I’ve had this annoying popup for ages. When you highlight an AVI file and hold SHIFT it often appears. This is most annoying when you want to move files (SHIFT+mouse) or force-delete (SHIFT-DEL).
I did some digging online and the best solutions I got were pointing me to a settings or configuration program within some XVid codec installs. Thing is, I don’t have those particular codecs so that didn’t help.
A bit of a dig later, courtesy of Process Explorer (formerly by sysinternals, now Microsoft) and I found that the program being used was one avisplitter.ax which can be found in C:/Windows/System32. I renames this (popped a “.bak” on the end)… and problem solved.
As far as I can tell, this has had no other effects on the system. Everything else seems to be working fine. However, I’ll leave the file in place rather than delete it just in case.
It is Carlsberg that do that “if…” adverts, isn’t it? I’m advertising’s worst target. I can never remember what company goes with what slogan.
Anyway. If some company who thinks they’re great made primary schools then I give you their end result (based on a 3-hour visit): Woodhill Primary in Bishopbriggs. As part of my PGDE, I requested a visit to a local school and this was the one selected for me. I’m teaching Computing and the school had been informed of this so focussed my visit on the IT side of things.
Ordinarily this would have been a suite and a few whiteboards. Instead, I was treated to a school with a small bundle of PCs and a “laptop safe” on wheels which allows a class of 30 pupils to share one between two. Each room has a network point to which a wireless hub is attached so all of the machines have wifi access.
The kids were unbelievable. One teacher – a confessed technophobe – told me of the start of term. “Over the next few weeks,” she said, “we’ll be studying the Romans.”
A hand goes up. “Miss – can we do a PowerPoint about them?”
“A Power-what?”
She asked the other staff and was told to just hand the laptops over once they’d done a bit of research and let the kids loose. These children are in P5 (arounf 11 years old) and I can tell you right now that their ability to produce a half-decent presentation exceeds that of some lecturers who’ve made me suffer for an hour or more at university.
Another thing that hugely impressed me was the school’s use of their web page. Very well put together, up to date and regularly added to. I gather the teaching assistants have a large part to play in this and their work is a great advert for the school. Bright, simple to navigate, and chock full of stuff the kids have done – much of it written and produced by them.
It’s a superb way of being able to say “look what I did today, mum” while allowing parents to feed back and comment on work that would otherwise be difficult for them to appreciate.
I am still mulling over doing a PGDE(P) when I finish this Secondary course, and my experience at Woodhill certainly hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm. If anything, it’s buoyed me further.
A quick “thank you” to the staff and kids for making my brief visit interesting, educational, worthwhile and fun!
I got a text message from Three (my mobile carrier) telling me that Twitter is free on my phone until March 31st. It uses one of those short-code phone numbers and there’s no indication of the cost once the promotion ends.
However, given that I have unlimited (erm… 4000 I think, so not actually unlimited) texts per month, this is utterly pointless.
I may have mentioned ping.fm before. If not, then head over there, register and link it to your phone number. It’s completely free and the number you send a text message to is a genuine UK mobile number, and therefore free to send to with any inclusive package.
It does a lot more than just post to Twitter, and it’s all customisable. I’ve set mine to forward text messages to Twitter and photo attachments sent via email to ping.fm are passed on to flickr. All of this is free, and doesn’t expire on March 31st.
I’ve told loads of people in the past not to install more than one anti-virus solution at a time. They get in each other’s way, slow the system down and generally create a mess. Well, Immunet’s different. It’s very low footprint and is happy alongside quite a few existing products which boosts your protection – they recommend Norton, AVG, McAfee and Microsoft Security Essentials.
The other difference is in how the product works. You don’t download updates all the time, but do need to be connected to the internet. The “virus archive” is stored online in the cloud, shared by all users. This way if a new virus is discovered, all users are notified instantly.
Any new programs which are installed are checked online before the installation proceeds. This will help protect against spyware sneakily installing itself and nips potential problems in the bud.
I’ve just installed it and will see how it runs. Oh, and it’s Windows-only. I’ve no idea if they’re planning a Mac or Linux port.
A great site for some beautiful artwork. There are 650 free desktop wallpapers on this site, and the “low-quality” versions are available to download in a variety of resolutions. If you want high quality you can buy a subscription, which at the moment is on a special deal – lifetime for $19.99.
Having said that the so-called “low quality” ones are stunning. Definitely worth checking out to spruce up your PC.
A large number of people received the new facebook layout yesterday. I gather this was facebook’s “6th birthday present” to its users. Some had had it since earlier in the year and others still haven’t got it – but will.
There are a lot of ways of looking at the design, but the single biggest flaw is that things have changed. It’s not so much what they have changed into, but the fact that things people have become used to have been moved or tweeked for no discernible reason.
This might not sound like a big deal to a lot of people, but I know of one user who’s dyslexic. For him to get used to finding something that’s moved from one corner to another is a big deal – he uses interfaces by memorising the location of things, not by visually recognising them. He has to relearn the interface from scratch – and for what purpose? None that I can ascertain.
I don’t use facebook to any great depth, so what I’ve spotted is likely to be fairly superficial. However, none of it makes any sense to me. First up is shifting the bottom bar around. The chat area is still at the bottom of the screen while the rest of the bar has been removed. Notifications are now in the top left instead of the bottom right.
This does give an extra line of screen real estate. I think. Or is the top now a little larger? However, it’s this particular move that’s caused problems for my dyslexic friend (and I’m sure many like him).
My particular bugbear is that I can’t be bothered with the news feed. It’s a mess and I really couldn’t care two hoots who is giving stupid virtual gifts to who, or who’s just got a highscore on some crappy game. I just want status updates.
In the previous version, I went to the correct area and dragged “Status” to the top of the list. Henceforth when I visited my “Home” area, I received status updates. This is no longer possible. “Home” now takes me to News Feed. It won’t even default to “Most Recent” so I have a completely useless splatter of informational crap that is of no use whatsoever.
I now have to go into “Friends” in the leftmost column. This in itself is badly-designed as there’s no indication whatsoever that “Friends” opens up sub-menus. There is a reason we have design standards, such as little boxes with “+” in them, or arrows with move from right-pointing to down-pointing. It’s simple design practise which facebook have chosen to ignore.
Once there, I’m stuck in the default Friends page and I then click on the newly-appeared “Status Updates” menu item to get what I used to find by simply clicking “Home” in the past. As far as I can tell, there is no way to set this as my default view.
Given that the press release from facebook read as follows:
A simplified home page to provide easier access to what you’re looking for on Facebook. You can now quickly navigate to commonly-used areas of the site from the top and left hand menus. From the Top Menu, you can now easily find new messages, requests, and notifications using the icons in the top, left hand corner. The left hand menu is now where you can find all of your applications, previously located in the bottom dock.
I would take issue with the use of “easily find”. Something that’s easily found should be immediately apparent, not located by means of a random search. I would also be tempted to say that the left hand columns isn’t a menu – it’s a list. Until you click on it and realise it just looks like a list.
Sure, it’s functional. There’s no denying the new look is tidier and reduces redundancy (there were so many ways on one screen to do the same thing before). But it’s very poor design. For a brand new user it lacks indication of the functionality of certain areas and for experienced users it’s moved things too far from where they were before with no obvious indication of where to look to find them.
As an aside, I think it’s badly programmed as well. This may just be coincidence, but when I left my browser (Chrome) on the Status Update page for about 11 hours yesterday when I was out, I came home to find that it was using stupid amounts of memory and froze. I never had this issue with the old design.
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