Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

If you send email to the Royal Mail opt out address to stop "Door to Door" deliveries of unaddressed junk mail, they'll just email you back a form to fill out.

I've taken the liberty of putting it here for you all to use, without having to send the email. Just print it out, fill it in, sign and send off. Unfortunately you'll need a stamp - I can't do that bit for you!

If you want to opt out of other junk mail (the stuff that comes addressed to you), then you'll need to register with the Mailing Preference Service.

( Here's the form for opting out of Door to Door mail deliveries. )

Hopefully, things like this will stop the Royal Mail from threatening the jobs of postmen who are just trying to help their customers.

I know we're not the only folks around with a Toshiba Portege R100...

A failed software install left ours blue-screening on boot due to a corrupted driver. While we've got a USB DVD drive in the house, the R100 doesn't support USB CD or DVD booting. I've spent a goodly chunk of the afternoon trying to find someway of getting it to work.

DUSE, the DOS USB project doesn't work with the R100's USB hardware (though it may well for many other platforms). However, I was able to track down a site with a copy of Toshiba's own recovery boot floppy software - which is conspicuously absent from the UK site.

You'll probably need to add files like SMARTDRV to the disk just to be sure...

It's not just for recovering Windows installs - you can also use it to install Linux or any other OS on your laptop. OpenSolaris, anyone?