…the taste of it’s cherry chapstick (Thanks Katy Perry - song reference here ).  Sadly though, after a month of use, I have reverted back to my Windows Mobile phone. My wife bought a first generation iPhone and then upgraded to the iPhone 3G when it was released.  This left her first generation...

I Kissed An iPhone And I Liked It… →

I have a question for you all. There are two types of people in the world. Those who HAVE lost data, and those that WILL. Which are type of person are you? I am in the HAVE LOST bucket. The few times I have lost data in the past have certainly contributed to my current backup strategy. More recently...

What Is Your Backup Strategy? →

Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 were released to manufacturing (RTM) on Monday just gone. Here is a link to the main Visual Studio 2008 Developer Center . Scott Guthrie has a blog posting about the VS2008 release here. More importantly, he has a posting about uninstalling Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008...

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released →

An update to my favourite Outlook add-in has been released today - check out the ClearContext press release here , and then run (don't walk) to download ClearContext here ....

ClearContext v4 Released Today →

A very quick one - late last year I posted about my mail provider FastMail . I now have a URL you can click that will credit me as the referrer! So, click here if you want to sign up for FastMail ......

FastMail Revisited →

A while ago I came across a blog post on the Live Search blog called " Add Search to Your Site with the Live Search Box ". You can basically set up a fully featured site search using and simply include it in your page. You can select what "zones" to search (for example just your site, or your site and...

Adding Windows Live Search to your Site. →

I suspect I am not a "normal" consumer of mail services. I have many domains that I send mail from (due to the sites I host). I want to check email from different places - home, work, hotels around the world, relatives houses, internet cafes etc - and as a result use many different computers and internet...

A Great Email Service - FastMail →

When I first started putting photographs online, I spent ages looking for an album creation tool that would give me some control but would automate a lot of the creation. I eventually settled on JAlbum - a nice tool written in Java that has many downloadable skins to choose from. You can see an album...

AutoViewer and SimpleViewer Photo Viewers. →

I am a little bit late on this one! I have posted about the Outlook addin called ClearContext a couple of times before; I think it is a fantastic tool for helping you to organize your inbox. GTDers, it can really help you guys too. So far I think I have helped a dozen or more people unchain themselves...

ClearContext v3 is released. →

My good gamer-friend Darren just sent me this link to Game System Wars - it is a round up of various sales statistics for the 3 games systems, with the data pulled from Amazon. Right now, Xbox 360 leads the way in all categories (as you would probably expect, since it has been out for longer). It will...

Xbox 360 vs PS3 vs Wii and Zune in stores. →

Microsoft released the beta of Windows Live Writer a couple of days ago. I thought I would do the "corporate thing" and give it a go. It looks really nice. I have used a few different tools in the past to post to my blog. BlogJet is an excellent tool, and let me do just what I wanted. Windows Live Writer...

Windows Live Writer →

ClearContext have posted their annual Email Usage survey. The results of last year's survey are here , and make for interesting reading. As an avid ClearContext user, I feel obliged to pass on the link to this years survey – ClearContext 2006 Email Usage Survey ....

ClearContext 2006 Email Usage Survey →

Microsoft has made the Consolas font available for download . Consolas is one of the 6 new fonts previously only available in Window Vista (Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantina, Corbel). It is a fixed-width font which makes it a great replacement for all text editors, including Visual Studio...

Consolas Font Now Available For Download →

A while ago, I signed up to take part in the beta of riya.com; I had forgotten about it until last week when I got an invite mail to try out the service. In a nutshell, riya.com is a facial recognition service for uploaded photos. It allows you to submit your photos to a website, and it will then start...

Riya.com - People Recognition In Photos →

The ex-architect from my group here at MSN has now released a beta for v1 of his new venture – SnapTune . To quote the website – “Snaptune One downloads songs, talk shows, interviews and live sessions directly from an FM radio to your computer automatically. Snaptune records what you...

SnapTune →

After I posted last night, Brad from ClearContext left me a comment to say that version 2 is now out of beta, and released as Release Candidate 1 . One great new feature for this version is that the ClearContext toolbars now work when composing emails if you are using Word as your editor; this wasn’t...

More on ClearContext version 2 →

Well, it has been a little while since the last post. It isn’t that I haven’t had anything to say, I just haven’t been able to find any time to write it down! So, let’s see, some snippets: IE7 I installed IE7 beta 2 Preview – is working nicely so far. The tabs work really well, and the “tab preview”...

IE7, Level 42, Hanselminutes and ClearContext →

http://www.waterfall2006.com/ I’ll see you there…!

Ever taken what you thought was that perfect “family photo” only to develop it (or download it to your computer) to find Granny is grimacing, Uncle Joe looks like he has indigestion, baby Alice is looking the other way, your sister looks asleep or your mum looks wild eyed on some hallucinogenic...

