Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Vista Ultimate Crap

After months and months of waiting for the Vista Ultimate Extras, finally one such Ultimate Extra appears yesterday. Windows DreamScene.
What is it? Just an animated Wallpaper. A High Definition video... It comes with 5 animated wallpapers. They do look good, but that's it, and you will probably get bored of watching it after like 7 seconds. Totally useless. And why the wallpaper? I'd rather have video as a screen saver. And I am sure it's been done by some other freeware apps already.

That is what we got the Vista Ultimate for??? That is what we paid the extra dollars for??? Oh I forgot the Ultimate has support for an additional 16 languages!!!

Of course you need to restart after you install this. WHy does it need to restart??? And it's not like it restarts quickly or anything... And if you do not want to, it will keep nagging you to restart... for WHAT??? And of course this Ultimate will take a big amount of RAM and CPU. But hey, you have a shiny new PC with Gigs RAM and the fastest Dual or Quad Core CPU already, just to get Aero eye-candy from Redmond...

I get to USE my Ubuntu for all sorts of things while it is being installed! I did not need to frigging restart my machine to install any package. Even an update of the Kernel (or OS) does not need a restart! As for eye-candy, Compiz-Fusion Kicks Ass!

And what's with the Vista new Delete Shortcut warning thingy? It warns you that you will delete the actual file, prompts you for a password and makes you think twice. What the hell???

Oh boy... I hate MS products by the minute, but sometimes I just have to use it for whatever stupid reason. I hardly do now, specially after IE4Linus working great on Ubuntu.

Long Live Linux.... Long Live Ubuntu!

Friday, September 21, 2007

Fly over Bahrain, or anywhere on Earth, with Google

Google Earth 4.2 has a great little easter egg. Just press Ctrl-Alt-A (must be Capital A) and you will be presented with a screen to choose your aircraft, and location. And then you can happily cruse around or crash your plane in the ocean. It is GREAT fun.

There are already tons of info on how to use it. I will not repeat them here.

A nice quick start guide is here.

Have fun!

Sunday, September 16, 2007

On Bahrain TV Ad-Dawwar

I don't usually watch Bahrain TV. But last night while flipping channels I noticed this Bahrain TV show. I don't want to even start to critique the program. That's not the point of this entry.

Anyway, the program is Live and you call and get some questions about Bahrain or Heritage and you win some prizes.

At some point, the two presenters Abu Abdulla and Zahra Arafat where talking about the different prizes they have, some cash, some "instant" and two Grand prizes to be drawn on Eid. The two grand prizes are a Lexus and a Hummer. Just then I am 90% sure I heard Abu Abdulla talking to Zahra and saying (maybe just kidding) "... yeah, so you get the Lexus and I get the Hummer".. Immediately Zahra replied "Noooooo!".

I will not be surprised if that was the case, but I could be wrong. I wasn't really paying that much attention prior to that.

Even if it was a joke, it is not something to joke about. Maybe it is just me, but I do take these things seriously, and to me that is fraud.

Does that ring a bill with some old BTV prize show where the presenters "won" BD6000 in the 1990's?

As BuZain and Ammar think it's only a joke, I edited the post to reflect that.

Sunday, September 02, 2007

Arabic on SE M600i

I love my M600i. The keyboard is great, and the phone is generally very good and nice interface. The only issue I had is that it did not come with Arabic Fonts. So I initially was forwarding the Arabic SMS I get to my old K600 to read them. Stupid, I know. I saw some Arabic enabling software, but was to thinking it was too costly. I did not find anything usable, until now. It's free too!
This comes from here.
You must have your phone in File Transfer Mode. It will not work in Phone Mode.
  1. Create a \Resource\Fonts folder in your M2 card
  2. Copy the Tahooma.ttf from Windows\Fonts (you may use other font if you like. I find this one very readable on M600i the screen. Verdana did not work for me).
  3. Make 4 copies of the file(s), and name them:
  • Sans-Serif_Latin-Regular.TTF
  • Sans-Serif_Latin-Italic.TTF
  • Sans-Serif_Latin-BoldItalic.TTF
  • Sans-Serif_Latin-Bold.TTF

The restart your Phone. You will notice the fonts have changed in all the displays.

Just Google it!