While installing Adobe Shockwave plugin
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-222% completed… I was lucky that it only took some seconds  |
Category: Software
Windows Mobile - Text Messages Accents
Since I bought my Qtek S200 with Windows Mobile 5 I’ve been having a problem in text messages (SMS) sending.
If I write a text message with accents the number of characters per message is reduced from 160 to 70 characters. This is a problem because without noticing you may spend a lot of money in accentuated messages (you send about the double of the messages).
I had never googled about this issue, but today I’ve found a solution while playing around with my pocket PC. It is just a default configuration problem. Sorry about the screenshots in Portuguese, but is the language of my Windows Mobile.
Step 1: Open Text Messages. Menu > Tools > Options
Step 2: Touch Text Messages account.
Step 3: Uncheck Use Unicode when needed (or similar text 
).
This option checked reduces the maximum characters per text message when using accentuated characters, because Windows Mobile automatically uses Unicode encoding which require more space than regular characters.
Windows Vista - Programs and Features
I simply hate Programs and Features feature in Windows Vista when compared with the Windows XP Add or Remove Programs feature. Why? Just an interface issue. When you go to Programs and Features the list of programs starts empty and is filled while Windows finds out that programs you have installed.
Every time I try to click in a program to change or remove it, before the search is complete, I loose track of that item because there are always new items being added to the list and hiding the existing ones (when they are added before that one). Because the fill isn’t ordered, but the items remain in alphabetic orders, you never know in which position of the list a new item will pop up.
I rather prefer the old loading message before all the items appear at once. At least I don’t have the frustration of seeing the program I want to change and not being able to access it, and when I walk through the list I know that there will be no items appearing in the beginning of the list where I had already seen.
Maybe in Windows 7 this will be improved. Who knows? Meanwhile, I can live with it
Songbird Media Player
Yesterday I took a look at Songbird Media Player. I must admit that I was very excited as a read about this open source media player. why? Because it has many things that look like my favorite web browser: Firefox!
The screenshot bellow shows the default look & feel of this application that looks a lot like iTunes. I like a lot the library navigation. You can filter the musics by year, artist and album in a simple way.
How about Firefox similarities that I talked about? Here it goes. It is “developers friendly”. Has themes and add-ons support like Firefox. It allows tabbed browsing with a Firefox-based internal browser. As you can see in the screenshot below some interface elements like options and Add-ons menu are similar to the analogous ones in Firefox. Almost a copy of them, which can be nice while getting used to Songbird interface. This project is powered by Mozilla (which explains a lot 
).
The screenshot below which shows a album browser isn’t a built-in feature. It is a Java-based add-in which I installed. Looks nice but has some issues about resizing, and hangs a little bit too… You can navigate through the add-in list in here.
My deception was when I played some songs… Songbird takes a lot of memory and CPU usage in order to work.
I’ve tried iTunes 7.5 and tough it uses an considerable amount of memory it almost “doesn’t require” CPU time. I must confess that this memory usage of 47Mb doesn’t bother me. 2Gb of RAM is enough to handle it And I’m used to Firefox memory usage as you can also see in the screenshot.
With Windows Media Player 11 I had some great results about both CPU and memory. It is the least I can expect with a media player built-in into the operating system.
I must confess that I don’t use media players that often, and when I use it’s just to listen to music and leave the player running in background. Songbird seems promising, but for now I won’t use it because it doesn’t fit my needs (low memory, low CPU,shuffle and playing!). Although my experience wasn’t good, don’t stay stick to what I have written. Install it and give it a try!
System Explorer
A simple application (that doesn’t require installation). Maybe it is old news, but I have only found out about this software today. Pretty nice because it gathers some (sometimes) useful information. The features list is “copy-pasted” from the website.
Features:
- Detailed informations about Processes, Startups, Explorer, IE Addons, Uninstallers, Windows, Services, Drivers, Connections and Opened Files
- Action History for monitoring processes activities
- Making of Registry & Files snapshots for easy comparing of system changes. Result of comparation is displayed in tree view and text list. Can be used for analysation of product installers/uninstallers (like Total Uninstall)
- Performance graphs for monitoring usage of system resources in time
- Easy check of suspicious files via VirusTotal
- Easy search details about file/process via online databases
- Easy access to System Utilities
Sam & Max - Abe Lincoln must die
I’ve found an hilarious game which is part of a series of video games. This is the 4th episode, and unfortunetly it is the only one that is free 
I’m talking about a point-and-click game (my favorite kind of game) where you must explore the scenarios and use objects to accomplish your objectives. The story and the dialogs between characters are very funny. They use a lot of the USA stereotypes in the argument.
I must say that I was stuck in the first minutes while playing (it is pretty hard), but it is worth using a walk through to follow the story.
I leave here some screenshots.
You can download this free game here. Enjoy it.
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