Microsoft Research releases "Group Shot" →

A while ago, some of the guys in one of the UK Developer and Platform group here at Microsoft started putting together “MSDN Nuggets” – short videos (under 10 minutes) that demonstrate some new feature or technology. This is a great idea, and is a very convenient way of getting an overview...

MSDN Nuggets →

Nick Bradbury has just announced that Beta 1 of FeedDemon 2.0 is available .

Dare just posted the following: Posting to your blog on MSN Spaces using Blogjet . I have been using BlogJet for managing my blog on this domain for a while and it is a really nice piece of software. It has built in settings for many different blog sites and engines, and now you can get it to talk to...

Posting to your MSN Space using Blogjet. →

I am in Seattle on business at the moment. In fact, in the last couple of months, I have been travelling for either work or pleasure quite a lot. One thing that has always frustrated me a little is the lack of good wireless facilities in the hotels where I stay. Sure there is almost always an excellent...

Travel a lot?Get a Wireless Travel Router... →

I have posted a couple of times before about FolderShare , and it’s recent purchase by Microsoft . I just wanted to add two comments: 1) it is now totally free. I will be refunded a pro-rated amount for the remainder of my subscription year. This is excellent news, and if you didn’t sign...

FolderShare is now FREE! →

Mike Torres was asking how to integrate the Windows Desktop Search / MSN Search toolbar with the search on the new Windows Live homepage – http://www.live.com/ . Well, I can help with that… First, open up the Desktop Search options dialog (you can do this by right clicking the little magnifying glass...

Using live.com Search from Windows Desktop Search →

I have been using FolderShare for a while, and I love it. I love it enough to shell out $99 a year for the premium service. Turns out that Microsoft purchased FolderShare today. This is great news in many respects – and as a Microsoft employee I hope I get to use the service for free now! I hope...

Microsoft buys FolderShare →

The IE Developer Toolbar has been refreshed with some new features and bug fixes. The details from the download page state: This version of the Developer Toolbar is an updated version of Beta 1; it was updated on October 31, 2005. Several issues are resolved and some feedback has been incorporated. ...

IE Developer Toolbar Has Been Refreshed →

Just found out from the IEBlog that Microsoft have released a beta of the IE Developer Toolbar . It has some pretty nice features - you can view the HTML DOM of the current page, update attributes and styles of items on the page, toggle various useful pieces of info (such as image size, image path etc...

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar →

Microsoft and Yahoo! have announced an agreement to connect their messenger products together. This will mean that users will be able to include buddies from both the MSN and Yahoo! services in whichever of the two clients they prefer. Check out the press release here ....

MSN and Yahoo! Unite →

Numark have released the iDJ mixing console for the iPod . Just plug two iPods into the docking slots, and mix away. What will the iPod lovers think of next?!...

Numark iDJ →

Russian scientists at Art Lebedev have created a very cool Optimus keyboard . Each key is a tiny 32x32 pixel display that uses OLEDs (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) to show full colour buttons. The keyboard layout can change depending on the language or application you are using. Check out the info and...

Coolest Keyboard Ever! - Optimus Keyboard →

In a world where software is becoming more and more bloated and complex, Bernard Belanger brings us NaDa Software . Inspirational.

A few weeks ago, my friend Jon turned me on to a cool service called FolderShare . This service allows you to transparently share files across multiple computers, so that you always have access to your important files. It works very simply. Install a small proxy application that sits patiently with your...

Using multiple computers?Get FolderShare. →

My team at Microsoft put 3 new msn.com international homepages live last week that embrace AJAX technologies for page rendering. These homepages (found at http://malaysia.msn.com and http://ch.msn.com ) load their contents asynchronously, and allow real-time interaction with certain modules on the page...

New msn.com Websites Using AJAX Techniques →

Anyone with a Tablet PC who doesn't reboot it too often will have come across the memory leak in the Tablet Input Panel (tabtip.exe) and TCServer.exe. There are various workarounds - anything from rebooting often to using a BAT file to kill and restart the processes every couple of hours! Thankfully...

Fix released for TCServer.exe memory leak →

I hate it when this happens. You breeze merrily along, relying on your laptop for everything, when all of a sudden it starts to do some really odd things. Last night, I wandered into my home office to check my email before powering down for the night, and my laptop was mysteriously trying to reboot for...

My Laptop Is Dying →

One of my sibling teams at MSN has just released the third version of their incubation project - start.com. It looks really slick, has some great features, and from a technical perspective is very cool. Everything is AJAX-ed, with most of the data being fetched at runtime by the client. In fact, my team...

start.com Version 3 Released →

This looks very cool if you are doing any significant client-side DHTML development for Internet Explorer. Drip: IE Leak Detector

Microsoft is going to be adding RAW support to Windows in a few different ways. This is very cool for those of us that have Digital SLRs that support the RAW format. They are adding RAW support into Longhorn, which is a great move IMHO. However, this is not greatly exciting "now". Better news is that...

Microsoft Adds RAW Support to Windows →