Following in the foot steps of this fellow’s Rogers post regarding their mobile phone sector, I’m about to go off on a little rant of my own about their cable TV.  Before I start, I have to note that I live in a town house condo where it’s not permitted to have satellites on the roof, otherwise I would have switched a long time ago.  I recently purchased an HDTV which I’ve been quite happy with so far.  The store I bought it from offered some special from Rogers that if I paid $20 when I bought the TV, I could have a Rogers HD terminal for 9 months free.  $20 for 9 months of HD terminal rental is pretty good, of course, if the HD terminal that I received last night didn’t suck.  I don’t have an HD plan so basically all I get is some HD channels that, at least right now, are just streaming in SD feeds anyway.  I’m going to have to look into pricing to get some actual HD channels, and maybe that will help sway my opinion.  The only channel I could find last night that actually came in HD was CNNHD, which half the time is also an SD feed with bars on the side that say “CNNHD”.  Another beef I have is with the program guide.  Why does it still look the same as it did 8 years ago?  It’s still the same ugly colours (which by the way there are only 2 of them), and even on the HD terminal, the guide and menus are still low resolution, so they’re just a giant blurry mess on the HDTV.  And, I don’t know if this is standard with digital terminals or not, but it’s only 1080i.  I have another question, why don’t the Rogers terminals at least highlight the channels that I don’t subscribe to in a different colour?  I’m flipping through the guide, see something I want to watch, select it, and then it tells me that I haven’t subscribed to that channel.  Unless they step it up a bit, I probably won’t be keeping the HD terminal after 9 months as it just doesn’t seem worth the ridiculous $13 a month extra, which doesn’t even include the HD programming.

Yes I know that “de-uglified” is not a real word.  If looking at that horrible green default Vista logon screen makes you want to puke, Stardock has the remedy.  LogonStudio Vista allows you to set any jpg, png, or bmp image as the background for the logon screen on your Vista computer.  It’s a free download, so give it a try.  Note that the screenshot on their page is from LogonStudio XP, which is why it has the fancy looking login box.  The Vista version only allows you to change the background image.

Previously I had read a tip on Lifehacker about removing entries in Firefox’s address bar auto-complete by pressing SHIFT+DELETE on the highlighted entry.  Later, when logging into Gmail, I noticed that the username auto-complete drop down had one bad entry, and one correct entry.  So I thought to myself “why not try SHIFT+DELETE” on the bad entry.  I highlighted the bad entry, pressed SHIFT+DELETE and blam!  Bad entry gone, now there is only one username in the auto-complete history for that field, so it’s automatically filled in!

I’ve been back using Vista again for a while now.  Since SP1 was released, I’ve found it to be a much more stable, and better performing OS than the RTM version.  Overall I’m pretty satisfied with my Windows Vista experience since SP1 and I’d like to share some of the minor things in Vista that make day to day operations easier than they were in Windows XP.  A lot have to do with files and folders, but there are a couple of other features I like too.

• When renaming files (whether right clicking and choosing rename, or hitting the F2 key), only the filename is automatically highlighted.  The file extension is left out, so that when you’re renaming you don’t accidentally remove the file extension.
• When creating a new folder, after you type the name of the folder and hit Enter, you’re automatically brought into the new folder.
• When saving or downloading a file, if you delete the file name in the File Name box so that you can enter a folder path (usually a UNC path to some network share), after you enter the folder path and hit enter to navigate there, the original file name is automatically entered back into the File Name box.
• When copying or moving files, you’re actually provided with some useful information about the progress.  Vista gives you information like how many files are left in the operation, as well as the actual amount of data left to copy.  To me this is much more relevant than just the estimated time remaining, which most of the time is pretty inaccurate.
• My Start menu gets pretty unruly at times with the amount of applications that I have installed.  The Start menu searching comes in handy when I’m too lazy to look through all of the folders.  I know this can be added to XP with some third party utilities but I’d much rather have it built into the OS.
• This next one isn’t exactly day to day, but still nice.  When renaming a computer on a domain, if you’re already logged in as a domain admin, it doesn’t re-prompt you for admin credentials.
• UPDATE: I forgot that I also really like the breadcrumbs trail in the address bar of Explorer windows.  It makes it really easy to navigate back up the tree with the least amount of clicking.

These are just some of the new features in Vista, but they’re ones that I really notice when using my machine to do regular day to day stuff.  Are there any new features in Vista that you really like?  Post them in the comments!

So I’m loading up an IBM rack server today with Windows Server 2003 x64.  After installing Service Pack 2 and rebooting, I’m greeted with a few hardware installation wizards.  One of them was quite interesting, have a look below.

What in the world is an “IBM Dummy Device”?  I tried a quick Google search and nothing useful turned up.  The system seems to work fine, but it just looked kind of funny so I figured I would share the laugh.

Why are you scanning my downloads for viruses?  And what are you using to scan them?  My guess would be that it’s not using some sort of internal antivirus since it’s not constantly downloading definition files.  So that would lead me to believe that it’s somehow hooking in to the antivirus I’ve got installed on my system.  My next question is: what’s the point?  Antivirus software performs on-access scanning, so won’t it scan that file itself when it’s done downloading anyways?  And at the very least, it will scan the file when I try to run it.  So why does Firefox need to be scanning it as well?  Fortunately there’s a way to turn it off so that you don’t get that 10 second lag at the end of each download.

• In Firefox, type about:config into the address bar and hit enter
• Type browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone into the Filter box
• Double click the browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone item that shows up in the list to set it’s Value to false

So I sit down this morning and check my Gmail, as per usual, and I find the May newsletter for Mozy (the software that I use to back up my home computer) sitting in my inbox.  The subject of the newsletter is “[Mozy] May Newsletter – Mac Launch & Canada Vacation”.  The “Mac Launch” part I get, because they’ve just released v1.0 of their app for Mac’s, but what’s with the “Canada Vacation” part?  It looks like a blog post that somehow got copied and pasted into the newsletter.  See the image below and you’ll probably be wondering the same thing.

With 2 Google posts in a row, it’s going to seem like I’m shamelessly giving them free advertising.  Anyhow, that’s not what I’m writing about.  I just wanted to thank Google for FINALLY putting high-res satellite imagery of London, Ontario on Google Maps.  For the longest time I’ve had to either use London’s way out of date aerial photo from their website, or use the old Yahoo! Maps beta that up and disappeared earlier this year.  Now when I go to someone’s house, I can pick the exact parking spot that I will use, and hope that no one has already taken it.  Good work Google.

It might seem kind of lazy to blog about someone else’s blog post, but I think this is a good one.  The Official Gmail Blog has a post that outlines 9 reasons why you should use the archive button in your Gmail account.  I have zero organization when it comes to my e-mail, all I do is read the e-mail, then archive it right away.  Since the Gmail search is so damn great though, I can always find what I’m looking for while still keeping a clean inbox.  With 6+ GB of e-mail storage, is there really any reason to full-on delete your e-mails instead of archiving them?  Seriously, is there?  If there is, post a comment, I want to know!

So my Xbox 360 bit the dust again. I was going to rock out and then BAM, 3 red lights again. It’s been working like a champ for a solid 3 months now (since I had to rip it apart and do some penny surgery), but over the last week or so it’s been randomly red ringing, until it eventually just gave up completely. I do, however, have some good news. I opened it up, loosened off the screws for the X clamps and overheated the poor little guy again, and now it seems that it’s back up and running! I just finished watching tonights episode of The Daily Show using the Media Center Extender, tomorrow night I’ll try out some Rock Band and see how it goes.