.

The person writing about this has the name Divine Tao and says they have nothing to do with the original hacker Viodentia (which recently Microsoft dropped charges as they could not find the person), strangely if you mix the letters in Divine Tao, you get Viodentia!

fairuse4wm is at v1.3fix2 and all details are at Doom.

Disposable email addresses – my review

I posted, a little while back, about disposable email addresses , namely Guerrilla Mail. Here is my big list of other disposable/temporary email services – very useful for getting access to some sites that want you to supply and validate an email address and you don’t want to give them your real one. I am sure there are many others, let me know what you find out there.

I have tried them all and rated how I find them, others may think differently. Starting with my favourite.

Guerrilla Mail provides you with disposable e-mail addresses which expire after 15 Minutes. You can read and reply to e-mails that are sent to the temporary e-mail address within the given time frame. Need an extra 15 minutes, just click the “Give me 15 minutes more” button. Simple and well done.

2Prong is very similar to Mailinator and all others but is improved by the programmer adding two features; 2Prong changes the domain weekly in order to prevent the address from being banned, a problem for some other disposable email services., and an interface that doesn’t require you to do any logging in or use the refresh button. Equal to Guerilla for me.

Mailinator offers temp email addresses, to create an account just send an email to it. Mailinator does not assign you an email address and you don’t even need to go to Mailinator before you use it. You choose any email address you want (@mailinator.com of course) anytime you want. Give it out first, then go to Mailinator and check it second. No passwords so anyone can type in the address and see the mail. You can receive you mail via RSS. The mail lasts a couple of hours. This is the original temp email site, the one that started it all.

MyTrashMail is good temporary mail service that gives you a mailbox in the address format e.g. some123@trashymail.com. Much the same as Mailinator. Mail is kept for 12hour to 30days. It’ s a little slow as they say they are running on the servers limits and processing over 10 million emails a day.

SpamBox With this service you can create a temporary e-mail address that will forward all incoming mail to your usual e-mail address. Simply enter your e-mail address and the life time of your spambox and Spambox will generate you a temporary @spambox.us e-mail. Mail lasts 30minutes to 1 year! Seems to work well plus it is available in many languages.

dodgeit.com

Dodgeit provides throwaway address, for example, “myaddress@dodgeit.com”, then you can check inbox from homepage, which is very neat almost Google like, or subscribe to RSS feed to keep an eye on it. Not recommended as I usually can’t even connect (error Too Many Connections)

MailExpire system allows you to create a free email alias for yourself. For a period that you choose, from 12 hours to 3 months, anything sent to this email alias will be passed on to you at your actual email address. Works well if the forwarding thing is what you need.

BugMeNot Email – use when forced to register for a site often you’ll need to provide an email address to receive a ‘verification’ link. Mail is kept for a maximum of 24 hours. Much the same as Mailinator (well most are the same really! ). I guess you use this when the main BugMeNot doesn’t help you.

SpamMotel requires registration, provides mail forwarding, mail can be accessed through desktop e-mail clients, can reply to e-mail from your real e-mail address using SpamMotel e-mail. I guess a real spam solution but not what I would use, more for addresses that will not be so temporary.

Jetable again provides you with a temporary email address. Just type in your real email address, choose the time you want the temp to last and Jetable then makes a temporary address for you. As soon as it is created, all the emails sent to this address are forwarded to your actual email address. Your antispam address will be deactivated as soon as the selected lifespan will expire which is1 hour to 1 month. Another service available with multi-languages. Jetable.org is not an anonymous email service: email headers are not modified and they keep the logs of this service ( a lot of these services do ).

Dontreg is nice and neat and much like a version of Mailinator with a nice web2.0 logo 🙂 If a site requests your email address and you do not wish to give it, you simply type a @dontreg.com mail, for example: john.smith@dontreg.com then go to the DontReg site, type the name of the used mailbox and read your mail. Mail lasts 1 to 2 days and they say they keep no records after the mail has been deleted.

Gish Puppy (strange name) offers disposable email addresses that automatically forward messages to your normal email account. You then create a different GishPuppy email everytime you register on the web, and individually cancel them whenever you want.

PookMail.com

PookMail.com is a disposable email account system. Use PookMail.com to avoid giving your personal email address to suspicious websites. They say it is anonymous and all emails are deleted after 24 hours. A 256KB limit on email size but these services are not about file sharing anyway. It looks basic but works just like the others.

10 Minute Mail offers a temporary e-mail address. You just click the Get Me an Address and it makes one like mail3131863@gorillaswithdirtyarmpits.com is your temporary email address. Your e-mail address will expire in 10 minutes, just like the name suggests. But if you need more time you can click on the “Give me 10 more minutes!” button. You can reply to the mail which in’t available on all of these services.

Temp Inbox is like all the others. You pick a disposable e-mail address (that ends with @tempinbox.com), then check your mail via the tempinbox site. You can also receive the emails via RSS. They don’t say how long the mail is kept but I am guessing less than 24 hours. This service has the most translated languages..Burmese anyone?

Thanks to Snoskred, Duncan, Crespo, Becca, Patrick, Homemom, Andy, Vincentia, Nirmal and Colin Campbell for recent comments in previous posts.

Safari for Windows – part two

I forgot to add this thought to the previous post about Safari.

