First, open any Office 2007 application (besides Outlook) and click on the nifty new “Office Orb” in the upper left-hand corner.

Second, at the bottom of the menu that appears, click on “-application name- Options” (where -application name- equals the app you happen to have open).

Third, on the default “Popular” tab of the new options window, select your color scheme from the drop down menu on the right. Please note that this option changes the color for all Office 07 apps so you can’t set each to a separate color scheme.

There you go. That’s it! You can choose from one of the follow schemes so hopefully you can find one that works with your windows theme. I’m just glad to be rid of “Zesty Cresty Blue”.

<rant>
So what’s going on here?  We’ve got a reasonably powerful device with web connectivity, and a clock is the best we can come up?  Surely the other top sellers will be better.  Let’s see; we’ve got a mediocre home screen customizer with really tiny Windows 95-style graphics.  There’s CorePlayer, which is decent, but it used to be free (back when it was still TCPMP).  There’s a tweaking app which makes tweaks to the registry for you and may have some other useful features.  Next is a notes management app, and then ANOTHER STUPID CLOCK.

I can’t put money down for this stuff, especially when I see some very nice free apps on the market.  Google Maps is very well executed.  Windows Live Search is very functional and simple to use.  Yahoo! Go is a pretty good piece of software, too; a little slow, but it’s a beta still.  These are all free.

Where are the professional, useful applications?  Where are the real developers hiding? 

What about all the wonderful Web 2.0 (forgive me) web apps available?  I’m talking about Google Docs, Mint.com, and similar.  Where are useful apps like those in a portable format?  So far the only strides have been online versions of Gmail and Google Reader ( and a few others).  Where is the creativity?  Where’s a blog tool that supports WordPress?  Where’s an IM tool that works?  Where’s a real replacement for Microsoft Reader (MobiPocket really sucks)?  Nah, we don’t need that; we need a ringtone manager or seven different weather apps.
</rant>

Here’s my point, in case I haven’t hammered it in enough.  Before developing another alarm clock or home screen plugin, step back and see what would REALLY be cool.  Until then, I suppose we could always take our agendas to the eXtreme.

I took the opportunity to upgrade my Smoothwall to the new version 3 last night, and took some pictures of my “network closet”.  I think this serves as an example of how NOT to EVER treat the heart of your home’s connectivity.  My network closet is currently just an area of my unfinished basement with a little table set up to hold everything.  There’s a big, ancient, 3Com switch, a smaller gigabit switch, my cable modem, my trusty Asus wireless AP, and the router for my VoIP service.  Note the huge power strip on the floor, right next to my water heater.

So last night’s project brought up a unique case of jury-rigging.  The little Compaq thing I’m using for the Smoothwall used a laptop CD drive, which has gone bad.  The power connector wasn’t a standard Molex, and I could not find a splitter anywhere.  My power supply supplies have suffered severe losses,  so I couldn’t do a dual power supply thing.  Luckily, I found a fix.

In my rummaging, I turned up an unused USB-IDE hard drive case.  I stole the power from that and plugged the IDE in from the Smoothwall box, and was able to make the upgrade from there.  Ugly, but workable. 

So how’s Smoothwall 3?  It’s a decent upgrade, actually.  I wouldn’t run and upgrade if you’ve got a good system going, but the built-in QoS should help when I’m trying to torrent and make a phone call at the same time, and there are many more configuration options right in the GUI.  I’d say consider it if you’re needing a little extra bandwidth management or switching from a store-bought router/firewall.

Interconnectivity and “community” are a few of the important terms in today’s techno-world, but these dudes skyrocket that idea to a whole new level. I can pretty safely say that this is the most amazing bit of software I’ve seen in quite some time:

I guess it’s just one step closer to when we can all just jack into “the collective” from our “cerebral connection enabled” couches. What a glorious day that will be.

Personally, I had no trouble with Windows ME, and I expect I’ll have no trouble with Vista.  There’s a lot of contention out there about whether or not it’s worth upgrading, what the exact benefits are, and whether the new OS will “take” or not.  I guess only time will tell.

While we’re talking about time, I wonder what the future of the OS is.  There’s a lot of talk about virtualization these days, and with Macs running Windows, and VMware running anything, it makes you wonder what things will look like 10 or 20 years from now. 

To close, here’s a completely unrelated link sure to BLOW YOUR MIND.

Back when Half-Life 2 was released, Valve re-released the original Half-Life, but upgraded to run on the then new Source engine. Unfortunately, this only updated the physics of the game. All the image maps were left the same and the result was not much of a change from the original. Well, there were a few fans that thought it could have been a little better and so decided to rebuild the whole game on Source, including a new look.

