Note – title is for ‘catchy title’ purposes only, I don’t claim this is actual hacking on any level 
One of the nifty features of my new laptop is ‘Dell MediaDirect‘ – essentially a button which quickly loads a hidden partition allowing you to listen to your music, see your pictures, watch videos and DVDs and display PowerPoints all without ever booting up Windows. It’s nice to have – and though not as pretty as Windows Media Center – a fairly cool thing to have available.
MediaDirect runs on Windows XP Embedded, so I wondered if there was a quick and easy way to have a bit of a play about with it. Thankfully, there is!
1. Make a PowerPoint presentation containing a hyperlink to C:\Windows\explorer.exe
2. If using Office 2007, save this in the 97-2003 file format so that MediaDirect’s 2003 viewer can open it
3. Boot into MediaDirect and click on the link – and voila!
4. To enable the Task Manager so that you can quickly repeat this process in future, find taskmgr.ex_ in the ‘Windows \ System32’ directory and rename to taskmgr.exe.
XP Embedded
(Paint isn’t included in that version of XP Embedded and loading Vista’s version from the main partition didn’t work, but a copy of XP’s Paint did the screenshot job nicely.)
So – what practical purpose does this all serve? Probably very little. There is some space – about 265MB worth – for adding your own ‘quick access’ stuff. A fully functional (it appears) version of Windows Media Player 10 is included. A few DOS games – loaded from the Vista partition – also work, which is useful since they didn’t in Vista. It could also be feasible to update the PowerPoint viewer and allow viewing 2007 file formats. It also occurred to me that if your main Windows installation was damaged beyond repair that this could be a good way of easily accessing your files from the hard drive, since USB devices are recognised by XP Embedded. But really, it was just nice to achieve – really by accident – at 2 in the morning 
I had a dream last night. In my dream, Bart Simpson was trying to find the distance from the bottom of my house to the top of the Eiffel Tower. He was using Pythagoras, since he knew the height of the Eiffel Tower and was looking on a map to measure the horizontal distance. In my dream, I stopped and realised: “but the Earth is curved! That won’t work!”
When I woke up, I was still thinking “and even if it did work, the height would be so tiny compared to the length that it would get lost in the error…”
I relay this dream to illustrate that, somehow, my brain is actually still working after school. And I’ve been surprisingly productive with it actually – especially since my aunt has appointed me her PA – so I’ve been busy phoning up people to get spare parts for dishwashers etc. I can do that! Soft skills! (I do get paid, don’t worry )
Other events: long-overdue Birmingham visit (yay!), Physics class pub evening (I love it when teachers buy you drinks), Saoirse buying me a birthday present (thanks!) and Dominic playing with Virtual PC. For, y’know, the thrill of seeing Windows 98 in a little box.
C’mon, I have to blog about this. We have a new Prime Minister! I was saying earlier how it’s the equivalent to football fans of a World Cup, but that’s not really true, since they are more similar to general elections. Actually getting a new Prime Minister is less predictable, even rarer, and even cooler. So hurrah! I had to blog, even if I have nothing intelligent to say. (“Quite clearly” you cynics mutter )
(Fun Fact: I was probably in the pub at the exact moment Gordon Brown took office today. It was either that or eating fish and chips. How very British and on-message am I today?! 
)
So, I was born into a Margaret Thatcher world, followed by John Major, and then Tony Blair. Tony Blair, in fact, throughout my entire adolescence. And now Gordon Brown, when I am all grown up
Exciting! *politics geek*
I’m just back from a final trip for the wonderful A-Level English classes of QPCS: a ‘Literary High Tea’ featuring readings (for those of you interested in this sort of thing) from Kate Ansell, Jeremy Sheldon, Heidi James and Toby Litt. (Way to go for having a proper website, Toby! 
) It was great fun, and having the presence of mind to take along a camera (for once) I will now present snaps for your delectation and delight:
I won’t lie, the hotel was rather nice
We brought the tone down
The Most Conclusive and Memorial Exam-O-Meter!
This is probably the most arbitrary exam rating I’ve done of the lot: on the one hand, objectively, I probably didn’t do that well, all things considered. However, since I had pretty low expectations anyway – it’s Physics, not to mention the dreaded Synoptic unit – I actually rather enjoyed it, in a strange sort of way. I managed to show the units were homogeneous, for the very last time! And I also thought – yup, if things had gone differently, if Physics had been life-or-death for me, I could have done this ‘properly’, and that means something to me.
Anyway – exams are all over now, and I am ‘free’ of school! Though Ms Hook already wants me back to do summer school work but heh, I get paid, so it has a different ring to it 
Best of luck to those with a few exams left! In fact, best of luck to everyone at any stage of school. Make the most of it 
and have fun…
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
