What the hell is with Zune’s Animating Taskbar Text?
What. The. Hell?
Thanks Zune. After getting rid of the annoying, distracting, attention-grabbing taskbar text animations in the 3.x series, Zune 4.x now brings it back in force, with no obvious way to disable it.
Every time the text changes, my attention is drawn to the taskbar. This isn’t remotely cool. This is distracting. That the option was there and is now gone tells me you don’t care about me.
Thanks for nothing.
Formula One Refuelling Ban: Worst. Race. Ever.
Well done guys, you broke the spectacle pretty comprehensively.
Bahrain was a boring track at the best of times. Adding bumpy corners that extend a lap is not really that cool to watch.
But now, with no refuelling… there is no strategy. It’s a freakin’ train.
It had better get better soon. Otherwise, F1 will have squandered the most compelling driver lineup it’s seen in recent years.
how to convert a dynamic disk to a basic disk in 5 minutes without data loss
This afternoon, STARSCREAM, my trusty Windows 2003 server, breathed his final breath. He was due to be replaced but I did not yet have all the parts to build a new server. Sad times.
One of the big problems with which I was immediately faced is this: due to being an idiot, I had made several of STARSCREAM’s hard disks Dynamic Disks. This means that I couldn’t just plug them into another computer and use them. I couldn’t access my data.
After a bit of forum reading and googling, I came across a life-saving post at My PKB entitled How to non-destructively convert dynamic disks to basic disks. Within 5 minutes I was happily copying my data to another server, a happy boy indeed. All standard warnings aside, it is a testament to the documented process that my Thank You comment was #294.
in love with the 960 grid system
I have been working on some new sites and designing them with the 960 Grid System, and I am officially in love. It drastically reduces the effort required to layout a page, and also reduces the amount of maths that you have to do in your head. To completely eliminate the maths, I have created an image that shows the grid sizes for the 12 column grid. Click the image below for a 960px wide version.
If, like me, you want to print this out and put it on the wall, I have created an A4 PDF that will have nicer fonts when scaled to print size. The boxes and pink lines are slightly blurry, so if you are a fancy graphics person please feel free to fix it and I will upload your better version here.
Now I have to redesign Pinkjoint using 960.gs 🙂
F1: Legard isn’t good, needs to go
The BBC’s biggest mis-step this year in their otherwise excellent Formula 1 coverage is Jonathan Legard.
His commentary just doesn’t work: it’s repetitive, he frequently gets things wrong, and he’s generally just not entertaining. Martin Brundle seems to put up with him, but if I hear his tone right, doesn’t think he’s doing a great job either.
For my money, James Allen did a fantastic job with Brundle back on ITV, and I’d love to see (well, hear) him back on the F1 commentary.
But really, just about anyone other than Legard would be good. Put DC and Eddie with Brundle in the commentary box, see what happens?
Please, Aunty Beeb, lose Legard.