A few weeks ago I bought a 16gb Sandisk Micro USB drive, awesome for doing large installations from USB and carrying around heavy duty files. Though I found the drive itself to be excellent, I didn’t have any use for the installed “U3 Launchpad” application.
Formatting the drive didn’t remove the app, though eventually I discovered how to remove the U3 Launchpad software from my Sandisk USB drive. In case you don’t need the software either, here’s how:
1) Open the Launchpad menu, and click “Settings”. You need to select the “U3 Launchpad settings” option:
Unfortunately, resizing your Windows Vista partition isn’t particularly easy. That fact is regardless of the presence of Vista’s drive management tool, the piece of Windows functionality that should make it easy to shrink or extend your drive partitions.
So, while I’ve been preparing to install Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope I’ve had to learn how to get around this problem. I thought I’d share the process with you and add some value to this forum post by testing the process and simplifying it with screenshots and a step by step guide.
The problem with Windows Vista drive management
I discovered Crunchbang on Lifehacker earlier today and couldn’t resist a quick tour by installing it to a USB drive. Crunchbang is a fast and light flavour of Ubuntu, and, if you’re an advanced Windows user curious about Linux, it’s an ideal entry point to explore the world of super fast Linux distros. See how dark and cool looking it is!
Want to try Crunchbang? Here’s how to install it on a USB drive from Windows Vista:
Here’s a neat little tweak my friend Adrian showed me this week – how to tidy up your Firefox bookmarks toolbar:
Before:
After:
All you do is open up the properties for each bookmark, and clear out the “Name:” field:
Job done. You now have a tidied bookmarks toolbar with lots of extra space for more bookmarks.
Just incase you haven’t heard, we’re heading towards a nasty global recession. While you might feel reassured by the news that many companies are increasing their SEO spend in 2009, it can only mean one thing – SEO is going to get competitive in 2009. So, if you’re thinking about recession proofing your site in the near future, here are a few things you might want to consider doing soon:
1) Review your keyword strategy
I was just meandering along to my trusty old about:config settings in Firefox 3 when I was confronted with a **”Here be dragons” message…
Highly amusing, thanks Firefox!
**May not actually be any dragons… 
Have you ever experienced seeing a ranking for one of your posts that has been copied and is being hosted on a different website?
That’s what has happened with the iphone display post I wrote on the 18th October, 2008.
I discovered the problem when randomly checking for rankings in Google for SEOgadget. I keyed in “iphone 3g display problem” and got these serps:
iphoneadmirer.com has taken the original content of the post, and is now out ranking my site for the terms I targeted!
What to do when you’re worried your content has been copied:
I had my first iphone 3g “fault” today – at least I thought it was a fault. The display screen wouldn’t activate and stayed blank even when I pressed the sleep/wake button on the front of the phone. With a blank / black screen your iphone is completely useless. You can still hear text messages and calls coming in, but there’s no way you can do anything.
Don’t panic! Your screen can be fixed, easily!
Fortunately, I worked out that you can fix this problem by resetting your phone. Here’s how:
I came across this handy little tool to convert ordinary text to ascii code, quite a useful tool if you’re trying to sort out your W3C compliance and don’t know the ascii characters for ampersands and slashes off the top of your head :-)
After I’d finished with the serious stuff I started looking at the other google results!, and I came across a tool that converts ordinary jpg’s and gifs into ascii code just like this picture of my cat:
The author is called Patrick Roos and you can find out more about him here.
Not my usual SEO or Ubuntu post, but that’s the fun of having your own blog! This week I visited the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill, London.
It’s all here…the toys and games, posters and magazines, fads and fashions, postcards and packaging. Nostalgic and inspiring, it’s an unexpected reunion with your past!
Featuring over 12,000 original items from the Robert Opie Collection, the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising has now opened in London’s Notting Hill after seventeen years in Gloucester.
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