Downloaded the latest iTunes 9.2.1.

Installed using the less-bloat method (for people like me who just want to use it to manage an iPod):

Extract the components from the iTunes setup EXE…

AppleApplicationSupport.msi /passive
Quicktime.msi /passive
iTunes.msi /passive

All good! All up to date!

I decided to fire up Quicktime and make sure none of its stupid tray icons were configured to run all the time, wasting my memory and CPU. What do I find?

Quicktime is out of date — it tells me. It’s only 7.6.6, and you should be running 7.6.7.

Oh, bravo Apple — can’t even keep their own software up to date.

I posted this on my personal blog because I thought it would be of general interest:

Windows 95 is fifteen years old today.

LEGO bricks can make you gay, because they go together so many ways and encourage experimentation.

You’ll probably be okay if you’ve only got them for “research purposes”.

Part 1: Atari 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision, NES, Commodore 64, IBM PC (DOS), Apple II

Part 2: Vic 20 (dodgy emulator?), TI-99/4A, Atari 8-bit computers, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Atari 7800

With adaptions from an arcade original that had a screen that was higher than it was wide, there’s an obvious compromise to be made between the clarity/resolution of the characters, their aspect ratio, and the number of girders to the top — eg compare the Atarisoft Commodore 64 version with the Ocean one. Some versions look very squashed.

Most surprisingly good I reckon was the TI version.

Via Retroist

News clips from the USA are often 4:3 – why?  Is it a technologically backward country, or do they only export their news in a universal format?  I see work-arounds to disguise this fact, like framing the whole clip in a themed border, or widening the clip by tacking onto the pillar-box sides a blurred-out duplicate of the clip that’s been zoomed, stretched or clipped.

And while I’m noting this, why is it that the watermark on these clips is almost universally blurred out and overlayed with the local broadcaster’s watermark – can’t they get the raw, unwatermarked footage from the provider?

Five HOURS of maintenance?!?

I’m suffering withdrawal symptoms.

OK, they do say it won’t be inaccessible for the full maintenance window, but still, isn’t it time Twitter got enough redundancy that it didn’t need to do this?

I’ve long been a fan of TV idents, and I used to love seeing the late-80s BBC1 globe animation, when it occasionally popped-up on television here. As well as the Alas Smith and Jones spoof version.

Here are a couple of fascinating articles on how it was generated: by a standalone computer, which animated the 12 second rotation, at the PAL standard of 25 frames per second.

• A Computer Originated World
• BBC1 – Bright New World

(Update: Found a better video)

It’s hard rubbish here at the moment, and having just had a power supply fail on me leaving me with no spares, I thought I’d go scavenging. PC components are mostly interchangeable, I’ll just grab a handful of computers and pull the bits I need, and toss the rest out with the hard rubbish.

But someone’s taken them all.

Not only they, they’re cutting the cords off any CRTs lying around. I suspect scrap-metal hounds (copper in the power and video leads), but I can’t be certain because there seems to be a lot of steel things that weren’t snaffled.

Who’s taking the old computers, and why? Also: how do I lay my hands on a power supply – don’t tell me I’ve actually got to buy one!

Be careful with any USB drives you take to photo kiosks — thoroughly scan them afterwards for viruses.

Turns out Big W (FujiFilm) kiosks have been spreading viruses, and Fuji is now investigating equipping them with malware protection. Not before time.

This rung a bell for me. I’m sure a month or two ago after I got some photos, I found the drive I’d used had a suspicious autorun.inf file on it that I could’t figure out the origin of.

As Graham Cluley comments, it might be best to use a USB drive with a read-only switch.

Zero-day flaw. EVERYBODY PANIC! (Well, if you use Windows.)

Simply browsing a USB drive, Windows file share or WebDav directory can potentially infect you via a rootkit inside a .lnk file. All current versions of Windows said to be vulnerable.

Microsoft advisory: Vulnerability in Windows Shell Could Allow Remote Code Execution — no fix yet, but they do list a workaround.

Sophos’s Chester Wisniewski’s blog: Windows zero-day attack works on all Windows systems — Chester notes a good workaround:

Today, a colleague suggested the best mitigation I have heard so far: deploying a GPO disallowing the use of executable files that are not on the C: drive. This will work for most environments, and you really shouldn’t be running executables from USB drives and network shares anyway. We tested this solution against the vulnerability and it does in fact provide protection.

…which would be nice, but I’m buggered if I can find it in gpedit.msc.

From the looks of it, most of the big anti-virus vendors are onto it, and will detect it as long as your definition files are up to date.

Just write down what you spend your money on. At the end of the month, review.  You might want to classify things, graph total expenditure and other fiddling around with the numbers.  But that’s all you’ve got to do: just monitor things. If it turns you on, the monitoring etc can be done via a spreadsheet or personal finance application, but a sheet of paper marked out with every day in the month will do just fine.

When you become aware of what you’re spending your money on, and look at it as a proportion of your monthly spending, the awareness alone may be enough to change your behaviour to be more fiscally responsible.

The other day I noticed I was following @Twitpic on Twitter. I use Twitpic, really like the service (esp as I haven’t yet sat down and got my mobile to Flickr and Twitter posting working yet) but I don’t remember following them.

This morning, much more sinister, I notice I’m somehow following Twitpic founder @noaheverett.

Something is afoot. Could it be that Twitpic is abusing their access to my Twitter logon, and using the API to make me follow them?

A Twitpic Twitterer mentioned the option is on this page. But I’ve been using Twitpic for about 18 months, and I’ve never seen that before — and it’s only in the last week that I’ve seen @Twitpic and @noaheverett tweets show up.

Apparently it’s new, added 20 days ago, and people see if once, after logging on. Maybe they’ve sneakily switched everybody on by default, or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, because I don’t recall seeing it, and I try and restrict how many people I follow very carefully. I might have opted-in for @Twitpic, but definitely not @noaheverett.

Or maybe, since only pops up during logon, I haven’t needed to re-login recently. I notice if you go back to it, it defaulted the option on again.

Not sure if this was something sneaky by Twitpic, or just not very well thought-through.