Bug or not? Windows CardSpace disables Aero Glass

Snooping around the Control Panel ended up in clicking on something that appeared new to my eyes: Windows CardSpace. What is it? I am not quite sure and i don't care enough about it at the moment since it didn't really make any news lately. More information about it can be found on Microsoft's Windows Vista Help website.

The intriguing part about it is that it seems to disable the Aero Glass interface when it is launched; in a manner similar to other programs that are not entirely compatible with Vista. Since it is a default piece of software built into Vista, shouldn't it be compatible with Vista?

Vista Sidebar shortcut and more...

I found myself tonight wanting to find a way to bring Vista's Sidebar to the front and access gadgets without having to click on the sidebar icon in the system tray or minimize all windows... via some sort of shortcut. A quick google search revealed that such shortcut does indeed exist and is built into Windows: Windows Key + Spacebar.

Quick list of useful Vista shortcuts:

- Show Sidebar: Windows Key + Spacebar
- Cycle through Sidebar gadgets : Windows Key + G
- Cycle through open programs using Flip 3D: Windows Key + Tab
- An alternate way to use Alt + Tab: Ctrl + Alt + Tab (lets you use the keyboard arrows or the mouse to select an open program)

View a longer list of Vista shortcuts on Microsoft's site: Windows Vista Help - Keyboard Shortcuts

Since tonight seems to be shortcut revelation night, here's another one that will hopefully make your day seem shorter: use a keyboard shortcut to quickly change to another search engine in Firefox's search box.

Why would you want that? Because, typing something in and then moving your hand to the mouse to select another search engine from the list (like IMDB) and then moving the mouse again to the search icon to click it or your hand back to the keyboard to hit Enter, can be tedious. So here's the shortcut: make it easier by simply typing in your search term, then pressing Alt + Arrow Down until your desired search engine is selected, then hit Enter twice (once to select the search engine and second time to execute the search). Much faster and simpler, isn't it...

1 Terabyte storage is here

I remember a time, not so long ago, when 500GB hard drives were all the hype. Then, the 750GB drives showed up, and now, the terabyte is here. For those less technically inclined, 1 terabyte equals roughly 1,000GB or 1,000,000MB of space to fill up with your favourite music, videos, etc. Now does that seem big compared to that 80GB hard drive you have in your computer? That's because it IS big.

Anandtech just reviewed Hitachi's (formerly IBM) Deskstar 7K1000 model and the results were better than expected. Maybe such a drive will make its way into my system after all.

Our limited experiences to date with the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 have been terrific and beyond expectations. The overall performance of this drive has been phenomenal and is close enough to the WD1500ADFD Raptor drive that we consider it a worthy adversary... Overall, we think Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 is the best 7200rpm drive we have tested to date... With an expected retail price of $399 or $0.40 per-Gigabyte this makes the 7K1000 a true value considering its size and performance.

My only worry, which increases with the size of the hard drives these days, still remains: Doesn't the fact that your hard drive can hold so much more data mean that you can lose so much more data all of a sudden? But enough with the free scare, just buy it and fill it up. Yes, that's a dare.

Vista: Windows Live Messenger: Cannot hide menu bar solution

Windows Live Messenger has an option to hide the menu bar for a more streamlined look. Recently, this option disappeared and i was stuck with a menu bar and no "hide menu bar" button.

In Windows Vista, this seems to be caused by Speech Recognition which enables the menu bar and hides the "hide menu bar" button. If you've enabled Speech Recognition to run on startup, try disabling it and see if that fixes it. Some users report mixed results where the problem randomly appears and disappears by itself. Closing Speech Recognition doesn't seem to restore the functionality, while a reboot may just bring it back.

See this link for more details: http://www.msghelp.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=10

Update: In many cases, going through the following steps has restored functionality of the hidden menu:

- While you have Windows Live Messenger open , start Windows Speech Recognition (do not enable it however)
- Exit Windows Live Messenger (don't simply sign out... close the program entirely)
- Exit Windows Speech Recognition
- Start Windows Live Messenger (you should now have the normal messenger window back, without the ugly menu frame around it).

Transform your Windows XP into Windows Vista

So you don't want to buy Vista but you want to have Vista? Ok, just install this Transformation Pack.

Since I do have Vista, i haven't had a chance to actually try this out myself, but sure looks promising.

What you get:

Vista Transformation Pack will replace many of the resources in Windows XP/Windows Server 2003. It can change such things as:

• Boot screen
• Welcome Screen / Logon Screen
• New msstyles files (visual styles)
• New desktop and file icons
• New toolbar icons
• Progress Dialogs
• Sounds scheme
• System Tray icons
• New Wallpapers
• Windows Media Player Skins
• And much more

Vista Media Center Review

Here's a review of Vista's Media Center that provides some very useful tips for watching HDTV content on your Media Center PC, home automation and others.

What a lot of people don’t realize is, that most of the HD you can get on satellite and cable, you can get for free, over the air, and recorded directly into media center. (about 95% of the TV my family watches comes from the major networks, which provide free over-the-air HD. (Mostly Fox.) 24, Prison Break, American Idol, Bones, etc.) Also, for a lot less money than you think, you can toss in home automation and control it through your media center experience. Everything from turning off any lights in the house, to open the garage door, viewing security cameras, just about anything you could ever want!

Read on at Windows X's Shrine.

