newly updated usb switchblade drive thingy
Apr 6, 2008 Tech
So I decided to revamp my usb switchblade after seeing this guide, I wanted to intergrate it with my current setup. so after doing that, it was actually pretty easy as I already had a WinPE source on my drive. (plus its a really easy guide to follow anyways), anyways, i decided to redo the switchblade part of my pen drive, mostly because it was a bit buggy and didnt work sometimes because it was a really “hacked” implementation, so ive spent pretty much most of today creating a new implementation of it now, gone are the drive vars as they were uneeded and just caused unnessesary complications and made it less reliable. ive added so new icons for the u3 drive and the flash partition. All this is been done on my new 2GB titanium cruzer which is a lot more solid than the flimsy plastic 4gb one i had, i went for 2gb because FAT has a limitation of 2GB so i kept having filesystem problems with my 4gb, plus it had an ugly orange light when you plugged it in, this new one has a sexy new blue light which looks much better and matches the lights in my case too :p
The actual switchblade itself has also had options added to it, the safety option is now a built in option instead of an added hack. And truecrypt actually runs properly now.
So now what i have is the following:
A 2GB Titanium cruzer pendrive, formatted to FAT, multibooting with the following options:
Windows PE 2.0
Win PE
Memtest
DBAN
ntpasswd
FreeDOS
Ranish Partition Manager
The bootup process has been re-done too, its now based on grub and gives me a menu (like above).
The switchbladenow runs more reliably due to it using VB scripting instead of setting a system variable to point back to itself, running a .exe to run a .vb to run a .bat file, lol yes, it really was that bad :p but anyways, its a lot better now, i should write a guide sometime, although you can get a jist of how i did it by following the guide linked at the start of the post.
offtopic: Also i just noticed how, unfinished, the new wordpress admin / create post page is, it looks really bare with just random blocks of colour, and boxes that dont look like they’ve been positioned right, i thought it was IE at first but its the same in firefox, maybe im just used to seeing borders around things.
Tags: bartpe, ce, drive, grub, hack, menu, pe, switchblade, tool, u3, usb, windows
Vista SP1 RTM available, Yahoo to reject microsoft bid.
Feb 10, 2008 Tech
So Vista SP1 RTM has been released on Connect, and Windows Update apparently. Its quite likely that it’ll be available/leaked on torrent/http link if it isnt already. I should reinstall vista sometime and test it out.
update:
“Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1. If Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1. Since we know that some customers may want to update to SP1 anyhow, the download center will allow anyone who wants to install SP1 to do so.”
Im not sure if i have “the driver”, but I’m getting it from another source anyway 
in other news, yahoo is planning to reject the bid from microsoft, calling it a “hostile takeover bid”. I lol @ that. tbh, i dont see yahoo lasting much longer, the only dominant thing they own right now is flickr, and they cant survive on that forever. I dont know anyone who uses thier webmail. and there isnt really anything special about thier homepage either imo. Since Yahoo messenger compatibility has now been added to wlm, there isnt really any reason to use the Messaging client. I dont think many people use Yahoo ! widgets any more but who knows. I guess only time will tell.
Tags: bid, microsoft, ms, sp1, update, vista, windows, yahoo
Macworld 2008 & windows seven.
So I tuned into macworld the other day, when i say I tuned in, i mean i just kept the macrumours live page open to watch the updates lol. pictures were cool too, ars had some too, but that crashed out quite often, probably because of the huge amount of users online. so i wont bore you with all the talk that jobs likes to do :p there was supposed to be a stream somewhere but i couldnt get it to work/load.
so heres a 60 second overview 
http://www.mahalo.com/The_Steve_Jobs_90_Minute_Keynote_in_60_Seconds
I think the new macbook is the sexiest thing EVER. (except for maybe the cute girl next door) but the price and limitations on it are so crappy that I can see only mac fanboys buying one.
for $3000 (yes thats £1500) you get a fixed non replacable battery, non upgradable 2GB of ram, a most-likely short lived HDD since its solid state, and the lack of an optical drive.
the pros being, its very fast, very small, and very good looking.
Its a shame this thing has more cons than pro’s.
I think the new airport thing with the hard drive is just an over priced NAS & combined router/switch type thing.
I have recently been thinking such a device would be useful. but i think id get more use out of a home built WHS. (which this just seems to be an expensive copy of).
I think the online movie rental thing is quite good, the only limiting thing with that is the download time, i guess the watch times are reasonable, you get around 30 days to watch it after you’ve downloaded it.
probably not very useful for people on dial-up as it would take longer than 30 days to download lol.
I lol’d at the fact that itouch users will have to pay $20 to upgrade too.
Ive always wanted to play with an apple TV simply because i wanted to find out how it works, it doesnt seem to have taken off very well.
There was no “one more thing” either, also i have no idea who randy newman is, but im betting he has a lot more results on google now lol. so that was pretty much it from macworld.
Apparently there is a build of windows 7 (a.k.a Vienna) floating around somewhere.
more info about windows 7: (for the uninformed) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7
a copy of M1 has been shipped to microsoft partners:
[quote]The current M1 drop is available to Microsoft partners in English only and has shipped in x86 and x64 versions. An interesting feature that has been highlighted by Microsoft is the ability of the M1 software to handle a heterogeneous graphics system consisting of multiple graphics cards from different vendors. A new version of the Media center is already integrated in this software, but supports PC speakers only at this time.[/quote]
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/35641/118/
When i manage to get some screens of this, i may post them in teh gallery >.>
CES also happened this week but for some reason i didnt pay much attention to it, the only real big thing that came out in the news about it was when gizmodo managed to piss off 90% of the community by playing pranks and turning off TV’s etc. personally i’d agree that it did seem a bit childish tbh.
in unrelated news, the downloads section is still empty, mostly because i dont really have anything to put in it. I dont really make things lol. I guess i could use it to mirror popular file but usually those files require lots of space and bandwidth, which i dont have a lot of. lol. nevermind :p
x
Tags: 2008, ads, ce, drive, hard drive, job, microsoft, mirror, ms, pe, post, software, space, support, tv, update, updates, upgrade, windows