Rated: 80% (1 votes)
Loading ...More love for Launchy
Alex Watson
I’ve posted before about how useful I find Launchy, a command line interface for Windows. Lifehacker has a couple of excellent posts up explaining how to extend Launchy and use it for more than just firing up applications. It’s really good stuff, particularly the clever use of Twitter to allow you to send reminders to your mobile phone via SMS.
The first post is here, the second here.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...We’re sorry, your advert needs to be rebooted
Alex Watson
If you’ve travelled on the London Underground recently, you might have seen the new video ad billboards they’re using in some of the bigger stations. This is what happens when one of them goes bad! (Click here to see it in full). A crash such as this is obviously not too much of a problem when the screen is small, but as display technology advances, and it’s used in more places, on a larger scale, we may have to get used to the idea of whole buildings turning from a piece of moving (literally) architecure into a gigantic BSOD, being able to watch a skyscraper churning through a restart, or seeing walls getting new firmware…
Rated: 66.67% (3 votes)
Loading ...Building a PC is as easy as putting together a Lego kit
Alex Watson
With Issue 48 of the magazine at the printers, we’re on to 49, and the main feature is going to be a hands on look at how to build the perfect PC - the nuts and bolts of putting together the… nut and bolts of a computer. People believe that building a PC is a very difficult task, but in truth it’s very much like assembling a Lego kit. That said, there’s doing something and there’s doing something with style. Check out this video of the Lego Millenium Falcon being built (opens in a new window): it’s a great demo of kit construction being done with panache.
The situation is similar with PCs: yes, you can throw together a working rig in well under an hour, but to get something tidy, good looking and that’s cool running with clean airflow takes more time and planning. Hopefully the feature will make it a little easier to make a great PC. I’m planning the piece at the moment, so if anyone has any PC building tips they’d like to share, do let me know!
Rated: 80% (1 votes)
Loading ...A hint at what’s next for the Windows interace
Alex Watson
Several months into my acquaintance with Windows Vista - one that lasts from 10 in the morning till gone 6pm, as Mr Vista runs my main work PC - what I’m finding most disappointing about it is the interface. There’s a lot I really like about Vista, searching in particular, but for a program that can be in part classed as a ‘graphical user interface’, the ease with which the main interface gets cluttered is something of a disappointment.
The taskbar is still a big part of the Windows experience, and it’s one that I find gets hopelessly crowded; to call 3D flip a complete waste of time is so generous it actually denigrates my other time-wasting activites, such as reading about rap records on Pitchfork. As I blogged previously, Launchy is much more useful than anything Vista has natively, and I still miss having Expose from Mac OS X. Fortunately, the taskbar may not be the permanent feature of Windows it has been for the past 12 years; a post appeared on Techmeme showing that Microsoft has just filed a rather interesting patent application. Blogger Long Zheng uncovered it, and his post gives a thorough run down of what MS may (or may not) be up to for a future version of Windows.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Where Nvidia goes next
Alex Watson
There’s an interesting thread on the forums about Nvidia’s ‘8900 series’, and I posted a quick reply this morning, which then got me thinking about the topic in a bit more depth. Not to get too Donald Rumsfeld about it, but there are a few known unknowns and plenty of unknown unknowns when it comes to Nvidia’s next GPU…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Asus Eee PC in the wild
Alex Watson
The biggest announcement at this year’s Computex show was also one of the smallest: Asus’s super portable, super cheap Eee PC. Clive and I got to see it, but were told it was too soon to play with a working sample. Asus has obviously been busy this last month, because a fully working sample has just been demoed to the guys at Notebook Review.
Not yet rated
Loading ...Technorati post
Alex Watson
Just a quick post to claim my blog on Technorati.
Technorati Profile
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...The new PSP
Alex Watson
This year’s E3 games show was supposed to be a more serious and sober affair. Evidently no-one told Sony as they got Chewbacca on stage at the show to announce a design rejig of the PSP hardware. If only this was an actual joke.
As a long term PSP owner, I can say that the hardware is not, and never has been, the problem with Sony’s not-quite-wonderful handheld. Chewbacca can wave the new PSP around all he likes, but making it slimmer, lighter, with better battery life and quicker game loading is not going to help matters much.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Wanted: Robot assistant
Alex Watson
Now that I have a blog to keep up to date, along with editing Features for both the magazine and the website, I am finding myself pretty busy at work. While I should probably just spend less time checking my RSS feeds, I did briefly consider getting a temporary assistant and trying to sneak it through on expenses. Human assistants are a bit passe though - in Japan, I would have been able to get myself a robot assistant.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...In praise of the command line interface
Alex Watson
There was a time when Windows was just a program like any other; you could load it and you could quit it, but you didn’t need to live in it. In fact, because this was a time when Windows was 3.0, not having to live there permanently was definitely a good thing. Since Windows 95 though, the START menu and the icons have become the place the vast majority of PC users permanetly do their computing. DOS and other ‘command line’ interfaces aren’t really used if you’re on a Microsoft run PC.