What with the Firefox Google page, and the customisable iGoogle, it’s less common these days to see the full-size Google logo, and its special event variations.

So you might have missed this: Google celebrated the 50th birthday of Lego (which was on Monday).

PS. I forgot to go to the Lego convention thing on Sunday, dammit.

PPS. Chewing Pixels highlights some great Lego finds

WTF? Opera is an “Internet Explorer Add-on” ??

Memo to self: when my ISP (Netspace) shapes after hitting the monthly download limit, they do not automatically unshape at the end of the billing period. You just have to disconnect and re-connect to get the proper speed back. Annoyingly, this information is nowhere to be found in their online help.

(It’s never happened to me before, which is why I didn’t know.)

When I’m putting PDFs (or any kind of downloadable file) on web sites, I’m always sure to publish them with a filename which is meaningful, including some indication of the web site it came from. ‘Cos if the average user is like me, they save PDFs etc all over the place, and some kind of identifier makes it heaps easier to find the file later.

I was very amused over the weekend to give an MPEG2 file on a USB drive to a couple of Mac addicts and watch them try to play it on their Macbooks. They were able to get the file off the drive with no problems, but Quicktime wouldn’t recognise it.

One of them ended up resorting to VLC, and it played… badly out of sync.

heh. Yeah. “It just works.”

Mind you, MPEG2 playback in Windows Media Player is choppy on one of my PCs, so I guess I can’t crow too much.

This is driving me crazy.

Some process, somewhere, every minute is flashing up this icon in the status bar, momentarily grabbing CPU time and focus, and interrupting my workflow.

I don’t know what it is. It’s too quick to right-click on to close or query it.

It’s even disruptive enough that I can’t capture it using PrintScreen; I had to grab it using a camera.

It’s similar in appearance to the MediaGate NDAS software, but that’s not it.

I think it only started happening a week or two ago, but you know how it is — I don’t recall what I’ve installed in that time. I know I upgraded iTunes, but I’ve already killed every Apple-related task I could find, and it’s still doing it.

Can anybody identify it?

WAIT A SEC. I did a search of all EXEs then scanned down looking at icons. It looks like it’s something to do with DivX. Hmmm.

Normally you can only get two downloads from any one site happening at a time. But it can be overridden. I know, I know, you’re not actually meant to do this, as it breaks some HTTP standard or other. But occasionally it’s warranted… umm, if you’re talking to your own web server. Yeah.

Firefox: In about:config, go to network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server

IE 4+: Get in the registry and alter HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
– MaxConnectionsPerServer for HTTP 1.1
– MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server for HTTP 1.0

Apparently you can’t change it in Safari. (Anybody know better?)

Doesn’t time fly? It seems like only last year Brickvention was on, but it was two years ago. This time ’round it’s being held opposite Flinders Street station, details at the Brickvention 2008 website. As to what to expect: check out the 2006 website, which has some pretty impressive models on it.

Happy New Year.

Apart from my sister, my eldest also got an iPod Nano for Christmas. Thankfully here we use Windows, so unlike my sister, we didn’t have problems having to upgrade the OS to get it working.

He also got a $50 iTunes voucher. Very cool. So we logged onto Windows as him, and ran iTunes, so it would set up a music library for just him. Ran through the usual guff to get it started, and we set up his Apple ID so the voucher could be redeemed.

Problem: It wants a credit card number. He’s 12. He doesn’t have a credit card. Maybe we can skip this step? Nope. He’s got a $50 voucher, and no credit card, but it wouldn’t let us use the voucher without entering a card number. Idiots!

The workaround we ended up with was to put in my card details. Then we put the iTunes voucher number in, and went and found the option to remove the credit card again. And we had to change his name on the Apple ID, as it had assumed that my name from the credit card was the one to use.

Problem solved. But it shouldn’t be that hard.