Determining When Windows was Installed

Here’s a tip you may find useful - how can you quickly determine when your copy of Windows was installed? I have a friend from college that used to religiously reinstall Windows at least once a semester. This was during the Windows 98 days when the notion of bit-rot was common place. Bit rot was [...]

Why Firefox Caught Fire

Similar to Microsoft’s random program has encountered a problem and needs to close crash dialog, the fine folks at Mozilla have the same idea included within the Firefox browser. These crash reports are vital to the developers who are tasked to fix the bug you just experienced. While the reports rarely make sense to us [...]

Closing Multiple Taskbar Windows Quickly

Ever increasing computing power and high resolution, large screen displays have allowed for true multi-tasking goodness. I would consider myself a power user; at any given time I have at least a dozen applications running, often with multiple copies of the same program - like my Firefox browser or Windows Explorer. There was a time [...]

Get Your QoS Going with the Tomato Firmware

The Tomato firmware is a feature rich replacement firmware for the extremely popular Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS and other Broadcom-based routers. If you weren’t aware, the WRT54GL runs a highly tuned and specialized version of Linux. Because of this, it is a popular device for hackers who enjoy adding new features or coercing a bit more performance [...]

Bits & Bytes

• Brendon Wilson has a fantastic write-up concerning the ramifications of Bill C-61, which has been tabled in the Canadian Parliament. This a topic that I hope will be hotly contested and all Canadians are encouraged to write their MPs to present their feelings. Brendon provides a rational fact based argument against the bill, which should prove to be much more effective than emotional rants that are commonplace when DMCA-like discussions take place. #
• Fresh off my participation in the 72h Podcast record set by KATG this past weekend, I'll also be doing my part tomorrow for Firefox's attempt at the Guiness Book entry for most downloads in a 24h period. #
• Caveat, I'm a huge fan of Metallica - even after getting booted from Napster by their representatives (ironically I own all their albums). Metallica held a listening party for a few journalists in London but was then taken back when they wrote about what they heard. As a result, management had the reviews yanked from the Internets. Guys, I can't continue to defend your lunacy! #
• Tomas Rokicki is at it again! If you recall, in March I wrote about his latest revelation that all Rubik's Cube are solvable in 25 moves. Like any good mathematician and computer enthusiast, when in doubt, throw more hardware at the problem. Using the same algorithm as before with a Quad Intel Core 2 and 8GB of memory, he has prooved that 23 is the new magic number. #
• Goosh is a "Google Shell" for your browser written by Stefan Grothkopp and it happens to  be fairly nifty. The shell like interface allows once to search Google and Wikipedia, returning information in a text only form sans ads. Goosh that's cool! #