While I'm sticking with Google for search, Microsoft's Bing home page has some of the coolest imagery around.

It's good enough to want to use as a desktop background. I could just do the old "right click, save as desktop" thing in my browser, but that would mean visiting the site regularly (and remembering to do so). So what's the alternative for the lazy user?

It turns out that I actually have lots of options. I first tried a piece of software called ZapBing, but that wasn't a great success (mainly as it managed to violate many of the Windows security features added post-Windows XP). The answer to that problem was a nifty tool called John's Background Switcher.

JBS is one of those tools that does just what you want - and then some. Need to create backdrops on the fly from your photos? From Facebook? From Picasa? From Flickr? From any RSS image feed? It's all in there.

The RSS feed tools are what saves the day here. All you need is the feed from the Bing Image Archive, pushed out by Feedburner [RSS feed link]. You can then set the feed as a source in JBS, and, well, Bob's your proverbial...

[For the more technical of you, if you're running Windows 7, you can actually build a RSS-powered desktop theme following these instructions.]

And yes, that does all mean you can get a desktop feed from I Can Haz Cheezeburger.

My workhorse machine is an HP 2710P tablet. It goes pretty much everywhere I go, and so it was the first machine (aside from my test PC) that I set up as a clean Windows 7 install, using the RTM build from MSDN.



First, the good news: Virtually everything works straight out of the box. There are Windows 7 graphics drivers ready and waiting for most of the machine's hardware, and even drivers for the fingerprint reader and the SD card slot.

Second, the not so good news: Some of HP's built-in tweaks and speciality hardware aren't supported yet, and there's some question over whether they will ever get Windows 7 drivers. That's always a risk when hardware pre-dates an OS. It's certainly a little annoying when the screen won't autorotate, and the slider volume control on the keyboard won't work - but there are workarounds using OS features such as Windows 7's Mobility Center (call it up with Windows-X) which gives you rotation and volume controls.

Third, the better news: You can get all those functions back using the latest versions of the Vista drivers from the HP web site.

So far I've been able to get back rotation and special keys (including the volume slider and mute button), the accelerometer-based hard drive shock protection and control of the WiFi and Bluetooth cards.

You'll need the following SoftPaqs:

SP43616 - HP Quick Launch screen rotation and special keys
SP38424 - hard drive shock protection
SP39734 - WiFi and Bluetooth manager

These will give you most of what you need. Some set up guides suggest using earlier versions of the Quick Launch driver, but this one works well for me.

You'll also find a couple of devices without drivers in Device Manager. These are part of the Intel AMT device management suite, and aren't really necessary for most users. If you do want to get them running you can find the drivers for these in these two SoftPaqs: SP38312 and SP38313.

The installers for these drivers won't run under Windows 7. However the files will unpack into folders under C:\swsetup. In Device Manager right-click on one of the two unsupported devices, and choose "Update Drivers". Choose to install from a local folder (and make sure the "use subfolders" option is selected). Pick C:\swsetup and let Windows install the device driver. Do the same for the other AMT device driver.

And that's everything you need for a fully configured Windows 7 machine.

Enjoy.

I found this forum thread very useful when setting up my machine

The day before yesterday I had to go into Putney to run an errand. I was passing the local branch of Next when I looked in the window. Now, if you know me well enough, you'd know that's something I don't normally do - unless of course it's a bookshop or a gadget shop that I'm passing.

I suspect it was because Next is right next to Waterstones, but that really doesn't matter. One of the dummies in the window was wearing a T-shirt I just had to have.

Anyone who's had their hands inside a car engine will probably have used a Haynes manual to guide their first fumbling tweak with a shiny new socket set. So when I saw a shirt that purported to be the cover of a Haynes manual for an Imperial AT-AT walker...

Three of my geekinesses in one item of clothing? What's to say no? And there was one in my size!



Now if only I had a socket set big enough.

Clearing out the spam folder on our mail server, I found a piece of spam that gave me a little twinge of nostalgia, taking me back to those heady days of 1994.

Yes, I got some Green Card spam.

Wow. Commercial spam is over 14 years old - in fact nearly 15 years. The spamgularity awaits.

"It's like watching a RAID array rebuild".

