I’ve moved to Posterous
- Image via Wikipedia
After some time on and off blogging and WordPress I’ve decided to start using Posterous instead.
My new blog is located at www.mlevit.posterous.com. I’ve always loved WordPress but it’s a much more professional blogging platform than I need.
Posterous allows me to easily send in posts via my chosen email client and perfectly formats everything for me. There’s no mucking around, there’s no loading times and there’s no excess features that I’ll never use.
From now on I will be stopping my Posterous from posting my new posts here. If you wish to follow my new blog I will be more than happy.
Thanks,
Marat
How to chat on Facebook without going to facebook.com
What you'll need:
How to set it up:
Firstly you must download and install Pidgin (see link above). What is Pidgin?Pidgin is a chat program which lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on MSN, talking to a friend on Google Talk, and sitting in a Yahoo chat room all at the same time.
Pidgin is compatible with the following chat networks out of the box: AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr. It can support many more with plugins.
Pidgin supports many features of these chat networks, such as file transfers, away messages, buddy icons, custom smilies, and typing notifications. Numerous plugins also extend Pidgin's functionality above and beyond the standard features.
So it's basically a free chat client that supports pretty much every chat network out there. And if a chat network isn't supported by Pidgin out of the box, a plugin will most likely exist providing this support. This leads me nicely to the second step which is download and install Facebook Chat for Pidgin (see link above). Download the .exe file and install it.
Once that's installed, run Pidgin > Accounts > Manage Accounts > Add > select Facebook from the Protocol drop down list and enter your credentials > Click Add. You're done. There's nothing else to do but chat away with your Facebook friends without having to go to facebook.com. ThanksNissan’s self-healing Scratch Shield paint to be applied to mobile phones
A while back, Nissan scientists helped to develop a paint clearcoat called Scratch Shield that can self-repair light scratches overnight or over the course of a week. Now the Japanese automaker is spreading the love, licensing the technology to Japan’s largest wireless company, NTT DoCoMo. The clearcoat uses a special top layer of highly elastic resin that gives the coating a ‘flexibility’ that reportedly means that it can prevent or “heal” 80% of surface marks. The coating itself is also tougher, so it is less susceptible to marks in the first place.
Very interesting technology. Would be useful for almost any product I can think of. This would be especially useful for mobiles, cameras… really anything mobile that gets used everyday.
Lets hope it get adopted quickly by many more manufacturers.
Thanks
A shadow copy could not be created // Insufficient storage available to create // 0×81000019
These are part of a message received when trying to run a Windows 7 backup with a system image. I myself have encountered the problem but luckily after some searching have found a solution that worked for me.
Unfortunately I don't have a screenshot of the message you may have received but I do have a text version of it:[Window Title]
Windows Backup: Troubleshooting Options[Main Instruction]
Check your backup[Content]
A shadow copy could not be created. Please check "VSS" and "SPP" application event logs for more information.
Details: Insufficient storage available to create either the shadow copy storage file or other shadow copy data.[^] Hide Details [Try to run backup again] [Change backup settings] [Cancel]
[Expanded Information]
Backup time: 10/25/2009 3:23 PM
Backup location: Terra-Stor (M:)
Error code: 0×81000019
So the insufficient space this error is referring to isn't the space on your hard drives that you're trying to copy the backup too, it's the space on that small 100MB boot partition that was created during Windows 7 installation. You can look at the partition yourself by:
- Start
- Right click My Computer
- Manage
- Storage > Disk Management
- Right click the 100MB
- Properties
If you have less than 40% of Free Space then that's the insufficient storage available error. See that drive is actually used to create your system image and therefore cannot drop below 40%. According to a Microsoft employee there is a problem with Windows 7 which causes it to use up more than 60% of that 100MB boot drive.
The trick around this problem is:If the System reserved partition cannot be extended using Disk Management because of lack of contigous space adjacent to it, creating a new system volume is the workaround. Here are the steps to move the system volume to any other volume:
- Choose where you want to have your system volume. Few things you need to keep in mind:
- System volume can only be created on a primary partition of MBR disk.
- If system volume & boot volume are together, then BitLocker feature cannot be used to encrypt volumes on your machine.
Suggest creating a new volume (say F:) on the same disk that contains the boot partition of size of about 490 MB (be careful to keep it less than 500 MB)
- My Edit: To do this you must be in the manage properties as per the steps above.
- Right click your C:\
- Shrink Volume
- Enter 490MB
- Right click the new drive
- New Simple Volume
Assuming Windows 7 is installed on C: on your machine. From an elevated command-prompt run: bcdboot.exe C:\Windows /s F:. From elevated command-prompt run: DISKPART From the disk part command-prompt:
- DISKPART> select volume F
- DISKPART> active
Now you can reboot your machine and F: will become the system volume. You can undo this by repeating the same steps using the original system volume (you have to assign drive-letter to it) to revert to your previous configuration.
via social.technet.microsoft.com
Once this is done you can head back into Manage:- Right click the new 490MB drive
- Change Drive Letter and Paths
- Remove
Removing the letter will also remove the drive from appearing in My Computer. Now you should be done. The drive should now be 490MB which is plenty for Windows 7 backup to create a system image. Go to Backup & Restore and run through the wizard again and this time hopefully it should work.
ThanksGoogle Search’s New Interface Being Tested Now
The rumours published last week may be true after all: Google is testing a new search interface on random people, as these screenshots from Gizmodo reader Matt Karolian confirm.
Bring on the change. If there’s one thing all Google sites have in common is their lack of colour variety.
If these screenshots tell the truth then we may be looking at a nice new Google fairly soon (or one could hope).
Thanks
Firefox hopes to one-up IE with fast graphics
Last week, Microsoft showed off some browser technology that could help Internet Explorer leapfrog the competition. But if Mozilla succeeds in its hope, Microsoft could be playing catch-up instead.
The technology in question is hardware-accelerated graphics and text using interfaces called Direct2D and DirectWrite that provide an easy way to use graphics cards’ computing power. They’re built into Windows 7, and Microsoft is bringing them to Windows Vista but not Windows XP.
The performance boost from Direct2D and DirectWrite was the centerpiece of Microsoft’s demonstration of Internet Explorer 9 goodies shown last week. Online maps flashed on the screen quickly and tracked mouse movements responsively; text was clearer and changed sizes more gracefully.
But the day of Microsoft’s demo, Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard had this to tweet: “Interesting that we’re doing Direct2D support in Firefox as well–I’ll bet we’ll ship it first.”
There’s work to back up his rhetoric. On Sunday, Bas Schouten, the programmer who’s been leading the work for Mozilla, posted a prototype of Firefox using the Direct2D and DirectWrite.
Amazing read and fantastic news for us all. While Google tries to speed up webpage load times with a new HTTP protocol layer Microsoft and Mozilla try to speed up the browsers by utilising the computers GPU for graphics rendering.
It makes perfect sense. Why use a CPU to render graphics when the computers graphics card can do a much better job? Thanks to Windows 7 and soon Vista browsers will be able to utilise Direct2D and DirectWrite to render webpages.
It looks like a very promising upcoming technology that will speed up most webpages by around two-fold. Let’s just hope Mozilla can release this technology by Firefox 4.0.
Check out Bas Schouten’s website benchmarks of Direct2D vs GDI (last link in the quoted section above).
Thanks
