Beta 2 was released yesterday and I’ve now had a chance to install it and have a quick play, so here are my initial thoughts and some screenshots.

The search is now fully working; in Beta 1, it would only search "user" folders. Now you can specify what to search in – you end up defining a virtual folder, so can pick and choose drivers and folders to include & exclude, as well as all manner of other query types. It’s very powerful and seriously quick.

A fair number of the games seem pretty polished (despite the <1.0 version numbers in the title bars) – Solitaire is still there as is Minesweeper. The chess game also looks pretty fantastic, with lots of nice animations.

Domain user switching is still there from Beta 1 – when Vista is in a domain, hitting Windows + L no longer locks the computer, but takes it to the logon screen where someone else can logon and then switch back to the first user. Very neat, and a godsend for IT support staff I would guess! I’ve not found the user save state feature yet that supposedly allows night time reboots for patching without punting a user off.

A quick look at the system properties shows it to be the "Ultimate" edition, just one of out 7 different flavours apparently.

Generally, it’s just a nip and a tuck across the board, but looking pretty neat. I still haven’t found a properly supported (LDDM) graphics card that’s powerful enough to display all the Aero effects yet though  

Cruel and stupid.

Only in Japan I suppose.

[Originally from Engadget]

So, I now have a Sony MP3 player (I’ve had a cassette walkman, discman and two minidisk players from them over the years). Ordinarily I wouldn’t have bought it (despite how fabulous it looks) for various reasons, but this one came free with something.

The one thing that’s wound me up is that you have to use Sony’s poxy SonicStage software to copy files around, despite the fact that it presents itself as a mass storage device and allows you to copy files onto it – it just won’t play them.

However, there is some light at the end of the tunnel, courtesy of Sony themselves, with their little MP3 File Manager program. It installs itself onto the device and you run it from there. You can then drag and drop MP3s onto without the need for Sonic-bloat-DRM-Stage. You still can’t drag the files off it onto another computer though.

Don’t buy one despite the good looks, the utterly restrictive and pointless DRM will frustrate you.

An absolutely gorgeous external IDE/USB2 caddy from Thermaltake, which comes with a blue backlit old fashioned style meter to show you the transfer speed. Yours for only £30? Can’t go wrong :)

Click for bigger

[Originally from Engadget]

An interesting forray for Google into providing a dedicated search just for blogs: http://blogsearch.google.com/

It relies on your blog publishing an RSS or Atom feed as well as sending a ping to a service such as weblogs.com. Movable Type will do this for you automagically.

I imagine that over time their regular spider will be able to pick up on RSS/Atom feeds automatically.

I came across this rather splendid device (called the TeleCrapper) that checks the calling phone number against a list of marketeers and then ensnares the unwary caller in a "virtual" conversation, which is recorded allowing you to snigger at your leisure.

Even better when set to a flash movie.

[Originally posted on Hack-a-Day]