I tried the new version of the Flock web browser and so far I’m liking this Flock Browser. It’s like Motorola Blurr for your browser. Since it is based on the Chromium Browser, which is the open source branch of Google’s Chrome browser, it supports Chrome’s features including Google Gears, Themes and Chrome Extensions.  It also imports your bookmarks from other browsers on install to sync with your Flock account.

Speaking of the flock account, it allows you to save your login credentials to social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.  This means on subsequent installations your login data and bookmarks are saved with your account so logging into Flock logs you into everything.  After you login you are presented with a sidebar of your status feeds.  You can click the reply button to reply in the form that network uses.  For example, replying to twitter gives you options to @reply, retweet or direct message.  On facebook it’s comment, like, poke or message.  There is also a nifty “Post” button that supports multiple twitter accounts so you can post directly to facebook or a twitter account from the sidebar.  It also lets you select which network(s) you’re posting to, so your update could be sent to one, many or all of your accounts at once.  The sidebar also lets you customize the feed to decide what gets displayed or filter it to show only updates from the selected social network.

This is a nice niche browser for the social networking scene.  Grab the 3.0 beta from http://beta.flock.com or the 2.6 browser from http://www.flock.com

Now I just wanna know when the thumb drive version is coming out.

I recently updated my main desktop PC with a 2 TB SATA drive and a 60 GB SSD drive.  The SSD drive greatly speeds up Windows but came with an unexpected problem.  After a fresh install of Windows 7 on the SSD the drive doesn’t boot into Windows.  After POST it gave the error “DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER“.  It may be just related to my vendor and brand, but I can’t confirm.  I just know that none of the suggestions for fixing the problem from Google or from the vendor’s tech support department worked.  I eventually found a solution that was not just a workaround and decided to post it here in case someone else needs help and can’t find the answer.  The drive in question is a 64 GB Kingston SSDNow V series drive.

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Often times when a printer has been installed and working and it stops working with nothing being changed the problem is a corrupted print job that is stuck in the print queue.  These can be cleared by stopping the print spooler, deleting the files in the print spooler folder and restarting the spooler.  How is this done you ask?  With this batch file you can complete these tasks automatically. 

Copy the text below and paste it into a text document named clearspooler.bat .  Run the file to work the magic.  If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7 you’ll have to right click the file and run it as administrator.

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Jump lists allow programs to give you a pop up menu from their program icon.  This can be used to access most recently used documents, open a new program window, access program features or many other options.  There are two ways to activate this feature from a taskbar icon.  The traditional way is to right click the icon to get the jump list to pop up.  A more graphically beautiful effect is to click and drag the icon up or down.  The jump list will slowly open while fading in from transparent to opaque in sync with the speed with which you drag the mouse.  This is another of the of the touches that beautified Windows 7.  Although Windows is still far from being as polished as Linux and Mac OS X, it did a lot of catching up.

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The iPad itself IS just a big iPhone, meaning it is a crippled, closed piece of hardware that doesn’t do everything it should be capable of.  It still holds a bit of intrigue, though that may just be the early adopter in me.  I’m not a fan of Apple or its products but once again they’ve come up with a device that I am seriously considering buying.  It has definite value as just a small slate that you can just keep on standby around the house and use it for quick internet searches or the more popular use, browsing the web or listening to music while on the toilet.  The 3G connection at a paltry $15 a month with AT&T is much cheaper than the standard contracts you get with most netbooks.  At that price, with the ability to get online anywhere I want to the device has a purpose.  The only problem is that you assume that AT&T’s saturated network will be able to handle the extra traffic iPads could generate.  In the end, I just might buy my first Apple product.  I’ll wait of course for Apple to drop the price after the fanboys buy it at full price and the casual user doesn’t buy an iPad. 

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If you’re a G1 user, you’ve probably experienced the memory crunch that occurs on the device.  You’ve installed all your favorite apps but now your phone runs slow, and apps crash or “Force Close” all the time.  If your phone gets as bad as mine did, you could reach the point where the home screen and dialer apps themselves crash, meaning you have to wait minutes at a time to use the phone, and even longer to make a phone call.  Fortunately there is a simple fix.

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This isn’t officially verified but it appears that Microsoft has fixed a glitch that has persisted for quite a while in Windows Media Center. 

UPDATE: This glitch hasn’t been fixed at all.  My system glitching made it seem as if it was fixed.  However, pressing the Windows key yields the desired result of being able to use your mouse cursor on another screen until you click on the Media Center again, at which point the cursor becomes trapped on that screen again.  Sorry for the misunderstanding.  I wish someone would get Microsoft to fix this annoyance.

I say not verified because for all I know my system is glitching which is temporarily fixing the glitch.  But back to the topic.  For a while now if you used Windows Media Center with a multiple monitor setup, if you maximized the application on one monitor, your cursor was stuck to that screen unless you Alt+Tab to an app on another monitor, or use the Windows key.  This is basically an annoyance, though a workaround was to resize the window to almost 100% of the screen.

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In the past, if you had a problem with Windows that prevented Windows from booting, you were limited to either downloading a third party system recovery disk like the “Ultimate Boot CD“, or booting from the Windows disc and working from the awkward command line to fix problems.  Windows 7 includes a utility to create a bootable disk to fix problems from a familiar graphical interface.  This tool could be a lifesaver if you perform such tasks as dual booting into Linux.  A common problem that occurs when doing that is that if you change your mind and decide to delete the Linux boot loader (normally grub), you end up with no way to boot into Windows.

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This problem is an annoyance that may randomly affect you if you’re using the beta or RC of Windows 7, and it’s a doozy.  Some random permissions problem occurs and none of your Programs show in the All Programs menu on your start menu.  This means you can’t start any program that isn’t pinned to the task bar without digging through explorer to find the start menu items.  I thought I’d write about this because apparently, not many people have written about it, so it’s best to get the fix onto search engines so the next person has an easier time fixing this problem.

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