StickyC.com

Thank you for polluting my search results, Knowledgestorm and Bitpipe. Thank you so very much for taking up 54 of the first 100 hits for “Mail archive software” with your meta-search results. It’s bad enough you’ve cloned your page to a dozen or so server aliases on your own domains, but you’ve managed to convince some other what-I-once-thought-were-reputable sites to include your advertising scripts as well (are you listening Businessweek, WashingtonTechnology, and LinuxInsider?). Your front page almost looks like a legitimate business, but your search-engine spam gives you away. You guys are so off my Christmas list.

I managed to badger my roomie into picking up the external HD-DVD drive for his Xbox 360 - I think it was the Army of Darkness HD-DVD that did it (alas, not Dune in HD).

Quick Notes - Wow! The picture is awesome. I used to think DirecTV’s HD feeds kinda sucked, now I know they completely suck arse. Only the occasional football game comes close to the level of detail. The pay HD feeds (HBO, etc) are absolutely miserable in comparison. The drive comes with the HD version of King Kong and it’s sooo beautiful. We were in the middle of a Sharks game and had only planned on watching a few minutes of it to see the action, but ended up watching almost half the movie.

The Remote is excellent as well. Nicely weighted with big buttons, much better than I expected for an add on. The bonus is that it replaces the miserable-for-DVD-control XBox wireless controller.

The only negative so far is the audio mix (on at least King Kong) is very quiet and not nearly as powerful as the standard-definition counterparts. From what I’ve read on the net, this is a known issue and Microsoft is working on a fix.

From what I’ve read, almost all of the HD-DVD playback process is handled in source code (somewhere there was a post that there’s more lines in the HD-DVD drivers than all of Win95). The great thing about this is that it makes fixing playback issues just a matter of software updates (of course, the flipside is that as Microsoft’s DRM grip tightens, locking down the player even more is also just a patch away).

Overall -two way big thumbs up. For an extra $200, if you’ve got an HD-capable set and a 360, this is a no-brainer. Even better purchase than Gears of War.

Peter Miller - Magnetic Yellow Card Peter Miller’s come up with an elegant solution to a problem I’ve been wrestling with as a while - how to let cagers know they’re driving like jackasses without actually calling them jackasses (which usually ends up in escalating hostility). Magnetic Yellow Cards that can be thrown to stick to the vehicle with a kindly message explaining (in this case) the driver got too close to the rider. They wont stick to windows so they can’t obscure the driver’s vision and wont damage the paint. I’m thinking they also wont stick to Saturns. Too bad, I’ve found a disproportionate number of Saturn drivers who’ve forgotten fundamental driving skills. The best part? It’s open source! Now to order 10,000 “Please use your turn signal” cards…

IntelliAdmin.com: New Remote Desktop client released by Microsoft Microsoft has released a new version of the Remote Desktop Client that is compatible with some of the new features of Vista. It is available for Windows XP, and 2003. Some of the new features: · Network Level Authentication · Server Authentication · Plug and Play redirection · TS Gateway support · Monitor Spanning · 32-bit color and font smoothing

As a long time VNC user, I’ve come to see the light that is Windows’ excellent Remote Desktop client. I’ve found it beats VNC is pretty much every way except allowing file transfers (and even that’s not in all versions of VNC) and only viewing Windows hosts (there are RD clients for OS-X and linux).