After over 15 years of computer service I complied the following statistical data on my walk-in customers that have brought their computer in for repair.

StrikeStar allows multiple, standalone lightning detectors to form a real-time lightning locator network with much better positional accuracy.

Neat liquid cooled desk at Popular Mechanics.

Cory Doctorow gives a talk at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in regards to DRM.

An Atari 800XL was used for the lead piano/organ sound. A Texas Instruments TI-99/4a as lead guitar and an 8 Inch Floppy Disk as bass. A 3.5 inch Harddrive was used as the gong with an HP ScanJet 3C used for all vocals.

I just stumbled on a neat site called AlternativeTo where yougive it the name of the software that you are looking for a substitute for. I often look through lists of types of software to find alternative versions. This could prove to be faster.

I use Google Calendar together with Google Sync on my BlackBerry. Today for no apparent reasons Google Calendar required me to type my password each time I launched the shortcut. I use the create application shortcut feature in Chrome to create a link directly to the Calendar. Having to re-type the password every time sort of ruins the conveniences.

The solution I come up with was to uninstall and reinstall Chrome. Note that un-installation alone will not correct the problem. You must uninstall Chrome and manually delete some of the stored settings. On Vista they reside in:

C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome

and on Windows XP they reside in

C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome.

As Chrome is the only Google application I have installed at the moment, I just deleted the entire Google Folder.

Hope this helps someone! I'm still looking for a solution a weather syncing problem. If I have Google Sync on my BlackBerry sync the weather, which is nice, it creates the weather as an all day event. The problem is it flags it as busy, so any other additions you make to your calendar show a warning that they conflict with another event which is the weather.

Firefox has been my browser of choice for a while. A while back, version 3 I believe, Firefox switched from storing it's booksmarks in 'bookmarks.html' to 'places.sqlite'. Unlike the flat file database 'bookmarks.html', 'places.sqlite' does not let you change the location with 'prefs.js'. You can however move 'places.sqlite' and trick Firefox into thinking the file is still there with MKLINK. The file resides in %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{your-profile-id}\places.sqlite.  AppData on Windows XP is 'C:\Documents and Settings\{username}' and on Vista it is 'C:\Users\{username}'.

For example on Vista my places.sqlite was stored in 'C:\Users\Grant\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\tp4sfudw.default\places.sqlite' and I moved it to 'D:\AppsData\Firefox\places.sqlite'. I then dropped to a command prompt and used:

mklink "C:\Users\Grant\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\tp4sfudw.default\places.sqlite"
"D:\AppsData\Firefox\places.sqlite"

I switched to VirtualBox from VMware a few weeks ago. VirtualBox lets you store your virtual hard disk folders and machines in another location. I store mine on my second hard drive in my system (D:). However the index to these files is stored in C:\Users\{Username}\.VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml. I often reimaging my operating system and as you can guess that wreaks havoc on my VirtualBox configurations. VirtualBox doesn't let you change the location of VirtualBox.xml but it turns out you can move it by copying it to where you want and then creating a link to the file with MKLINK.

For example, my VirtualBox.xml file was stored in C:\Users\Grant\.VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml and I moved it to D:\VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml.

So I dropped to a command prompt and used:

mklink "C:\Users\Grant\.VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml" "D:\VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml"