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]

Yes Microsoft, just what we needed, a new version of "Solitaire" for Windows Vista. Perhaps you should have used all those developers to maybe, bring out a product with the features you said it would have.

Just upgraded to MT 3.2 – it looks prettier without a doubt, however only time will tell if its spam blocking is just as good as Jay Allan’s spam plugin (you’d hope it would be, given he now works for Six Apart).

Yes, ok, it’s been out for a little while now, but I thought it would be nice to add my 2p’s worth.

The good

•  Virtual folders
  • These are ace – they essentially display the contents of a search pattern you set, so "all pictures" for example. I haven’t yet worked out how to define my own criteria so I’m stuck with the defaults for now.
• Searching
  • As it’s coupled with the above, you’d expect it to be pretty fast, and it is. When you click once on a file in Explorer, you get a sort of bar at the bottom for you to add metadata to files so that the search works better:
    
• Group Policy
  • There appears to be a new group policy option called "pushed printers". Probably not relevant for the home user, but this is the first time us Windows SysAdmins have been given a decent tool for deploying printer settings.
    

The bad

• Windows shortcut keys
  • Although they’ve not gone (Windows+E still opens explorer, Windows+R does the run menu), they’ve changed Windows+L to log out instead of lock computer/switch user. Put it back please!
• Start menu search
  • At the bottom of the start menu is a search box, however it only searches for program names, not the entire computer. It’s confusing and annoying.
    

The ugly

• The logon screen
  • Well, it’s radically different. I’d liken it to a KDE (Linux) desktop or Mac OS X. You don’t get any drop down box to pick a domain – you have to type [domain]\[username]. If you don’t specify a domain it assumes a local account.
    
    You also have to click a button to "switch user" – it shows you the account of the person who last logged on as per normal, however setting the policy "Do not display last user name" has no effect.
• As Vista is built upon Windows Server 2003 SP1, you would have imagined that they’d finally allowed multiple logins – i.e. one on the console and up to two via remote desktop. Despite the fact that the group policy templates are in for that, and task manager shows the "users" tab in the same way as Server 2003, I’ve not been able to get that to work. It behaves in the same way as XP it seems.

My build of wget is now woefully out of date. You’re encouraged to look at https://eternallybored.org/misc/wget/ for a more up to date version.

Having laboured over this for the past day, I thought I’d post this here.

It’s the AMD64 port of wget – it should run on Windows x64 Professional (Intel or AMD architecture) as well as the Windows Server 2003 64 bit versions.

Be warned however, this doesn’t contain the SSL libraries so will not work against https sites.

Download file