Great video. Someone singing a song reverse. Try to get the name of the song before the middle of the video.

Here is a fine bloke who did what I have been dreaming of ever since I got my new Dell D830: he upgraded his Windows Vista installation to Windows XP.

Although my own Vista installation runs a lot better than his, I do see a lot of familiar problems he seems to have fixed with his upgrade.

In addition, numerous tasks that take a long time on Vista have been greatly speeded up. File copies are snappy and responsive, and pressing the Cancel button halfway through actually cancels the copy almost immediately, as opposed to having it lock up, and sometimes lock up the PC. In addition, a lot of work has gone into making deletes far more efficient, it appears that no more does the operating system scan every file to be deleted prior to wiping it, and instead just wipes out the NTFS trees involved, a far quicker operation. On my Vista machine I would often see a dialog box from some of my video codec’s pop up when deleting, moving or copying videos. No more, now all that is involved is a byte transfer or NTFS operation.
Automatic Updates has also gone through a performance facelift in that it no longer hogs your bandwidth when you’re surfing, a nice touch.

Link.

Today on Something Awful’s Photoshop Phriday contest: improbably pop-up books. Here is a nice example from the site. Nice movie as well…

Link (via boingboing)

Bruce Schneier (security guru) just finished an interview with Freaknomics. In the interview he answers a lot of questions of Freaknomics readers. His answers include a lot of links to articles he has posted on various topics. Well worth a read.

Q: Is there any benefit to password protecting your home Wifi network? I have IT friends that say the only real benefit is that multiple users can slow down the connection, but they state that there is no security reason. Is this correct?
A: I run an open wireless network at home. There’s no password, and there’s no encryption. Honestly, I think it’s just polite. Why should I care if someone on the block steals wireless access from me? When my wireless router broke last month, I used a neighbor’s access until I replaced it.

Link

Alright, I’ve done it. Have been playing around with Feisty and got it all to work on my precious Dell D830. I had a lot of problems with Feisty (you will find the links on the left) so when Gutsy came out I hoped everything would be fixed (it did have the new intel drivers).

Well I was wrong. The problems with Gutsy on my Dell are just too big. My wireless is failing all the time. Compiz doesn’t really work (applets don’t start, settings are not saved). Too much to tell.

So I did it, I switched to hardy. Better to have an unstable release that kinda works than a stable release that just kinda doesn’t work. At least now I know I can’t blame anyone. So as time will pass I will post some updates about my experiences with Hardy.