Sam Oliver

I’ve been ranting for ages about how ugly most PCs are compared to Macs. What has been stopping PC manufacturers making anything close to being as asthetically pleasing as a Mac?

Check out the new Vaio N10 on Reg Hardware due to be on sale next month.

I might have known it would be Sony who would step up, as they have always been closest to building a trendy PC - but is this just a cheap Mac rip off?

Update I decided on a Macbook Pro and I’m very very happy with it!

I’ve finally got compiz and AIGLX working on my desktop (ubuntu 6.06). I’ve only got an Intel i915 onboard graphics processor, but even so it’s surprisingly smooth!

You’ve really got to use it to fully appreciate how cool it is - especially 3D desktop switching which rocks!

Thanks go to gandalfn for the howto that finally got me up and running.

You may have noticed the new box on the side bar entitled ‘Where I Am’. Powered by Jaiku, this is a service for Nokia 60 series phones that amongst other things logs your location and enables you to display it on the web. I was only thinking on my walk home the other day that a service like this would be great.

Other possibilities are using location-aware devices to find friends in your vicinity. TechCrunch are running a good article on the subject.

If you are using Windows XP or 2000 and you have accidentally deleted a file from the recycle bin, don’t start panicking just yet - you might still be able to get it back. But if that file is important to you, you need to take immediate action.

First and foremost, if you are using the PC where the file was located you must stop using it right away! Your computer will be constantly writing temporary files to your hard disk as you use it which may at any time overwrite the contents of your lost file forever.

Get yourself on to another computer by any means necessary. Don’t even shut your PC down, but if you have to, switch it off at directly at the mains (un-plug it) rather than using the shutdown button in the start menu. Even the shutdown process writes files to disk and should be avoided.

Once you are on another computer, download file recovery free ware ‘restoration’

Copy the software to some form of removable media (USB memory stick, floppy or CD). Run the restoration program on the computer where the file was deleted directly from the removable media. The software will list deleted files and allow you to restore them easily.
If you have already shut down or powered down your PC, first set up a BartPE bootable Windows Live CD (you will need your Windows installation CD). You can boot your PC from the CD to avoid over-writing your lost file. Run the restoration software from your removable media as before.

Make sure you restore the file to the removable media and copy it back to your PC later. This reduces the risk of overwriting your file data when you attempt to restore it.

A useful page with more in depth information can be found at http://www.aumha.org/a/recover.php