Insomnic Dreams

There is a relatively new site called Super User that has been developed by some very well known tech gurus including one of my favorite – How-To Geek. The site is a combination of  Digg/Reddit, wiki, and forum and at its core it allows you to ask a question and get answers back from the techie masses.

The site is specifically for hardware and software questions and more details about the types of questions and answers can be found in the Super User FAQ and About pages, but the basics are: if your computer is doing something you don’t understand or you have a question about using your computer, Super User is the place to go.

Besides just asking questions you can watch the hot topics to see what interesting items the Super User community is discussing as well as search through to see if someone else may have had the same question and already found an answer.

As a moderator, the How-To Geek has written up an excellent run down on what exactly the hope of Super User is and here is the line that make me truly support this site:

“Super User was created by a group of guys that really believe in putting the reader first.”

This site has the potential to be the best tech support resource on the internet with tons of common users and techie geeks working together to make computing just that much easier for us all.

There’s a weird bug in Firefox that when watching videos on YouTube or Hulu you will see a little video lag every 10 seconds or so… and luckily someone figured out how to fix it.

The fix was presented quite some time ago actually but I only just came across it and it has made watching online video so much more pleasant – and it’s an easy fix.

1. Open Firefox and in the Location/Address Bar type in about:config and hit Enter.
2. You are now looking at some of the advanced functions that can be customized.
3. In the “Filter” line at the top of the list (where your cursor should already be blinking) type in session and it will automatically reduce the listings.
4. Now find “browser.sessionstore.interval” and double click it.
   That number is how many milliseconds between the times that Firefox saves your current browsing session in case of a crash and 10000 milliseconds equals 10 seconds – the same amount of time between video freezes.
5. Change that number to something different. 300000 is 5 minutes and 120000 is 2 minutes. I actually switched mine to 600000, which is 10 minutes, because I don’t worry about session saving much.

That’s it. You should now have much smoother video playback at YouTube.

UPDATE: With HTML5 being used at YouTube and Vimeo now, it would be beneficial to switch to an HTML5 compatible browser such as Chrome and Safari (at the time of this writing). Firefox will be supported on those sites soon as well.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 come with a new file system type called exFAT. It is an updated version of the FAT file system and carries a lot of new features and improvements – which most people won’t care about at the moment so follow the link for the gory details. That’s a good thing, but one problem is that Windows XP can’t read it!

So, if a friend of yours formats a USB stick using exFAT on Vista and copies some docs to it for you and brings it over to your XP computer you won’t be able to get the files. Well, luckily, Microsoft has released a download that will help you get around this issue. Just go to this KB955704 article and you can download and install the update.

Now you can handle exFAT formated media from your Windows XP machine.

If you are running Linux or OS X – you are out of luck. Linux and OS X users are used to this though and tend to have their own ways around these issues – but still something to keep in mind.

It has been a slow weekend in the tech world… not really, but most of it is boring to regular people so I thought I’d spare most of you.

There are few things that have come to mind I thought I’d let you know about.

Apple released a large update to their Leopard operating system.  Lots of fixes and tweaks.  Be sure to run Software Update again after installing because there is a graphics update as well.  Also, open Disk Utility (from Utilities folder in Applications) and run the “Repair Disk Permissions” on your system hard drive.

WHDb.com released an article with the top 50 proprietary programs that drive you crazy and their open source alternatives.  I don’t necessarily agree with some of their “top” picks, but the list is pretty complete. I suggest you check it out when you get a chance.  It is mostly Windows centric, but there are a variety of Apple apps on there as well.

I’ve been using twitter regularly lately and I think I’ve finally settled on a desktop app.  It is called Twhirl and does all the things I liked in the other programs I tried and none of the usual irritations. It will run on Windows and Mac using Adobe AIR (AIR will be coming to Linux soon). If you have a Blackberry, I recommend TwitterBerry. You can find me on twitter here.

Steven Brust has written a short story based in the Firefly world called My Own Kind of Freedom. It is free to download under Creative Commons and it is a nice added episode to the Firefly world.  Yes… the entire crew is in it. It’s a pretty good read and since it’s free you really can’t complain can you? I think it is a worthy addition to the rest of the canon.

Starbucks is leaving T-Mobile and moving to AT&T for their wireless services in their billions of coffee shops.  Current T-Mobile customers will still get 5 years of usage while AT&T broadband customers will have free access to even more wireless locations.  AT&T Cellular customers will be getting the same benefits soon.  Check here for current AT&T wireless hotspots around the world.

It looks like Blu-ray Disc may come out the winner in the HD Disc format wars. Two more big players are backing Blu-ray.  Best Buy and Netflix have both stated that they are backing Blu-ray.  Netflix will no longer refresh their inventory of current HDDVDs and Best Buy will be recommending Blu-ray over HDDVD.  Ars has the details about this latest development in the “format wars”.

As always – if you are looking for distractions, check out My Pownce or the feed to the right. Watch the Delicious bookmarks at the right too as interesting sites I find will end up there as well.

So it wasn’t too boring… was it?

I recently checked out Plaxo and it seems like it could be a useful service for some people. I don’t want it though so I tried to delete my account… unfortunately that isn’t easy to do without a little help.

If you want to delete your Plaxo account you must follow these two simple steps:
1. Sign into your online account http://www.plaxo.com/signin
2. Enter the URL https://www.plaxo.com/delete_account

Now just follow the instructions (pretty quick) and your account will be deleted. It would have been nice if this information could have been found on their site somewhere… but it isn’t. I had to contact customer service; which makes sense from a business standpoint in order to have a chance at retention and is becoming more common for advertising based services.

UPDATE: Comcast has aquired Plaxo and many Plaxo users are concerned about what will happen with the service.

If you’ve needed to install Windows XP on a newer computer with a Serial ATA drive (the new drive standard for hard drives) you may have run into an error where XP installation couldn’t find the drive.

Lame.

Normally, you would insert a floppy disc with the driver when prompted … but who has a floppy drive?

Enter nLite.  nLite is a program that helps you install that driver right on the CD so it can find those hard drives.  It will also let you do a bunch of other useful things like adding service packs and updates so you don’t have to install them later.

For an excellent tutorial on adding a SATA driver to your Windows installation via nLite, check out this How-To Geek article.