Nathan Alter:

You know how you always install the same stuff on a new PC? Firefox, Pidgin, Audacity, Foxit, Steam, whatever? Try ninite.com.  Check off the boxes and walk away…it installs it all for you.

If your motherboard goes out and you have Windows 7 OEM (Windows that comes with a new computer) you’d have to buy Windows again.  Of course, they’re trying to get people to buy the more expensive non-OEM version.  LAN parties be gettin’ expensive…between buying full versions of OSes and individual copies of games for each computer…it’s almost impossible for an individual to do these days.  I hope Ubuntu gaming takes off some day.

I introduced Sean to Gimp yesterday.  He had fun messing with photos and drawing new things.  Even a 5-year-old can learn enough to have fun with it.  I also had a look at teaching him Blender, but that interface is not exactly friendly to a 5-year-old.

At the Windows command prompt, type systeminfo to see your PC’s stats.  Handy for troubleshooting.

For 2 days at work, I’ve been debugging a crashing program that uses an old Outlook 2000 interop DLL.  It was giving generic ComException errors that couldn’t reliably be troubleshot.  Then there was a power surge overnight and my computer rebooted.  I came in to find the program working just fine on my PC today.   Aaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!

If you’re editing a bulleted list in Microsoft Word and try to insert an image below the text of one of the bullets, Word will probably try to stick the picture awkwardly between two spaces of text.  Shift-enter will put a return into the current bullet between the text and the picture.

Sometimes, for one reason or another, Windows Explorer crashes and you can’t do anything because it’s a crucial part of Windows. Here’s how to recover without rebooting. Go to task manager and end the hanging explorer process. Use task manager to start a new one. File->New Task (Run…) and run explorer. Voila!

Netflix is sending us a disc to stream Netflix on our PS3. Unfortunately, according to this interview, we have to leave the disc in there while using it. There goes any convenience factor. I’m guessing Microsoft’s XBox exclusivity deal made them do it the painful way for now. A system update late next year will do it the right way and install it on the hard drive. We’d probably just continue to use a media PC for Netflix until then.

I’ve apparently missed an important point about SQL joins. You know when you are trying to run a SQL query with “group by” and it nags you about needing to have each selected column in the group by…so you just stuff them all in. (Yes, you, grandma.) Anyway, that’s not the way to do it. This guy shows how to do it the right way.

Alltel was bought by Verizon, so we now have the irritating, long voicemail instructions that they use to make extra cash by eating up minutes. I set my personal greeting to mention the secret “skip to the beep” button, (*). (This varies for each cell company.) I also turned on rapid prompt like this, but it only helps a little:

• call voicemail
• enter password
• press 4
• press 2
• press 3
• press 2 (rapid prompts)