Category Archives: GeekStuff


GeekStuff, Windows

Variations On A Theme – aka GodMode

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There’s been a bunch of press lately about the “discovered” GodMode that’s in Windows 7. Basically, this is neither new or God-like. The GodMode name was used by the person that “reported this discovery” but the truth is that the “new feature zOMGBBQPEWPEWPEW!!1” was originally introduced in Windows 95.

Basically, you create a new folder in Windows Explorer, you name it SomeFunName.{ShellFolderGUID-from-Registry} and that new folder will be a “shortcut” to whatever namespace you gave it. In the case of naming a folder GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} you end up with a folder named GodMode that opens to “all tasks” as is defined by that GUID. On my PC, I named the folder All Tasks.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} which named my folder “All Tasks”. Windows 95 used this same technology with fonts in the form of Fonts.{93412589-74D4-4E4E-AD0E-E0CB621440FD}

What is nice about the All Tasks folder for me is that I’m able to make shortcuts to any of the tasks there; I could put “Add or remove programs” on my desktop now… what it’s is either an Easter Egg or a newly hidden feature in Windows 7.

Nice thing about this is that I wanted to post the GUID so I don’t have to go dig it up for new machines!

GeekStuff

Hardwarez!

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As part of my vacation at the end of 2009, I decided to give a bunch of new hardware a try and see how things went… and then forgot to talk about it.

The collection of goodies included: an iPhone 3GS, a Nintendo DSi, Zune HD, and MacBook Air.
Continue reading Hardwarez! →

GeekStuff

Happy Windows 7 Day!

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Finally! You’ll get to start playing with what I’ve had installed for months and, well, to be honest it’s an exciting time. For me.

It’s 7:42 AM, I’m on campus in Studios West’s theater, watching a co-worker NOM on a blueberry muffin, and waiting for the launch event to start in New York… yes, I’m excited enough to have gotten up that early to be here. On top of that, it occurred to me in the shower that a number of users will be going from XP to Windows 7 – that is going to be very, very interesting to see, since they skip the intermediary view of Vista: going from XP blue to Seven glass? Nice!

For what it’s worth, for as good as 7 is – and it is good – its goodness started in Vista and, to be technologically blunt, Vista wasn’t as bad as most people would have had you believe. Vista was an improvement on XP, as 7 is an improvement on Vista… it’s the nature of software. I actually look forward to pointing out to people which of the features they love in 7 …that they missed out on for the last few years because they were in Vista. Reminds me of when Office exposed a ton of functionality with the Ribbon and were able to say “That’s not new to Office 2007… that was in Office XP.” But I digress…

Windows 7 – go get it.

Oh, and if you have a netbook or notebook without an optical drive, we’ve got that covered too: The Microsoft Store allows you to buy Windows 7 online, download it to a USB thumb drive, and install it from there.

GeekStuff

*gaaaaaaaasp*

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You didn’t Hear that? No? I did. It’s the sound of a big inhale before the chaos begins… it’s the calm before the storm.

Actually, that might not be entirely true… the first bit of the storm has already hit with the announcement of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 this morning. Some time after that, Xbox is going to release our recent Preview this week, to people that signed up for it; that bring Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, and Zune Marketplace to 360 users. And then on the 22nd, Windows 7 hits retail shelves; that unleashes every OEM that has been sitting on new machine models, waiting for 7 to ship. That includes ION based netbooks, allowing the tiny models to play HD video without breaking a sweat. Also likely to improve on the Atom CPU as well… Add to that Apple and Google’s intention to start new ad campaigns on the 22nd, to steal 7’s thunder…

Yes, it’s going to be a very, very busy and exciting week – who says all storms are bad?

GeekStuff, Windows

Props to the Windows Team

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I’ll go on record with this comment: Wow… that actually just worked.

Retiring my last Vista box didn’t go as smoothly as I thought it did. Windows 7 installed fine: every device I had in the thing was auto-supported… the machine was built in 2007 with all brand name parts, but even so… there’s usually a rogue driver that’s required on a repave. No, the reason I was up until 2:30 this morning was caused by something completely non-OS related…

One single password.
Continue reading Props to the Windows Team →

GeekStuff, Windows

Windows 7: Allowing Access to C$

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After recently installing Windows 7, I found that I was unable to access the “default admin shares” for my local drives, namely \\ME\C$. I was able to see the machine on my local network, so I know that the firewall wasn’t the problem. If I shared out something explicitly, I could see that from other machines as well: File Sharing was turned on. On other networks, I know that I’ve been able to access the C$ share from other machines, so the functionality was still there, but likely just turned off.

From HowToGeek.com, I found a registry setting that would allow this. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System, add a new DWORD called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and set its value to 1 and reboot. Want to revert? Delete the key or set it 0.

I must have done this for Vista as well, but I don’t remember doing it… either way, it works. And this was the “last” box. All of my machines are Windows 7 64-bit including VM’s and Bootcamp partitions. My Lenovo S10 had to settle for the 32-bit version of Windows 7 because Atom didn’t like the x64 version. The only other OS I see daily is from a couple of servers which are Windows 2008 (and awaiting an R2 installation).

