Paul Smith's Blog

Ian Bell over at Digital Trends caught my attention when he repeatedly claimed that some users who have Windows Update configured a certain way would get Bing Desktop automatically. The article in question is a review of Bing Desktop - which is basically an application which places a search box on your desktop, along with the Bing image of the day as your wallpaper. Straight forward enough right, they take some pot shots at it - they're a pretty anti-Microsoft website....

Long term readers will know I've long been a fan of the Tablet PC. Having owned two and certainly would have owned a few more if the budget had been more favourable. My first was a Toshiba Portege M200, and my most recent has been a Motion Computing LE1700. Windows XP SP2 was really great at making a PC usable with a pen. Windows Vista took that a step further and really developed a lot of the things we take for granted today, a handwriting recognition engine that learns and of course pen flicks....

An issue a few people are running into while they're getting to grips with Windows "8" is the remote desktop application, the new dare I say it "Metro-style" doesn't seem to be all that great. I personally can't get it to do anything - it's also pretty rare I'd be using Remote Desktop fullscreen, I'm usually doing something else at the same time. Nevertheless it is of course possible to just use the original Remote Desktop client....

As revealed in the latest Buildings "Windows 8" blog post, half of all users shut down their computers rather than putting them sleep/standby. Shocking statistics in my opinion. No doubt compounded by the fact that in Windows 7, the power button, would shut the system down rather than put it to sleep by default like it would in Windows Vista. Windows Vista introduced the new hybrid sleep mode, that writes the contents of memory to disk, like if the system was hibernating but would then suspend the system like it was sleeping....

So the Daily Mail picked up a story about a brilliant meteor moving across the sky over Peru. First up the Daily Fail incorrectly call it a meteorite - which is what they're called when they're on the ground. They're meteors when seen in the atmosphere, meteoroids when in space and meteorites on the ground. It isn't hard, if they had just asked you know, one of the expert type people they wouldn't have made such a play-school mistake....

Yesterday, at the All Things Digital conference - usually something I avoid - Microsoft unveiled the new Metro style user interface for Windows. Optimised for touch, but compatible with a mouse and keyboard. Alarmingly applications that make sure of this user interface are written in HTML5 and Javascript. Hopefully Silverlight, and even WPF will make an appearance in the future. It also looks like the Office team have finished their takeover of Windows, with Jensen Harris in charge of the video!...

Here's one to add to your toolbox, especially for people who do a lot of consumer oreanted tech support. The recently released Microsoft Safety Scanner. It's a self-contained anti-malware scanner, the kind which is handy to run off a USB drive to scan someone's computer. No installation or internet connection is required, as most sophisticated malware will block installations of known anti-malware and block internet access to various websites. But copies you download are only good for 10 days before you have to download a newer version....

Internet Explorer 9 came out a few weeks ago, if you're not using it. I'd recommend it. Especially people who are still using Firefox. It is well documented as the fastest browser out there. Not just in javascript speed, but also important areas like start time, and page rendering. With the update to Windows Phone coming later this year, Internet Explorer 9 will be included. With it comes all the HTML5, and hardware acceleration that IE9 brought to Windows, but now in your pocket....

...Almost (see my previous entry on Cosmonaut day). 50 years ago today, Yuri Gagarin successfully orbited the Earth, paving the way towards the stars. But disappointingly all we've done in the last 40 years is orbit the Earth. It's time human space flight was properly funded.

With Internet Explorer 9 Microsoft have made some changes to how it renders which end-users may find noticable. Previously in Internet Explorer 7 and 8 it didn't matter, nor was detectable to an end-user if IE was rendering a page in quirks mode or in standards mode. Internet Explorer 9 however has removed the 2 pixel border that previously versions of Internet Explorer had. On the left IE9 is rendering a page as IE8 would....