Like all things Source, this mod looks to be pretty killer. Unfortunately, like many of the mods out there (cough… Goldeneye: Source… cough…), it’s been quite a long time in development. They don’t have a release date posted on the site, but they seem pretty optimistic that they’ll be finished “soon”. I’m not going to hold my breath until they actually get done, but I do plan to keep my eyes on this one. As long as it runs well, this could be one of the coolest mods to hit Valve’s Source engine since its release.

Apparently, it seems that this isn’t so much a Linux/Intel 2200BG issue as it is a “cheap-pile-of-crap-Qwest-provided-Actiontec access point” issue. I guess this particular access point has some weird DNS issues when you connect with a Linux based machine with DHCP enabled. Although you may be able to connect to the access point and ping pretty much any site on the entire interweb (I can both connect and ping), you will still get intermittant “failure to resolve hostname” errors when trying to surf. Apparently this issue has been going on for well more than a year now and Actiontec/Qwest are pretty much ignoring it. I suppose this is just one of those things you have to get used to when using a non-Windows OS.

So now that I know what the problem is, I’ve found a semi-solution for this issue by settings a static IP and gateway id within the Ubuntu Network manager. This isn’t really as big a deal as you might think as Ubuntu doesn’t have a Windows style “browse for available networks” tool so you kind of have to know the info about any access point you plan to connect to anyway. But if you’d rather leave DHCP enabled, here’s another set of possible work arounds. Just thought I’d share my newfound knowledge of this stupid issue.

Enter Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)…

A few months ago Zach was tinkering with Ubuntu Linux on his Toshiba laptop. He kept telling me how nifty it was and how much he thought I’d like it, but I just never got around to installing it. Eventually he ended up having some blue tooth issues (I think) that he couldn’t resolve. Long story short, he ended up uninstalling it. I kinda took that as a sign, and just forgot about it. Then, about a week and a half ago, Zach aimed me a link to the Beryl Project page. After a quick review of that site, my curiosity was immediately peaked at the prospect of a fully accelerated desktop. Brian, with whom I have worked for several years has recently acquired a brand spanking new Macbook and is constantly spouting off about the super-nifty goodness of the OSX accelerated environment. And to be honest, some of the tricks he likes to show off are quite nifty indeed. So I decided it was finally time. If for no other reason that to show Brian that you don’t have to have a Mac to be cool.

I downloaded the Ubuntu iso and immediately tried installing it on my aging Dell Inspiron 8200. The Install was a breeze and within 25 minutes I was officially an Ubuntu user. For the most part, my hardware was all recognized and installed with almost no effort on my part. Way to go Linux community. I quickly discovered though, that the default video drivers did not support the 3d accelerator on my Nvidia GeForce 440 Go card. Now to be fair, even Nvidia’s support for this card is far less than stellar. I’ve actually had to resort to using a somewhat “modified” version of the Nvidia drivers that I obtained from guru3d.com in order to get this card working properly in a Windows environment, so I wasn’t really surprised. After a bit of digging though, I stumbled across a cool tool called Automatix. This is a pretty cool tool used within Linux to keep track of and install drivers and software from several Linux repositories. After installing Automatix I was presented with an update to the Nvidia drivers that I decided to try out. Automatix made the download and install a two-click process and when it was finished, my 3d accelerator was working like a champ. Wow… thanks again Linux community.

The next challenge was to try out Beryl to see if my old 440 go card would actually support an accelerated desktop. I went through the installation instructions on the Beryl page and after a small bit of tinkering, had it installed. Time to hold my breath and reboot to see if the install worked. I rebooted my machine and… nothing. Crap! I could get into the “safe mode” terminal version, but I couldn’t get into X which is the gui shell that goes on top of Linux. After messing around with it for a good day and a half, I finally gave up and decided to start over from scratch. About this time I’m wondering if all the effort is actually worth it, but I decide to stick it out and try again. So I reinstalled Ubuntu and the few drivers and pieces of software I felt were essential. Then it’s back to try Beryl again. As I started through the instructions page again, I noticed a small detail that had slipped past me the first time. There are two different sets of installation instructions depending on which set of Nvidia drivers you happen to be using. Of course, I had used the wrong instructions last time… DUH! So I tried the install again and rebooted. Moment of truth time… HA! X came up, I’m half-way there. When I try running Beryl… drum roll… it works! I am now running a 3d accelerated desktop on Linux and although it’s a tad sluggish on my aging video card, it works like a friggen champ.