(29.4% Complete, Time Remaining 399.8 Minutes)

The house NAS is slowly on its way back to health.

One of the four drives in the RAID array lunched itself a while back, and I received a replacement this afternoon. Fitting it was a snap, the Buffalo Terastation Pro uses quick release drive caddies, so all I had to do was unscrew and replace the drive. The folk at RL Supplies had the right drives, and they delivered the replacement pretty quickly.

(Actually, the first thing I had to do was find the key to open the drive bay door, which in my usual efficiency I had "filed". Once that panic was over I could get to work.)

Once it was in I powered up the NAS to discover that the crash had also lunched its firmware. Luckily I could download some replacement code, and fire it off at the box. Of course the firmware updater needed me to turn of the firewall on my desktop PC so it could actually see the NAS. Still, updating the firmware was pretty straight forward, so I didn't have to much to worry about there.

Reflashed, it booted, and I could finally see the web UI. The three remaining disks were OK, and all that remained was clicking the "rebuild array" button. Oh, and waiting. And waiting. It's looking as though the process will take about ten hours. At least I was running RAID 5 and could do the restore, so waiting for the data to come back is really not too much of a hassle compared to not having anything.

And then I'll be able to get back to the house music collection - as I've ripped everything we have and stored it on the NAS. And, err, the wedding photos.

Phew.

4.6% done.

I took advantage of John Lewis' technology clearance shelves in their Peter Jones store yesterday, and spent £25 on a new DSL router for the house network.

While switch to DSL Max a while back had sped up our network connection a fair bit, I wasn't entirely sure that we were getting the best out of the available connection. To be honest, the fact that Linksys hadn't fixed the VPN bug in there firmware which meant that a PPTP connection wouldn't traverse the NAT mappings was also a problem. So when I saw a D-Link DSL-G624T for not very much at all, I decided it was worth trying a swap out. After all, this was a router that was designed for ADSL 2+ connections, instead of my old ADSL 2 hardware.

Setting up the new router wasn't quite as easy as my previous Zyxel and Linksys devices, but once I'd understood how it mapped NAT connections for my servers, I was able to get it up and running in fairly short order. While web pages seemed a little snappier, it wasn't until I decided to download a DVD image from the US that I saw things had really improved - I was getting sustained download speeds of over 750KB/s, rather than the (still respectable) 400-500KB/s I'd been getting before.

I think I managed to get a little bit of a bargain there.

Yesterday I hooked up a Slingbox to our Sky+ system.

The Sky+ lets us time shift our TV watching, and the Slingbox adds a new dimension: place shifting. It turns the video output from the Sky+ into a stream of IP data that we can watch anywhere in the house, or anywhere there's an Internet connection (once I punch the appropriate holes in the firewall). It also means I don't have to run extra cabling round the house, or spend money on additional Sky subscriptions.

It's a fine example of appliance design - simple software, easy to understand instructions, just a few connectors, and underneath it all a device that's doing something rather complex.

All I had to do was plug the box into the house network, hook up a couple of IR emitters, and plug the Slingbox into the Sky+'s S-video output. Once I installed the software on a PC (Mac and mobile versions are available), a wizard walked me through configuration and video stream optimisation, and, well, there it was, working.

One neat feature is the on-screen remote, which looks just like, and works just like, a Sky+ remote. So I can use the EPG, and even watch stored programmes (even if I keep trying to click on the screen). I'll even be able to program the box when we're on the road...

One of my favourite bits of Watchmen is the comic-within-the-comic, one of Moore's alternate world's pirate horror comics, "The Tales Of The Black Freighter". Images from an issue of the comic interspersed the story, adding a counterpoint to the big picture of a world tumbling into chaos, and highlighting its darker moments.

And now someone has extracted the Black Freighter from Watchmen, giving us a full 20 pages of speech and illustrations from a comic that never was.

Goggles bills itself as a Google Maps flight simulator. It's not really, but it;'s a nifty bit of AJAX mashup work, putting a small 3D plane in your browser, and using it to control Google Maps.

Here I am flying over Park Lane.



Fly the little plane around the map, using your keyboard, as aerial photographs from Google Maps scroll by underneath. It gives a whole new look to Google sightseeing. Only a few cities so far (including London and New York), but fun!

Just don't crash the plane...