Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I'm helping marypcb work on a Tom's Hardware piece on mobile mapping software. As it's for an international audience she needs to be able to show some US specific features, like the traffic tools. That's fine with Google Maps for Mobile or Yahoo! Go - both have one installer for wherever you are in the world, and you can map US traffic from the UK quite happily.

Unfortunately there are two different versions of Windows Live Search for Mobile. One US, with traffic data, and a UK version for the rest of the world, without. It doesn't matter which version you try to download, the site will download one standard installer no matter which country you select.

The first time the application runs, it checks the device location, and if you're not using a US phone it gives you the Rest of the World version. You can be in the US with a UK device and you won't be able to get the traffic data - so you could get stuck on an LA freeway without knowing how to escape the jam. Now Microsoft rarely makes two binaries where one will do, so I suspected that what we were seeing was something in the application configuration. I first used a mobile device registry inspector to see if the application was using the registry.

It wasn't. So it was time to pour through the Windows Mobile file system to see if there was anything there. There was. Sat right next to the application executable was a preferences.xml file. I copied it across to my desktop, and had a look through with an XML-aware text editor. The file contained some canned searches, details of most of my last few searches, as well as some slightly less obvious sections. In one, <R>, was the text GB. I changed it to US, and put the file back on the mobile device.

I reopened Windows Live Search. Bingo! The traffic option was now available, and I could see the state of the LA rush hour. At least I won't get stuck on that stretch of 110...

Our electroluminescent wire stair lights are up for Ikeahacker's "hack of the month".

You know what to do...
so make with the clicky!

A blog on hacking Ikea furniture and, err, stuff. You know you want to get more out of that flatpack - well, this is what other folk have done, to give you ideas and tips.

Me, I want to know what to do with the hundreds of allen keys we seem to have...

Most useful!

(and it mentions our stairlights!)

...about a hacked OS X 86 than runs in a VMware image?

They're true. It's bloody slow though - even on a 3GHz hyper-threading box.

I decided to put on my journalist's hat and track the image down. It's not difficult to find - it's well seeded and carried on many BitTorrent trackers. The 2GB image takes a while to download, and then requires considerable unpacking. Once unpacked, you can open the image and start running. Some of the VMware device locations in the image need to be changed, and there's no networking, but it boots. And runs.

Well, "runs" is a bit of a misnomer, I think I prefer "crawls".

The lack of speed (the hype from the Wired article is best ignored) isn't surprising, VMware and Virtual PC need to know quite a bit about the OS they're running in order to optimise the virtual machine for the client OS, and this is only a hack of something that's actually intended for a specific hardware platform.

The hack has removed the current link to the developer motherboard TPM chip, which Rosetta needs to run. As Apple intends to preserve its hardware margins, we can expect that the final OS X for x86 will use TPM for a lot more than the current developer release - so the hacks used here are unlikely to work for anything else.

It's still rather odd seeing Aqua starting up on my PC.

If you've got access to a MSDN subscription, then you may want to try out the Windows XP version of Internet Explorer 7 beta 1. Unfortunately the standard install will replace your existing copy of Internet Explorer - and, to be honest, the IE 7 beta isn't the most stable browser around.

Now, you could dual boot Windows Vista, but the Vista IE 7 isn't the same as the Windows XP version, and setting up a whole Virtual PC or VMware image just to try out a browser can seem a bit like overkill...

However there is a simple hack that will make IE 7 work as a standalone browser. Just follow these simple instructions (based on the instructions for older versions of IE):

• Download the IE7 Beta 1 Install from MSDN
• Open the install file with WinRAR (yep, it's an EXE, but it's a self extracting EXE) and extract them to a folder. Alternatively, you can just run the EXE, make a copy of the files which are extracted in the first step, and cancel the install. I was too chicken to do this on my work computer.
• Look in the folder you extracted to for the file SHLWAPI.DLL. Delete this file.
• Create a new text file in the folder, then rename it to IEXPLORE.exe.local.

Then just click on iexplore.exe and the browser will launch and run...

One thing to note - you won't have access to your bookmarks, and trying to open the favourites menu will cause a non-fatal error. Still, you're not going to be using IE 7 for anything other than test purposes...

If you need standalone versions of older browsers (not just IE) you can find them at browsers.evolt.org. How about a nostalgic spin round the interweb in Oracle's Powerbrowser? Or Netscape Navigator 1.1?

...a scrolling message mug.



I'm just not sure about it saying "World's Greatest Dad". Why not the M25 version with "Variable Speed Limits In Operation", or the "LA Story" version with "There are more things in heaven and earth, Harry, than are dreamt of N your philosophy. "

[via Red Ferret]