Vista Media Center: Shortcuts for recordings scheduling

The traditional way to schedule a recording in Media Center is to go to the guide, locate the program you want to record, hit enter or OK on the remote control to see the program details and hit the Record or Record Series button to schedule it for recording. Then, you have to press back to return to the guide or Live TV.

These steps, while not too many or complex, can be skipped by using some useful shortcuts. While browsing the guide, you can hit Ctrl+R on the keyboard to tag the select program for recording. Pressing Ctrl+R a second time will schedule recording of the entire series. To cancel recording alltogether, press Ctrl+R a third time.

Alternatively, while browsing the guide, just hit the record button on the remote control to schedule recording of the selected program (instead of Ctrl+R on the keyboard). Press the record button again to schedule the entire series, and a third time to cancel the recording.

Now go practice it.

Vista Media Center: Mini-Guide: Arrow Up means Channel Up

Came over today an interesting article about how to fix a little annoyance in Vista Media Center. The new mini-guide that pops up when you press the up and down arrows on the remote control works, many would argue, unintuitively: arrow up takes you one channel down.

This article shows a simple registry "hack" that changes the functionality by moving to the up channel when pressing the up arrow... thus fixing the problem.

Here are the steps:

1. Click on the Start menu, choose All Programs, then Accessories
2. Right-click on Command Prompt and choose Run as administrator
3. Click Allow to launch an administrator command prompt
4. Run reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\VideoSettings" /v ChannelBrowserArrowUpMeansChannelUp /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Now, if you are like i was, when i first read the steps... puzzled, that is, by the gibberish in the step 4 above, read on for the translation.

Step 4 above simply modifies an existing registry value by changing its value from 0 to 1. It does so via the command line, using the "reg add" command. This command is built-in and you can find more information by typing "reg add /?". Here's a breakdown of the parameters:

/v - value, under the selected key. In this case, the ChannelBrowserArrowUpMeansChannelUp under the ".../Settings/VideoSettings" key.
/t - type of the value; here being a REG_DWORD type.
/d - the data to be assigned to the value.
/f - A parameter that simply forces overwriting if the value exists (which it does).

Evidently, you don't have to do this via the command line if you don't want to. You can also simply do the following:

1. Fire up regedit via Windows Key+R (to bring up the Run... window)
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\VideoSettings
3. Double click the ChannelBrowserArrowUpMeansChannelUp value
4. Change the value to 1 and click OK. (leave it as hexadecimal)

To reverse the "hack" and make the mini-guide function as it used to by default, repeat the steps above but instead set ChannelBrowserArrowUpMeansChannelUp to a value of 0 (zero).

You will have to restart Media Center for the change to take effect. Enjoy.

NOTE: You may actually want to go back to the default way after applying this fix. While this somehow fixes an annoyance, it does create another. The slide-in effect that you see when moving from one channel to another (in the mini-guide), slides channels in contrary to what you would expect. I suppose this is why they made it work wrong in the first place and allowed for it to be changed (easily) via the registry; to compensate for the unintuitive slide in/out effect.

More precisely, when pressing arrow up, after applying the fix, the next/higher channel slides in from below... rather than from above. Instead it should slide in from above, as if going up and down a list which has entries arranged in a decreasing order (higher values higher, lower values lower). Try it and you'll see...

Now if that could also be fixed, then I'd be a really happy camper.

(Had I been a Program Manager at Microsoft, this never would have happened :P )

.NET 3.0, WPF and XBAP Blurp

WPF? You know, Vista’s new “kickass” feature? With the latest Vista talk on almost every website, chances are you’ve heard about the Windows Presentation Foundation already built-in certain Vista flavours. It is what drives, among other things, the new Aero interface; Aero’s Flip 3D is another example.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is the next-generation presentation sub-system for Windows.
It provides developers and designers with a unified programming model for building rich Windows smart client user experiences that incorporate UI, media, and documents.

Then what about XBAP? XBAP stands for XAML Browser Application and it’s Microsoft’s, Windows-only, Rich Internet Application alternative to Macromedia’s (Adobe’s) Flex technology. The difference? It is based on the .NET Framework 3.0 and only runs in Internet Explorer ;). It seems fairly promising, considering this example by the British Library, which recently made available some of the best (ancient) books using XBAP tech. It’s called Turning the Pages 2.0. The original Turning the Pages, which made the news a couple or so years ago, still lives.

Read more about WPF and XBAP. Also, check out this interesting interview with Microsoft’s XPAB Program Managers.

Coming up: SlickSurf.com Mouse Feet Impressions

I received today the replacement mouse feet ordered from SlickSurf.com. They arrived in a little package as shown below. I'll give them a week or two to see how they stand up and then post some impressions here.

Your Wi-Fi can tell people a lot about you

Traveler beware! Taking care of business right before jumping in that plane heading south may render your vacation... unpleasant. This CNet article discusses the risks associated with using your laptop on unsecured wireless network, such as those found in airports and even networks with low (WEP) security. The data that can be sniffed (intercepted) on such networks can vary from usernames and passwords used on various websites, to lists of wireless networks your computer has already connected to, and more.

Soon after a computer powers up, it starts looking for wireless networks and network services. Even if the wireless hardware is then shut-off, a snoop may already have caught interesting data. Much more information can be plucked out of the air if the computer is connected to an access point, in particular an access point without security.

Read on... at CNeT.