And so Vista slips away …as XP, 2000, NT, 98, 95, and 3.11 did before it.

GeekStuff

WinToFlash

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A few posts ago I jotted down how to properly prepare a thumb drive so that it could be used to install Windows 7 – looks like there’s now an application in the works to ease the process (and it supports XP, Vista, Server 2008, and WinPE.)

WinToFlash – still in beta but I’m hopeful!

GeekStuff

Xbox LIVE NXE Update

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The update has been available to the world for the last six hours. I missed the actually releasing of the bits because I was home, dreaming in colored code.

As most people know, I have been working on Avatar Marketplace for a while.  There was some rumblings about it, when E3 was going on, and as I was testing out the feature, my Avatar picked up some never before seen swag. This morning I woke up to and popped online, to see how things were in the Store and, well, holy shit.  There’s a lot more stuff up there than I knew about!  Gears of War 2 armor.  Halo 3: ODST armor.  The helmets from Big Daddy’s in Bioshock 2.  Basketballs, pom-poms, and soccer balls.  Even a light saber from The Clone Wars.  The that made me go “oh” though was Big Daddy Doll Prop that you can carry around the blades with you.

r0xx0rs.

GeekStuff, Windows

Windows 7: How To Prepare A Thumb Drive

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This is mostly for me, so that I don’t have to keep looking up the long winded discussion about why this works – I just need to remember the steps.

    Prep a USB thumb drive for booting

  1. list disk – look for the thumb drive
  2. select disk # – use the # of the thumb drive
  3. clean – wipe all disk information
  4. create partition primary – create a new partition
  5. active – set the partition active
  6. format fs=fat32 quick – quick format for FAT32
  7. assign – give it a drive letter

If you’re looking for the long winded discussions, use the search icon next to the title.

GeekStuff

Is iPhone 3.0 Software SIM Unlocked?

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Before you answer “no” have you actually tried it on either an already activated phone or a non-activated iPhone with the 3.0 software (meaning 3GS, out of the box.)

Jolene has a non-3G, non-iPhone SIM that is with AT&T that previously didn’t work in:

– 2G iPhone with 1.x or 2.x software

– 3G iPhone with 2.x software

Tonight on a whim, I popped her non-3G, non-iPhone SIM into my 3G iPhone which has the 3.0 software and it worked. Made calls, received calls, called into VM fine (since it’s not enabled for Visual Voicemail.) I then put her SIM into my 3GS and it worked there too. On a further whim, I put in an old non-connected T-Mobile SIM… the iPhone did not reject it. Obviously I couldn’t place a call but in the past I had gotten a “this is an unauthorized SIM” message. I even went ahead and wiped the 3G iPhone clean and put the SIM in: worked there as well.

And so the questions in my head are:

– Does this only work on purpose or is this a bug in the 3.0 firmware?

– Has anyone activated a 3GS with a non-AT&T SIM?

– If not, does this only work on activated phones?

Or is this breaking news and I was the first guy to stumble into it?

GeekStuff

Atoms Aren’t All Atoms

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Joey deVilla: Fast Food Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck

A very interesting read on netbooks and why having something in the middle of established form factors can suck. In fact, I’ve made some of these same arguments when talking against tablet PC’s that didn’t have a convertable keyboard option with them. Way too slow to write everything down if you can type 120wpm on a keyboard. Similarly I’ve argued against email on phones in the past because tapping out full paragraphs with a stylus, on-screen keyboard, or physical keyboards (a la Dash) is just far too painful to make it useful. Why shouldn’t a new device or form factor fill this void?

And so enters the netbook, which very often has a small screen with a miniscule resolution and as little as 85% of a full size keyboard… why would I like these restrictions, considering that I bought a Lenovo S10 in the past? Well, for quick meetings at work they are pretty freakin’ great. For watching movies, they are pretty good. For coding and gaming, it’s fair. For having portable “hard drive” that can have my entire PC experience and preferences in a 2.43 pound package that will drive Aero on Windows 7 [RC] and project HD resolutions to external monitors, it’s great…

Wait, movies, coding, and gaming on a notebook? Yes, I said that. You haven’t had that experience? That’s because all Atoms are not the same chip…
Continue reading Atoms Aren’t All Atoms →

GeekStuff

And Now For Something Completely Different

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As most people that have an Xbox knows, Xbox LIVE is currently down.

While the scheduled maintenance is going on, my team (and group) are tasked with verifying that all things are right in the world of LIVE before LIVE is turned back on… so yes, for this brief moment in time, my job is about playing games at work for test purposes. It doesn’t happen often, but since it’s happening today, I thought I’d fulfill everyone else’s expections of what my daily job life is supposed to be like… sadly, I spent very little time testing games at work – when we do play at work, it’s only for fun.

To keep the people of the Xbox LIVE machine humming happily, I present to the world the current contents of my office refrigerator:

Yes – that is a lot of wings and we will be using them all day and night!