Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Every three years or so I have a handful of incredibly busy days, when I hit strossian word counts, while absorbing and interpreting a fire hose of information. It's some of the hardest work I've done, trying to understand the whys and wherefores and at the same time pushing the boundaries and coming up with what-ifs and ah-has.

That's been my last week, as Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 - both on the desktop and on the server.

Starting with a two and half day closed door briefing up in Redmond, where thirty or so journalists and analysts were introduced to Windows 8 Server, it was followed up with a flight down to LA for another closed door briefing on the Windows 8 Desktop the day before Microsoft publicly unveiled everything at its BUILD conference. At 6 o'clock the night before the conference began, and about 15 hours from the lifting of the first of several hefty non-disclosures I got my hands on a loan tablet PC running the developer preview Windows 8 code.

That left me very little time to write a series of news stories and two in-depth reviews, as well as a long blog post analysing things from a developer point of view. By the time the last piece went live on Wednesday evening I'd written over 12,000 words, including two 5000 word reviews, taken 50 or so photographs and screenshots, editing them in Lightroom and exchanged many emails with editors eight time zones away. Oh, and had about four hours sleep a night. And remember, hotel rooms do not make good studios for device photography.

I did make a couple of personal millestones, with one piece linked on the influential Techmeme site,and another quoted in the San Jose Mercury News. (Oh, and you need to check who favourited my developer blog post on FaceBook!)

Time for a little linkage:

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.

Scott Hanselman's annual list of developer and power user tools for Windows is just out, and there are a lot of good tools in there - many of which I use every day. They range from memory joggers and notetakers to DOS emulators and deep debugging tools.

It's one of those lists that every time you look at it, you'll find something more and something that solves one of those nagging little issues (like the application that take a screenshot of your desktop every hour or so, so you can remember just what you were doing when...).

There's one area where Scott doesn't have some of the problems I have - working with more than one machine at a time. I try to keep distractions off my main screen when I'm working, so I have a laptop on an old monitor stand on my desk. I can just pull it out to type on when I need it. These days, however, I don't even need to do that.

A software keyboard mouse switch does the work for me, and all I need to do is slide my mouse of the side of one screen, onto another - in fact on to another machine. I'm currently on my third tool of this type. I started out with Synergy, but the project started lagging OS development and there hasn't been a new build for years. Then I switch to Multiplicity, but it too drifted off into the realms where updates are few and far between.

So I'm now using Input Director, which is one of those Ronseal applications, that just does what it says on the tin. It's easy to set up, easy to use, and works well with Windows 7.

That's me happy.