A new beta build of Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 was released yesterday. Like the previous Wave 4 build, conversation view was plagued by an annoying advert, yes you could close it to make it go away but it was an annoying extra click.

Yes, well annoying. Microsoft have however also added an option to turn it off. This only effects the conversation view, not the Social or Contact list views. It is fairly well hidden in options. If you make your way to Messages and down the bottom under Conversations is an option called "Show expanded footer in conversation windows" uncheck that and the advert will be hidden by default.

Sorted. My main issue has been resolved, now if only we could get handwriting support back.

Those following me on Twitter will know I've been away with Catherine to the Lake District for a few days to enjoy the odd walk and bike ride here and there, and also to enjoy the dark (but mostly cloudy) skies and hunt for Perseids.

I'm in the process of going through the photographs I took for use with Photosynth and getting them uploaded. For starters here's Buckle Yeat. Don't forget to press P to toggle through the different point cloud options, press F to make the viewer fullscreen.

We stayed at the Buckle Yeat Guest House in Near Sawrey, approx 4 miles south west of Windermere. More Photosynths to follow over the next few days, including some landscapes.

The other day we got Gamercast listed on Google News, however we had a bit of trouble getting our news articles correctly indexed so I had to find a Google News sitemap plugin or skin for b2evolution.

After 30 minutes of searching I came up empty handed. So I just modified the existing _sitemap skin to do the job.

You can download it here.

There are a couple of things you'll need to do to get it working. First up you'll need to specify the publication name, language and any Google keywords in the file directly. I didn't pull this information out of the blog because the blog name might be different to the publication name on Google News, plus Google recommends specific keywords. So yes this may cause issues if you run multiple blogs on the same backend which you want listed on Google news, however as a workaround you can just use multiple copies of the skin. There's also some fields not used by the skin, such as the tags field or the subscription options.

You'll then want to upload it to the b2evolution skins directory into a folder of your choice, for example _newsmap. You can then check to see if it is working by visiting yourblog.somewhere/?tempskin=_newsmap that should show articles from the last two days. All you'd need to do then is submit if via Google's webmaster tools.

Microsoft released the new Beta of the developer tools for Windows Phone 7.

Probably the most interesting bit for end-users is the Windows Phone 7 emulator, which lets us have a little play with the device. However in the original only Internet Explorer is available but like always the guys at XDA Developers cracked that emulator image to unlock full functionality like they did with the last 2 CTP releases. So if you're curious what Windows Phone 7 will look like check out the video Long Zheng put together earlier.

What I'm excited about is OneNote integration with SkyDrive - something we don't have with OneNote 2010 on Windows Mobile at the moment, it'll only sync with SharePoint. But it looks like with Windows Phone 7, we can sync directly with SkyDrive, which means Gamercast's shownotes can be done out and about now, sweet.

*Assuming you can find games that even work on a Mac.

The Macintosh gaming scene received a boost earlier this year when Valve announced they were bringing Steam, along with their Source games like Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal over to Mac OS X.

I was expecting to see Adam (the only person I know with a Macintosh) on Steam a lot more, and maybe even playing games with me. Before he'd have to boot into Windows and so it was quite rare we'd ever have a game together. I was thinking great, now I'll see Adam on all the time and we can play some TF2. I was wrong however, I haven't seen him logged in on Steam once. Maybe he just doesn't feel like playing games he played on the PC 5 or 6 years ago.

Or maybe there's another reason. Anandtech recently did some benchmarks. Let's just say, the results aren't good for the Macintosh.

On a 2010 MacBook Pro, Half-Life Episode 2 runs 54% faster under Windows than on OS X. Now that's a fairly low-end system. Let's be honest, it's a laptop. Laptop = weak graphics.

How about on a high-end system? Something like a computer with 2 x 2.93Ghz Quad-Core (eight cores in total) Nehalem Xeon processors, 6GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 285.

Windows gets, quite literally over twice the framerate at some resolutions. Ouch. Maybe this explains why I've not seen Adam joining the Gamercast weekly TF2 matches, maybe it just runs too slow.

That's not all that's bad with the Mac OS X versions. The graphics are foggy and have quite obvious texture banding in some locations. So not only is it drastically slower, but it also looks worse.

If you wanna play games don't get a Macintosh.

In my on going struggle with Creative and their Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS I've now come across a new problem that manifested a couple of weeks ago. I'm not entirely sure why it started happening then, maybe it was the heat? Maybe after 7 or 8 years the card is finally starting to die.

Now sometimes after resuming from sleep, any sound has distortion and noise in it. So far I'm restarting the Windows Audio service to get things back to normal.

There's a couple of ways to restart services in Windows Vista or Windows 7. The quickest way is to open an elevated command prompt by pressing Start, typing cmd right-clicking on the cmd program when it shows up, right-click and select 'Run as administrator'. Alternatively to right-clicking and selecting the option you can also hold CTRL+Shift and click instead, both should elevate.

Once its open, type the following, giving a short pause to allow the system to stop the service:

net stop audiosrv
net start audiosrv

The sound should now be back to normal.

You can also restart the service, by typing services.msc into the Start Menu (you won't need to elevate this), alternatively it can be opened via the Services tab in the Task Manager. Then find the Windows Audio services, right-click and select restart.