StickyC.com

Home Theater: 1080i v. 1080p Here’s a fairly well written article about why 1080p isn’t a must have feature in an HDTV.

The Road to Know Where: Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft A pretty extensive list of cool tools free from MS for Windows XP. Some, I’ve already documented (all of the PowerTools are here), but others are new to me and sound like they’re worth checking out.

I’ve upgraded StickyC.com to Wordpress 2.04, and applied a nice looking theme and fixed the comments. Since the vast majority of you are reading this via RSS, you probably wont even notice. Note that I did change the permalink structure, so if your RSS reader is using a stale cache of the feed and you click on a particular article, it might not come up. Just refresh the feed and you should be fine, or click on this article’s link and you can use the powers of the internets to surf the site directly.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had problems with WMV files playing under Firefox - maybe 80% of the time, when attempting to load a page with embedded video, the browser would just ‘go away’. No error dialog, no bleep, nothing.

Turns out, this is a conflict with the excellent VideoLanClient player’s WMV plugin for Firefox. The fix is quick & painless - Locate your Mozilla Firefox plugins folder (usually C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Plugins) and remove the file npvlc.dll (or just drag it somewhere else for safe keeping).

So far, I haven’t found any detrimental effects and now VMW files play just fine all the time.

More info from the Firefox FAQ here.

Going Adobe-Free for PDFs - Cantoni.org File under “now why didn’t I think of that”. I’ve long been sick of the Acrobat bloat, I didn’t even know there were alternatives for viewing (on the PC - Mac’s got quick & easy PDF viewing built into the freakin’ OS).

PlacesBar Constructor - Customize the Places Bar For most Windows applications, when you do a “Save As…”, you’re presented with a standard file file dialog. The shortcuts on the left present the most popular options for the average user. These shortcuts can be modified using TweakUI, or you can follow the steps here to change them to something that better fits your usage patterns.

workFRIENDLY - BETA It’s hard not to blog something as funny as this - Feed it a URL and WorkFRIENDLY will reformat the web page to look like a Word doc. The best part - There’s a boss key that changes the text to a doc about productivity strategies.