Just recently I was drawn to the attention of Firefox Flicks, a site where users of the excellent Firefox web browser submit their own videos to promote Firefox. I looked through a few, and found one that was really funny. It’s kinda stupid-humour, but it does make a good point that IE, Safari and Netscape all like to do stupid things where Firefox is a bit more serious and less-annoying. Watch it here. Wheeee!

Other things I’ve been up to lately: I just made an automated Windows install DVD for my personal use, which auto-installs Windows, Office, and a heap of other third-party essentials like Adobe Reader, Flash Player, Audacity, and other good trimmings. It should be very convenient should I ever decide to reformat (I would use it for VMWare installs, but usually I just use the plain XP CD because I usually don’t need any extra stuff in there for the 10 minutes I run the virtual machine ) The MSFN Unattended CD guide is very useful in the event that you ever want to make an automated CD/DVD.

One little snag I came across in the auto-install: I like to auto-install VNC onto my computers so I can get into them remotely without using Remote Desktop, but the annoying thing was that you need to open the port in the Windows Firewall (or whatever other firewall you use, I use Windows Firewall cause I’m cheap and lazy ) before you can use it. I couldn’t immediately find an easy way to do this from a batch file, so I did some snooping in the registry and came up with the below .REG file, which when imported into the registry (double-click it or use regedit /s file.reg) will open port 5900. Note you’ll probably need to reboot after applying it – the batch file I use in my auto-install DVD reboots anyway.

EDIT: Get it here, I can’t get it to show up nicely with Wordpress’s formatting…
There is an easier way to do this via WMI scripting but I just wanted something quick-and-dirty and that does the job, without writing a page of VBScript code. Once this regfile is in the same folder as the batch file, a simple call to regedit (with the /s parameter of course) will apply the changes.

Windows Vista build 5365, an interim build, was released to the beta testers a few days ago. It seems to have performance enhancements and more Windows Sidebar gadgets. Still, I wouldn’t know, as I’m not a beta tester for it and I don’t want to break the law Still waiting for Beta 2…

Tomorrow is Anzac Day, where we celebrate the anniversary of the Anzacs landing at Gallipoli. W00t!

That’s about it for now,

–Ben

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Computing, Life. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.