dom.blog

Reindeer Post

It technically launched two weeks ago, but there’s still more than enough time to tell you about… Reindeer Post! Yes, over the holiday I’ve been working on this joint business venture: my role, unsurprisingly, was to build the website. The idea is very simple – personalised letters from Father Christmas for children (or even ironic adults ). Simply head over to the site, fill out our order form and (for a low low price) the intended recipient will receive a customised letter from Santa addressed to them in the post. And let’s face it, getting letters is pretty cool these days even when it’s just a bank statement… how amazing to get one from the North Pole? (Or Lapland, he said hastily.)

A word about the website itself: yes, it’s very simple and highly imperfect. I know this, honestly. But I am reminded of that erstwhile Microsoft saying – “shipping is a feature” – and particularly so for such a seasonally-dependent service. The important thing is that the site is up and running and works, which is does, so that we can all learn lessons for next year. So go on – if you know anyone who would just love a letter from Father Christmas, tell them about Reindeer Post. Ta

~

The Wit and Wisdom of My Mates And I: Part 2

Part 2: On Bad Wives
Ladies! Please make sure you don’t live like Jane Wallis, for she is “a great talker, and spent the time in which she ought to have been providing for her husband’s comfort, in standing at the corner of the street gossiping with all the idle people who chanced to be passing. And then the money Dick earned went to pay for smart bonnets and gowns for her, for she was very fond of finery. Then when the bills came in, Dick complained and grumbled; but it was of no use. She answered him with such a storm of abusive words, and with such a burst of passion, as fairly drove him out of his home, and sent him to ‘Red Lion.'”.

Oh dear. I think we all know what happens next…“Well, one night it came to and end… We rushed to the front to see what was going on, and we saw there such a sight as I never saw before, and I trust I shall never see again. Poor Jane Wallis was lying on the ground apparently dead, her head bleeding dreadfully, and over her was standing Dick, with the poker in his hand, only half sobered by what he had done.”

The Internet was down yesterday, and so I was forced to turn to more inventive methods of time-wasting. These are very rough and ready, but I’m not a graphics person by any stretch of the imagination, so allow it:

Fight, fight, fight!

Inner turmoil?

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

My current background

I change my desktop background fairly often. (Known as a ‘wallpaper’ way back in Windows 95, it is irritatingly referred to as a ‘screensaver’ quite a bit these days.) It goes from Doctor Who wallpapers to scenic views and cool photography, until I get bored with it and change it again. I’ve gone back to this photo a few times though, taken from a nice collection at wstaylor.net and – I think – included in Windows Vista.

What’s yours?