The more I think about it the more it seems to me that you will have to have Safari as the interface between the iPhone and your computer. Just like you need iTunes (well there are replacements for that) for your iPod whether you use OSx or XP/Vista, my bet is you will have to have Safari for the iPhone.

Apple releasing it now is to get people used to the idea of a new browser for Windows. I hope the major bugs are fixed because I have read that even the Alpha version was more stable than the released Beta!

Let’s see if I am right when the iPhone is released.

A great review of IE7, FireFox2 and Safari3 is at ArsTech . Apple for some strange reason ignores standard windows operating features like ClearType and the ability to resize windows from any edge. Instead of just porting something over why not write the app as a real native application following the OS’s fonts and features that the users have set for themselves. I don’t understand Apple!

Thanks to TripleHelix  for recent comments in previous posts.

Apple Safari for windows

You have probably read that Apple has made their Safari browser compatible for windows, big deal I say – I don’t need another browser but maybe others do and it is good to have choice.

I have used IE7 since Beta and have never (honest) had problems with it, reading about WinSafari people are in trouble. Typical posts are this…

I’ll give Safari more time to be fair, but for now it is buggier than should be expected – crashing, hogging CPU, taking forever to load pages and failing to interact with e.g. the most popular online email (yahoo). This one was rushed out of the dressing room without getting zipped up.

I am guessing Apple has released it just like the new versions of iTunes for Windows, in a poor state. I have been cheesed off with Apple about iTunes 5 (ouch what a shocker) and iTunes for Vista. I am sure they either don’t test properly and leave it to users to report bugs or they just can’t program Windows apps… or both. But that doesn’t matter, Apple fanatics will jump to it’s defence.

One big problem is that it has created security vulnerabilities – a zero day exploit just 2 hours after release. It is a command execution vulnerability, triggered without user interaction simply by visiting a web site. Great!

Remember this is from the Safari download page:
“Why You’ll love Safari
…
12. Security
Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one.”

Yeah, sure.

(I hope you like the photo of the original Safari Windows 🙂 )

Thanks to Andy , HomeMom3 , for recent comments in previous posts.

New update for Floola – The iTunes replacement

Floola has a new update, June 2007: beta 49 version with Podcast and Smart playlist support added!

It supports v7.2 of iTunes, and runs on OSx, Windows 98 and above including Vista plus Linux.

This program is coming along nicely. If you are after an iTunes replacement or want to use your iPod on Linux try it out. And of course it’s free (click an advert on their site to help them out or donate)

Funny, I still get searches for Foola, not Floola!

I have a new phone

I finally have a replacement for my aging mobile phone. I did have a Siemens M65, apart from being weather proof it wasn’t much of a phone – very poor reception. Anyway, now I have a shiny new Samsung a701, mainly used at work.

So far it is not too bad. The big screen is excellent, reception great, bluetooth works fine, TV fine (yes I have 12 channels of TV), data is fast (HSDPA, 1.8 Mbps down speed), voice or video calls. It is meant to be able to view word, exell and pdf documents but I haven’t bothered with that – it a phone – I use it for calls mainly.

Video calls are great – I call my son when I am at work and he is at soccer practice after school, it’s nice to see him 🙂

One gripe I do have is I can’t seem to work out how to make a certain phone number a default – for example I have Paris Hiltons details 🙂 I have mobile, home, work numbers stored under her name – how do I make the mobile one the default – all other phones I have had I can do this. It seems the Samsung makes the first number you inputted the default, I hope that is not the case.It has some weird functions like when you punch in a number with the keypad and it writes it out with a feathered quill on the screen! gimmicks that some people like I guess.

It comes with software for syncing and file management etc. but as with every mobile manufacturer NO Vista compatible version yet (lucky my work PC is XP)

Thanks to Untwisted Vortex , HH , MikeM , Garry Conn , Ev Nucci for commenting in the previous post.

Share the same RSS Feeds list between IE7 and Outlook2007

I don’t usually use feeds, I rather visit the site, but reading over at Untwisted Vortex, Richard mentioned subscribing to his feed so I thought I would look into it as I remember seeing an RSS folder in my Outlook2007 plus there is also RSS feeds in IE7 favourites.

When you use IE7 and Outlook 2007, you can view and maintain the same RSS Feeds subscriptions list in either program. You do this by sharing one RSS Feeds subscription list via the Common Feeds List in Windows.

The Common Feed List is used by Outlook 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 (and I guess any other program that wants to) as a common location for RSS Feeds information. When you add an RSS Feed to any program that uses the Common Feeds List, that RSS Feed is available in all programs automatically. Likewise, if you delete an RSS Feed, it is removed from all programs.

The first time you add an RSS Feed to Office Outlook 2007, you are prompted by a dialog box to keep your RSS Feeds subscriptions list synchronized between Outlook and the Common Feed List. Regardless of the option you choose, you can change your choice in the Advanced Options dialog box.
Synchronize your Outlook RSS Feed subscriptions with the Common Feeds List

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. On the Other tab, under General, click Advanced Options.
3. Under General settings, select the Sync RSS Feeds to the Common Feed List check box.

Stop synchronizing your Outlook RSS Feed subscriptions with the Common Feeds List

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. On the Other tab, under General, click Advanced Options.
3. Under General settings, clear the Sync RSS Feeds to the Common Feed List check box.