Detritus....

This is the fifth post I am composing while waiting for Grand Stream Dreams to be cleared for flight by the Blogger gods.

Bits and pieces, nay, detritus of links...waiting for life to spring forth again....

Man Gear

Deutsche Optik - Tons of really cool gear and stuff. Every guy should have at least some conversational piece from this modern-day army-surplus store. How about the Swiss Army Teletype Tuning Kit, or maybe a Full Walkers Log Set. Forget that prissy Sharper Image stuff. This is Real Manly Man gear. Oh, yeah. Don't let the name fool you. That there is a good old US of A company.

Windows Tips and Tricks

How-to install VMware Server 1.0.1 on Windows XP SP2 - via Network Physics Although installing VMware Player or VMware Server really isn't THAT complicated, this is a bang-up tutorial (with pictures) that holds your momma's boy hand through downloading VMware's Server software to getting a virtual machine "appliance" up and running.

HOWTO: Install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive - So Kurt Shintaku gets clever and figures out how to speed the installation time of Vista by porting it from a DVD onto a heavy-big and fast Flash Drive. He reports seeing a Vista Ultimate install in less than 5-10 minutes.

Quoting from Kurt's post:

Why would someone want to install a client OS from a thumb drive instead of a DVDROM or over the network? One reason: Performance. Installing Windows Vista from a high speed USB flash drive is in my experience the easiest & fastest way to complete a Windows Vista install. This is much faster than using a DVD, gigabit Ethernet, or possibly even some external USB 2.0 hard drives, due to differences in access speed & transfer rate. To put this into perspective, y'know how installing Windows on a Virtual PC virtual machine from an .ISO CD image is really, really, really fast? Imagine something roughly just as fast, except for doing installations of the OS on to actual workstations.

Very clever indeed. Mileage may depend heavily upon motherboard support for USB drive system booting and speed of said Flash Drive.

Windows Live Writer Portable - TechLifeBlogged - I love using Windows Live Writer as my blogging tool. It is great...and not even out of Beta yet.

I haven't tried this "hack" yet to make Windows Live Writer portable, but it looks good and might just work. I haven't checked out the zip file either to make sure it is legit. So be careful.

I'll have to give it a shot and get back with you on it....although I don't really know how I would use this...I adhere to a very strict "no blogging at work" policy. (Though I might moderate a comment or two if it is really gross comment spam.)

For the Linux fans

klik - Linux Software Download - What is klik? Well. Simply put, it allows Linux users to download and use many popular software applications for Linux, without needing to actually install them onto the system. Kinda like portable-apps-on-demand for Linux users. I can see how some users might find this useful. Although, you need to have the klik client installed on your Linux system first for it to work.

I've been Mooned!

Did you remember the Lunar Eclipse tonight? Nope? I forgot too (darn-it!). NASA - Lunar Eclipse

But that did remind me to see if my two favorite astronomy applications have been updated recently, and they had!

Stellarium - (freeware) Now at version 0.8.2.

Celestia - (freeware) Now at version 1.4.1

Now you can be mooned too!

Just don't let the cops or the neighbors catch you at it.

--Claus