Nikhil Dev

I tried Digsby after reading about it on a website. This is one Instant Messenger that exceeds expectations for me. I dont have a Mac so have not tried Adium that people talk about so much, but I compared Digsby to the features that Adium had to offer and there are hardly that these people have missed out on. Beautiful skinning, ability to reply from the pop up and not have to deal with the main window. Support for almost all the popular protocols, Video chat and many more. What else would you want.

When I tried it, it was open for download for a restricted group. But it is open for download for all here.

It is totally worth at least one try.

P.S: Its available for dowload for all platforms. Windows, Mac and Linux.

A really interesting and very true to its description graphic.

This has always been my biggest concern. Windows is always an over bloated operating system. For me an operating system needs to be just an empty box. The user should then have the option of filling it up with things.

Just a while ago, Nash sent me this amazing graphics and I burst out laughing in the office.

I am sure anyone who sees this will.

Last week I had a problem, that just drove me mad. This is what happened.

I was defragging my 80Gig iPod, and my desktop at home for some reason froze. I had to hard reboot, but to my horror, all my music, the songs and the videos now do not showup on the ipod. I connected the ipod again and I could see them in iTunes. Even media monkey showed that the music was there on the ipod. The ipod stats also showed that the content was there. Why the hell is the ipod library not able to detect the media. Is it that the library got corrupted. If yes, then there was not way to rebuild an ipod library. So my only solution was to copy all the music off the ipod to my work desktop using Yamipod. After that I had to restore my ipod to factory settings. And then put all the music back on the ipod. I dont use Auto sync. So it was even more tough for me. Things went smoothly until just 2 days back when I connected the ipod again to my home computer. The same thing happened again. All the music appeared to be gone. This time it was nothing that I screwed up. All I did was just update a few albums on my iPod.

This is the time, I had to research on this. I brought out my Compaq 3228AU. Connected my iPod to that and copy just one song to the iPod. Miraculously, the library now showed up on the ipod. So what went wrong??

This is really interesting. What I did not realize was that I had upgraded the ipod firmware from 1.2.1 to 1.2.2 which was the latest firmware for iPod 5G and 5.5G. Now when I connected it to my work comp, the iTunes version there was 7.5 whereas the iTunes version at home was 7.3. There is a major incompatibility between the iTunes earlier to 7.5 and the 1.2.2 iPod firmware update. If you want to stick to an iTunes version lesser to 7.5 you should not update the firmware to 1.2.2. If you want to still use 1.2.2 firmware, you better upgrade the iTunes to 7.5. I think this is a nasty way Apple is forcing the consumers to use the latest versions of software.

I have been able to fix this problem after quite some research. If you are having the same problem, do comment. We will try to fix it together. If you have already fixed it, it would be great if you can share it.

Just a simple list of steps to fix this again:-

1. Upgrade to iPod firmware 1.2.2.

2. Upgrade iTunes to 7.5

3. Connect the ipod to iTunes 7.5 once and disconnect. Or just copy one song so that the library is rewritten.

4. Disconnect the iPod.

Voila!!!!

—–Update——

Just today I noticed that apple has released it Firmware version 1.2.3 for the ipod 5Gs. I have’nt  had any problems till now. but just in case there are any surprises, Will surely post.

As usual, when there is nothing to read, there is Digg. I was goin through one of these articles in that and something interesting that I saw there interested me. Microsoft has secretly launched the Service Pack 3 for Windows Xp. As for now this is available to only a selected number of users and is possible through a hack. Thats why I thought that I will write some detailed instructions on how this is achieved.

1. Open Notepad and type in the following into it

@echo off
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /f 2> NUL
reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /v RCPreview /t REG_SZ /d 1c667073-b87f-4f52-a479-98c85711d869 /f
echo XPSP3 registry key has been set. Please check for updates in Windows Update - Kudos to nikhildev.com
pause

2. Now save that file with any name like “windowsxpsp3.cmd” . Make sure that you have the double quotes and the .cmd extension.

3. Now double click on that file and let it do its work.

4. Once you have confirmation, log onto the window update website and look for any Windows update available.

5. You will see that Windows Xp Service Pack 3 is one of them listed. Just install that and reboot the computer once everything is over.

Thats all that you need to do to install the new Windows Xp Service Pack. Microsoft says that in the new Windows Xp Service Pack 3, it has included a lot of bug fixes and few features from Windows Vista. I I havent tried any of the features as I am writing this before rebooting my computer. Will keep the results posted about the Service Pack 3 for Windows Xp.

Do comment, if you need help or are stuck in some step.