We've gone high-def over the last month. First, Emma bought a 42" 1080p plasma Panasonic HDTV to replace the 32" CRT TV in our living room. Although it's wider, it's not over­whelm­ing, as the slender box sits further back. The picture's pretty good—at least when you give it a good signal.

To take advantage of it required a cascade of upgrades. Our old TiVo served us well for eight years; ap­point­ment TV has long been alien to us. It's dis­con­nect­ed now, replaced the other day by a DirecTV Plus DVR and a new satellite dish. I had heard bad things about the older DirecTV DVRs, but I have no complaints about this …continue.

I've been very happy with my MacBook Pro. It's my primary home machine, sitting on the living room coffee table, and getting far more use than the desktop system in my office upstairs.

But it rarely leaves the house. It's big–a 17" screen–and it's heavy. I seldom carry it anywhere and I hardly ever bring it to a coffee shop.

I bought myself a netbook last month, an Asus Eee 1000H: 10" screen, 1024x600, 1.6GHz dual core Atom, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard disk, 3lbs, $479. Look at how much bigger the MacBook is in the photo! For reference, the Eee 1000H is the same size as a magazine. It's small enough and light …continue.

My formerly trusty Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 camera went berserk one night in September. The zoom lens wedged open and nothing I did would persuade it to retract into the case or take more photos. The zoom had grown a little tem­per­me­n­tal in the preceding month, but I didn't expect cat­a­stroph­ic failure.

The other hardware failure was far more upsetting.

From Christmas until August, I ripped most of our CD collection with Exact Audio Copy to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). Since FLAC is lossless and open source, I figured I'd never need to rip the CDs again. I also wrote a Python script to convert the FLACs to MP3s with …continue.

If you're reading this post directly on my blog, you have probably noticed that the top section in the sidebar is “George Reilly’s shared items”.

[This post is describing how this blog worked when it ran on DasBlog]

If you're reading this through an RSS reader, let me tell you that that section contains various items that I'm sharing through Google Reader. Mostly these are items that I've read from blogs that I'm subscribed to in Google Reader, but I'm also using the Note in Reader book­marklet to share arbitrary webpages. If I choose, I can add a note to each item that I share.

Formerly, I would oc­ca­sion­al­ly summon up the energy …continue.

Over at Cozi, we've started a new technical blog. I just put my first post up, describing a nasty problem we had late last year.

Here's the summary:

Internet Explorer 6 does not support trans­paren­cy in PNG images. The best-known solution is to use the DirectX Al­phaIm­age­Loader CSS filter. It's less well known that using Al­phaIm­age­Loader sometimes leads to a deadlock in IE6. There are two workarounds. Either wait until after the image has been downloaded to apply the filter to the image's style, or use the little-known trans­par­ent PNG8 format instead of the filter.

More here.

Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) talks multiple protocols, including MSN and Google Talk. To configure, follow the in­struc­tions.

For Google Talk (XMPP), you may also need to set some advanced settings. At least, I have needed this at my last two jobs.

I worked at Atlas Solutions, a subsidiary of aQuantive, from October 2005 to July 2007.

Google bought our largest competitor, Dou­bleClick, for $3 Billion in April 2007. In the following five weeks, all the other major web ad­ver­tis­ing companies were bought up, cul­mi­nat­ing in Microsoft paying the stupendous sum of $6.3 billion for aQuantive. The Microsoft-aQuantive deal closes in mid-August.

To put it mildly, I was not excited at the thought of becoming a Microsoft employee yet again. Cu­mu­la­tive­ly, between 1992 and 2005, I spent 10 years at Microsoft as an employee or contractor, including a year and a half on Cairo, seven years on IIS, and a year on FlexGo.

Nev­er­the­less, I had absolutely …continue.

Scott Hanselman wrote today about family backup plans and alerted me to MozBackup. MozBackup can backup all of your crucial Firefox and Thun­der­bird files to a single, con­sol­i­dat­ed PCV file, saving you the hassle of figuring out where all the crucial files live on your hard disk.

You still have to back that PCV file up to a CD or an external drive, but now you have one file to back up instead of several dozen, scattered across several different, deeply hidden directory trees with non-obvious names.

Speaking of backup plans, I need a better one for myself. I regularly do a manual backup of my crucial data to a rotating set …continue.

I use Clipboard.NET as a clipboard manager on Windows. It stores the last few entries sent to the clipboard.

There's one problem: the default hotkey is Ctrl+Comma, which also happens to be an important key for Outlook (previous message). I figured out a while ago how to change the hotkey, but my report doesn't show up when you search for it.

Net: using a key name from the ConsoleKey table, change the value of Short­cutKey in %Pro­gram­Files%\­Tom Med­hurst\­Clip­board.NET\­clip­mon32.exe.config:

<applicationSettings>
    <clipmon32.Properties.Settings>
          <setting name="ShortcutKey" serializeAs="String">
                

Gmail's Mail Fetcher now works for me! As of today, I can now read my reilly.org email through Gmail, instead of the crappy webmail interface that Ne­tI­den­ti­ty provides. Much, much nicer.

I still prefer to read my email with a real email client, like Thun­der­bird, but I don't have POP3 access from work.

In related news, it looks like anyone can sign up for Gmail. You no longer need to be invited.