Chris Barnes’ Jottings

There are a number of product key recovery utilities for Windows - Magical Jellybean Keyfinder is the first one that comes to mind, possibly because of the name - but ProduKey is the first I’ve seen that will recover keys from other installations, for example via a local area network or from slave hard drives. It also recovers keys for Office and SQL Server, and at a diminutive 31KB, deserves a place on any technician’s USB drive. It is one of a number of freeware utilities available from the NirSoft website.

Edit: Actually the new version of Magical Jelly Bean has similar functionality, although it’s still in beta at the moment.

Inspired by an article by Martin Lewis, I recently contacted O2 (my mobile provider) to renew my mobile phone contract and instead of going through Customer Services, I called their Customer Retentions department on 0800 0288 151. As a result I was able to get a a shiny new Sony Ericsson W880i for free on an 18 month contract priced at £25/month including 1000 any time/any network minutes and 200 texts. This would normally cost £40/month (Online 40 Talker) and that’s with 100 fewer texts.
The key is to be persistent - I asked for my PAC code (which is needed if you want to migrate to another network) on a couple of occasions and was on the line for a total of 35 minutes, so it’s a good job that O2 foot the bill for the call (as long as you phone from a landline - remember that 0800 numbers are not usually free from mobiles and sometimes don’t even count towards your free minutes allowance).
I really wanted a 12 month contract so I could upgrade again after year but O2 weren’t forthcoming with any particularly good deals and I’m happy to wait the extra 6 months for the amount I’ve saved.

I was also offered insurance for £7.50/month which I declined, then £6/month with a £25 excess which I still didn’t bother with - over the term of the contract it works out at over a third of the value of the phone which seems very pricey.

I recently bought the 512MB iBall from Geil, a company perhaps better known for their high-performance computer memory. Labelled as a “GMV Player” (or “MPV Player” on some versions), it can play video files on its tiny OLED screen as well as acting as a simple MP3 player. I haven’t experimented with the video feature beyond watching the included sample clips, and I have to say that I wasn’t impressed with the quality.

It looks fairly stylish and works perfectly as a standard MP3 player bar one somewhat major flaw - it won’t resume from where you left off if you switch the unit off and on again, so you end up having to skip the tracks you’ve already heard. This would probably have caused me to return the player if it wasn’t so cheap (£2.99 from the Overclockers B-Grade section, no more left unfortunately!).

The player also packs an FM radio no better nor worse than those I’ve seen bundled into other MP3 players and mobile phones, an e-book/text file viewer which allows you to view an impractical 24 characters at a time, a voice recorder which  haven’t experimented with, and a picture viewer which I imagine is of similar quality to the video player.

All in all, it’s a fun little toy but not what I’d consider a serious digital audio player. Much more details over at Dan’s Data, an independent PC hardware and gadgets blog which I recommend highly, by the way.

Today I needed to recover one of my FTP account passwords from FileZilla. If you find yourself in the same situation, there is a free tool available here which does the trick nicely, along with password removal/recovery tools for a whole host of other programs.

Nero 7 comes with the Nero Scout media library application, and I couldn’t find an option to not install it (or to uninstall it later). It adds an extra icon in My Computer, and presumably runs all the time consuming system resources. The fix seems to be to run the following command (from Start -> Run):

regsvr32 /u “%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Ahead\Lib\MediaLibraryNSE.dll”

If you don’t feel the need to be reminded of your computer manufacturer every time you use the System or Performance Information & Tools applets, copy the following (italicised) lines into a blank Notepad document and save to your desktop as RemoveBranding.reg. Then double-click the file and accept the prompts to permanently* remove your manufacturer’s name and logo.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OEMInformation]
“HelpCustomized”=dword:00000000
“Logo”=”"
“SupportHours”=”"
“Manufacturer”=”"
“SupportPhone”=”"
“SupportURL”=”"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winsat\WindowsExperienceIndexOemInfo]
“Logo”=”"

If you’d also like to hide the logo from the Welcome Center, rename the oobe.xml file (which you will find in C:\Windows\System32\OOBE\Info) to something else, e.g. oldoobe.xml.

* In case you ever want to restore the System/Performance Info branding, you should first back up the relevant registry keys. To reinstate the Welcome Center branding, simply rename oldoobe.xml back to oobe.xml.

If, like me, you’re contemplating switching mobile phone providers, here’s where you can check the network coverage of the five UK providers:

3
O2
Orange
T-Mobile
Vodafone

What I’d like to see is some sort of independent service that mashes up the data from all 5 sites and helps you decide which network is best for your needs.

I’ve just been doing some PHP programming and the following error came up:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected ‘)’, expecting T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in /home/foo/bar/baz.php on line 81

Turns out that Paamayim Nekudotayim means ‘double colon’ in PHP and is the official name of the scope resolution operator. I guess it’s the PHP developers’ idea of a joke…

Anyway, the cause of the error in my case was a dollar sign missing from the front of a variable.

For anyone who repairs computers for a living or likes to tweak their own system, the PC Repair System is a must-have. It’s a collection of portable utilities for Windows PCs, complete with its own menu system and designed to fit on pretty much any USB stick you have lying around.

Head on over to Daily Cup Of Tech for the free download.

Mozilla has released the second beta version of Firefox 2. The usual warnings about beta software apply, but if you’re brave and would like a sneak peek of what’s to come, give it a spin.

If you’re not enamoured with the close buttons on every tab, or the tab bar scrolling feature, there are a couple of hidden about:config options that can be changed to disable the new features. See this Lifehacker comment for details.
Firefox 2 is slated for release in October of this year, with version 3 of the browser expected to appear at some point in 2007.