1. Open a new tab
2. Type about:config in the url bar and press enter
3. Click the I’ll be careful, I promise! button
4. Right click anywhere on the list that appears and select New then Boolean.
5. For the preference name put extensions.checkCompatibility.10.0a and click OK
6. Now select false and click OK
7. Now do the same again but this time name it extensions.checkCompatibility.10.0
8. Again set it to false.

Now close Firefox and when you restart all your extensions should be working again.

To disable it in the browser go to Internet options by either clicking the gear cog on the right hand side of IE9s toolbar or go to your control panel. Once open click on the Advanced tab. The very first option is Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering* so tick that. You will then have to restart IE9. Hopefully Zuma Blitz will be a bit more tolerable now.

To disable it in Flash simply go to a web page that has Flash in it and right click on the flash. From the menu that appears select Settings… and then deselect the Enable hardware acceleration option.

So first try disabling one. If that doesn’t work re-enable the one you disabled and disable the other one. If it’s still jerky try disabling them both.

If all else fails you can always just uninstall IE9 and go back to IE8 or try one of the other browsers such as Firefox, Chrome or Opera.

1. Drag the video file you want to convert over on to the XMedia Recode window and wait for it to finish checking it
2. Click on the video in the list near the top of the XMedia Recode window
3. Click the Format tab and change Profile to Custom, Format to MP4 and File Extension to mp4
4. Click the Video tab and tick the Video Copy box at the bottom of the options
5. Click the Audio tab and under Modus select Copy. If your file has multiple audio streams you can choose to remove some at this point.
6. At the bottom, under Output, change it to Source Path so the mp4 version appears in same folder as the original (optional)
7. Click Add Job at the top
8. Click Encode

If you want to do more than one file simply repeat steps 1 – 7 before clicking Encode. So now you now how simple it is to get MKV to play on Xbox 360.

Just a minor update. I forgot that the Xbox does not like 5.1 audio so if your original file is using 5.1 audio you will have to convert to stereo. If you do you need to do this then simply setting the Modus under Audio to convert instead of copy should work just fine as the default is stereo.

Warning! – The latest version of Xmedia recode, 3.0.3.0, has a bug where selecting Video copy will result in an empty file being created. I have informed them of this bug. Appears to have been fixed in version 3.0.3.4.

Now on to the downsides.

Their video tag will only play .h264 files. Originally the specifications stated that the video tag would use the open source OGG codec but then Apple complained and so any codec could be used. Not that the fact both Apple and Microsoft own parts of the .h264 licences or anything. Now Google has purchased a company that was working on a new codec called WebM and has made it freely available with Firefox already supporting it as well as Chrome. Microsoft say they refuse to support WebM until Google can guarantee there will be no patent claims against WebM in the future. This is typical MS hypocrisy since their own licence for letting you use .h264 clearly states they offer no such guarantee themselves.

No support for the text-shadow CSS despite the fact Internet Explorer has offered text shadow as one of it’s filters since IE5.5.

Flash can be very laggy. My current favourite game, Zuma Blitz, is damn near impossible to play due to it being so jerky. This is possibly down to the hardware acceleration as Firefox 4 also suffers from this.

Still I think for most people who only use IE this will be a major breath of fresh air.

They have seriously improved how they handle newfeeds such as Facebook and Twitter now giving them their own tray icons if you wish as well as their own windows. It also has a very small memory footprint and usually uses around 10MB. It’s email handling has also been improved but it still lacks Digsby’s ability to delete emails from Yahoo, Hotmail etc as I only seem able to delete emails sent to my Gmail account.

You can get more information as well as see screenshots and download the beta it’s self from http://www.trillian.im/learn/tour-trillian5.html

Anyway I was updating them both today and I got to thinking, "How often do they check that the sites in their block lists are still active?" At present SpyBot is saying it has immunised me against 130712 sites and SpywareBlaster says 13138 sites. So I decided to test a random selection of 20 sites they have blocked. Out of the 20 all the domains had now expired and pointed to nothing (resulting in a oops message in the browser) or they were now a domain landing page. That’s one of these stupid pages you sometimes end up on when you mistype a web address which has a list of links loosely based upon the domain name.

I know both of these programs are free but would it be to hard for them to write a program that checks their list every so often to remove dead domains? The reason I say this is because Internet Explorers block list is stored in the registry and this can slow down your computers boot up time. Also the more sites are blocked the slower your web browser may become. SO come on programmers. Just write a program that runs through your list once a month and see if they are still active or not.

source

So why keep using it? There are plenty of excellent alternatives these days. Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Flock and you could even use Apple’s Safari although it uses a stupid amount of memory on Windows.

Have you just installed/reinstalled Xp, Vista or Windows 7? Need to install programs but don’t want to sit there manually installing them? Then try Ninite Easy PC Setup. Ninite makes installing multiple applications simple. You just go to their site, select the applications you want to install and then click Get Installer at the bottom. It will then download a small program which you will need to run as administrator so it can install the programs. The installer then downloads the install packages for your chosen programs and silently installs them. You can even suggest other programs for them to add to their list. They promise they only install the chosen program and not any of the rubbish a lot of the program installers try to add such as toolbars.

“We install apps with default settings and say “no” to browser toolbars and other junk.”

So basically you
1 – Go to the Ninite Easy PC Setup site.
2 – Select the programs you want to install.
3 – Download their installer.
4 – Run the installr as administrator.
5 – Go do something less boring whilst their installer does all the work for you.

Just to add you will need cookies enabled to be able to download the instaler.

From the site:

• GNOME 2.24 desktop environment
• Google Chrome 4.0.223 web browser
• Google Picasa 2.7 photo manager New!
• OpenOffice.org 3.0 office suite
• GIMP 2.6 image editor
• Flash Player 10.0 plugin
• and much more!

• Processor: Intel Pentium, Xeon or newer; AMD Duron, Athlon, Sempron, Opteron or newer
• RAM: min. 256 MB
• Hard disk: min. 1 GB
• Graphics card: supports most modern graphics cards

Why they would try to make people believe this was Googles forthcoming OS I don’t know.

Digsby is not just a cool multi messenger program but it is also a brilliant email checker for both web based email accounts and the traditional POP/IMAP accounts. And on top of that Digsby also lets you keep track of your accounts on the big four social networking sites in real time.

Go to the Digsby site

As I have friends on different messengers and offer support for my guestbook script I have to be available on all messenger networks. By all I mean Yahoo, WLM (formerly MSN), ICQ, AIM and more recently Gtalk. So for years I used Trillian to let me connect to all these networks from a single program. But earlier this year I discovered Digsby. Digsby is a relatively new program so isn’t as polished as the likes of Trillian but I prefer it over Trillian for a couple of reasons. The main reason being that Digsby can check your email for you even if you use Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, GMail or a standard POP or Imap account. When you get a new email you can delete it, mark it as read, report it as spam etc all from within Digsby.

Digsby also lets you keep track of your account of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter as well as updating them from within Digsby. Digsby also supports Facebook chat so you can chat with your friends when they are using Facebook.

One brilliant feature of Digsby is the ability to place a Flash widget on your profile or any web page you wish and people can then chat to you via the widget.

Here is the Digsby widget in action.

As I said previously Digsby is still in it’s infancy so still needs polishing in some areas but the developers are always working on it, fixing bugs, adding new features and polishing existing features, Also, like Trillian Astra, Digsby stores all your details in a central database so you don’t have to remember all your settings and passwords if you use Digsby on a different computer.

Just remember to decline on all of the excess crap that the Digsby installer offers.