So am I completely sold on Ubuntu over Windows? No. There are several things I’ve come to like about Windows. I have a set up and a collection of software that just works well. Plus I can play all my games on my Windows machine. There are ways to play games on Ubuntu and in most cases, there are similar replacement tools to those you’re used to in Windows. However, they don’t always work quite as well. Plus the fact that you have to be willing to tinker in order to get some things to work at all in Linux. I have had a few troubles and it’s taken quite a bit of investigation in order to figure out how to correct them. For example… Firefox kept crashing on me whenever I would visit a Flash enabled web page. I had the latest version of flash player installed, but every time I hit a page with flash… BOOM!!! Firefox would just shut down. I finally discovered that this was being caused by the fact that the default color depth was being set to 16 instead of 24. Once I modified the video configuration file everything worked fine, but it’s that sort of issue that you’d never have to deal with in Windows. I’m also still having some quirky wireless issues with my Intel 2200bg card. Anytime WEP is enabled on a DHCP access point, my card seems to be very picky about which sites I can actually surf to. I can ping pretty much any site, but as far as I can discover, there are some weird DHCP issues that seem to be causing Firefox to be “selective” about where it will allow me to go. I haven’t really found a solution to that one yet. I did finally get things working on my home wireless and then the power went out and my access point restarted. Now I’m back to the same set of issues and I’m only able to surf here and there. Luckily ModStomp is one of the sites that I CAN get to. I also have yet to find an acceptable replacement to Audiograbber for ripping audio cd’s to mp3. I found a tool called GRIP, but it’s a bit sluggish in comparison.

On the flip-side though, Beryl is wicked-cool. Admittedly, it’s more just eye candy than actually useful, but even so. There’s just something cool about being able to view your workspaces as a rotating cube. And the ability to make your windows burn in a wall of flame any time you decide to close them is just fun. Cool as it is though, Ubuntu is not for everyone. Be prepared to tinker and tweak in order to make it work how you’d like. You need to be fairly computer savvy and mostly fearless to be an effective Linux user. If you’re worried about screwing something up, Linux is not for you. You need to be prepared to jump into the deep end with both feet if you want to make Linux work for you. If you are willing though, the Linux community offers a vast resource for assistance and applications to accomplish just about anything you’d like to do. For now I think I’ll continue to leave me laptop a dual boot machine so I have the option of either Ubuntu or Windows, but I now see a future with Linux that I wasn’t so sure about a few weeks ago. And of the flavors I’ve sampled over the years, Ubuntu is definitely the best I’ve played with so far. I guess only time will tell if I’m a Linux user deep down inside. I’ll let you know how it goes as I get into it more. And check out the links page for a growing list of useful Linux tools and applications I’ve found.

Historically Mac fans and Windows fans don’t mix so well. Its like getting any two fans of opposing European soccer, er… football teams together in the same room. Utter chaos! I mean, not even Nostradamus saw this one coming. So how will it play out? Will this result in some sort of space-time rift of love and harmony between these two groups?

Would any real PC fan drop their custom rig for Mac hardware (which is now mostly the same being X86 and all), only to run the same OS and software? Would any real Mac fan really ditch OS-whatever for the often complained about (and often rightly so) Windows? Can this end in anything less than the end of the world?

Only time will tell. But I think Scott Johnson sums it up pretty well in his latest ExtraLife webcomic…

Let us know your thoughts on this one… Leave a comment.

So… you can understand my reluctance to do so with my ever-so-beloved iRiver iHP-140 mp3 player. Even though my warrenty had long since run out, that just meant it would be that much harder to try to get support if I did happen to screw something up. But after reading the accounts of many successful upgrades on the RockBox forums, I decided to go ahead with it. With my fingers crossed and headphones on in anticipation, I followed the step-by-step (and quite easy) instructions. Once everything was in place I selected ‘OK’ to confirm the firmware upgrade and then held my breath…

Luckily, once it finished the upgrade, the player rebooted and I was sportin a nifty new interface. All the functionality of the original firmware remained, but RockBox was about to blow my socks off. Since this is blog post, I’ll try to keep this list short, but I plan to expand further in a full-on review this weekend. Here’s a list of the best parts of my sweet new firmware…

1. Track gaps are a thing of the past (my biggest gripe with the original firmware)
2. Totally customizable status screen and menus
3. 5 band graphic equalizer (with gain, Q and cutoff adjustments)
4. support for many other nifty plugins
5. on the fly file delete, playlist creation, file rename, and other stuff…
6. real-live honest-to-goodness shuffle (instead of that fake crap iRiver tried to pass off as shuffle

And many other things to be mentioned in my upcoming review. Long story short…

RockBox kicks Ass!!!

Click the pic below to visit RockBox.org and upgrade your player today.