The Internet was down yesterday, and so I was forced to turn to more inventive methods of time-wasting. These are very rough and ready, but I'm not a graphics person by any stretch of the imagination, so allow it:

Note - title is for 'catchy title' purposes only, I don't claim this is actual hacking on any level

One of the nifty features of my new laptop is 'Dell MediaDirect' - essentially a button which quickly loads a hidden partition allowing you to listen to your music, see your pictures, watch videos and DVDs and display PowerPoints all without ever booting up Windows. It's nice to have - and though not as pretty as Windows Media Center - a fairly cool thing to have available.

MediaDirect runs on Windows XP Embedded, so I wondered if there was a quick and easy way to have a bit of a play about with it. Thankfully, there is!

1. Make a PowerPoint presentation containing a hyperlink to C:\Windows\explorer.exe

2. If using Office 2007, save this in the 97-2003 file format so that MediaDirect's 2003 viewer can open it

3. Boot into MediaDirect and click on the link - and voila!

4. To enable the Task Manager so that you can quickly repeat this process in future, find taskmgr.ex_ in the 'Windows \ System32' directory and rename to taskmgr.exe.



(Paint isn't included in that version of XP Embedded and loading Vista's version from the main partition didn't work, but a copy of XP's Paint did the screenshot job nicely.)

So - what practical purpose does this all serve? Probably very little. There is some space - about 265MB worth - for adding your own 'quick access' stuff. A fully functional (it appears) version of Windows Media Player 10 is included. A few DOS games - loaded from the Vista partition - also work, which is useful since they didn't in Vista. It could also be feasible to update the PowerPoint viewer and allow viewing 2007 file formats. It also occurred to me that if your main Windows installation was damaged beyond repair that this could be a good way of easily accessing your files from the hard drive, since USB devices are recognised by XP Embedded. But really, it was just nice to achieve - really by accident - at 2 in the morning

I change my desktop background fairly often. (Known as a 'wallpaper' way back in Windows 95, it is irritatingly referred to as a 'screensaver' quite a bit these days.) It goes from Doctor Who wallpapers to scenic views and cool photography, until I get bored with it and change it again. I've gone back to this photo a few times though, taken from a nice collection at wstaylor.net and - I think - included in Windows Vista.

What's yours?

A really interesting part of my day today was helping to test a new website from UCAS, allowing prospective undergraduates to compare student satisfaction data. So I sat there, in front of a black MacBook and a mocked-up site, talking a lot about my impressions of the design. For someone who has done web design himself, it's fascinating!

To be honest I'm sure I wasn't that helpful because I probably knew a little too much about how the process worked. So I knew to insist that the behaviour of the search feature should fit the user model ("I want to search by subject, or uni, or both!") and complain that there was too much vertical scrolling through menus before you got to the actual data. The guy observing chuckled to himself when I mentioned that no one ever clicks on 'skip to content' links. I also attempted - and failed - to click on the big logo in the top left as a way to get back to the homepage. He scribbled it down excitedly. They did have an excellent way of presenting data using colours though, where a stronger shade indicated a greater percentage of people.

It's just fun because I've sat and watched people navigate my own humble web site completely differently to how I've designed it. Illuminating

Just playing about with my new phone gifted from my aunt. Love the e-mail features though a way to kill the t-mobile branding would be good?

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