• Open up your “hosts” file in a text editor. This is the location on Windows XP:

  C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
  

• Add two different hostnames with the same IP address.
• Enter control panel -> User accounts and select your user. Then click “Manage your network passwords” (in the upper left corner, assuming you haven’t selected “classic mode”).
• Add the different host names and the corresponding user names and passwords you want to use. You might need to add “MACHINENAME\” before the user name. The MACHINENAME is the network name of your Windows machine.
• Optionally, map the shares as network drives.

I was quite annoyed but the Google logos displayed every now and then on top of my pictures, and decided to try to remove them. It wasn’t hard, here’s how I did it.

• Install a resource editing program, such as the XN Resource Editor.
• Open up the Picasa installation folder and make a backup of the file Picasa2.scr, just in case you want to switch back to the branded screen saver again.
• Start the XN Resource Editor and open the file Picasa2.scr.
• Locate the two JPEG resources in the resource tree, in my case it was 111 and 114 (this might differ between different versions of the screen saver).
• Right-click on the resources and choose “Delete Resource”.
• Save the file.
• Done! The Google logos have now been removed from the screen saver!

A little tip: The same screen saver (atleast AFAIK) is available in the Google Pack, in case you don’t want to install the full Picasa suite. It’s called “Google Photos Screensaver”, but seems to be the same program that they bundle with Picasa.

• Install the excellent freeware program MyPhoneExplorer.
• Enter the Options (F2), choose Sync and then choose Thunderbird Lightning in the “Calendar” field.
• MyPhoneExplorer will automatically install the required Thunderbird plugin.
• Click on “Advanced” to choose which calendar to sync and what mode (merge calendars or let phone override Lightning or vice versa)
• Hit Ok, enter the Calendar and hit sync – done!

If you want to create a desktop shortcut to automatically start the sync – duplicate the shortcut to MyPhoneExplorer, enter the icon properties and add “action=sync syncitem=organizer” to the destination (after myphoneexplorer.exe). There are more command line options available in the English FAQ.

Hope this howto helps someone, it sure made my life a lot easier! Before I discovered this method, I was auto-exporting the calendar as an ICS file (through a dedicated Thunderbird extension) and then importing in manually into MyPhoneExplorer on a regular basis. Now I only need to connect the USB cable and click the dedicated shortcut – quite an improvement!

• Try using the “Manage my network passwords” window (accessed through the “User accounts” applet in the control panel)
• If that didn’t help:

• Make sure to enter the server name in the username box, example: MACHINE\username
• Try entering the IP address of the server instead of the host name (worked for me when everything else failed).

Just today, I found a program that makes things a LOT easier: StreamSniff. Just start it, and it will start sniffing net traffic for stream URLs…

It’s available for both Windows and Linux, and worked right away on my Linux firewall. Highly recommended if you like to save internet streams to disk for later converting/viewing.

NetTransport is handy for these tasks if you’re running Windows, the Linux alternative is Mplayer using the -dumpstream option.

First, a warning. Be careful when using Norton Ghost (in my case version 2003) on a HP machine – there’s a known problem with that combination.

In my case, I ran Ghost and chose to clone the drive. When the computer booted into the Ghost interface, it locked up and displayed an error message saying “internal stack overflow”. After retrying this a few times (same results) and trying to boot back into Windows (didn’t work since Ghost had taken over the boot sector) I booted Knoppix so I could look for assistance on the web.

(Thank god for Knoppix, BTW… I was able to access my files and documents on the disk, access the net and use email just as usual. It only took a quick configuration of Thunderbird to get myself back on track.)

Further attempts to clone the drive from within Knoppix failed – PartEd crashed when I selected the drive and both PartImage and NTFSclone gave up midway due to disk errors.

Finally I managed to remove the small partition created by Ghost and make the old Windows partition active again, and Windows on the faulty drive booted again. Well, after a few lockups during boottime anyway.

Now it was time for another try at cloning the drive… I decided to give Acronis True Image a try, and it worked beautifully.

So the lesson is – don’t use Ghost unless you’re sure it’s compatible with your hardware, because it can really screw up your computer…

Thus, I decided to use Ghost… The first approach was to create a disk image file of the “master” PC and using it on the other PC:s, but accessing the file (located on an external USB hard drive) proved to be difficult.

The second option was to use the “peer-to-peer” mode, meaning the master computer rebooted into DOS/Ghost mode while the slave (target) computer booted from a “peer-to-peer network boot floppy” which Norton created for me. Both computers got IP adresses through DHCP, and all that remained was to connect them and start the copying.

I was quite surprised by the speed, a ~1.5 GB XP install took only 7 minutes on a 100 MBit network – pretty fast considering the relatively slow hardware!

All that remained when the transfer was done was to reboot, adjust the computer & user name and uninstall Ghost (since it was installed on the master computer, all slaves got it too – pretty silly but unavoidable). Voilá!

Someone on a mailinglist suggested I’d use DB Power Amp which, with the help from RealAlternative quickly turned the .ra file into a huge wav.

Using Sound Forge, I set so called “markers” in the file, named them into the song names, then turned them into regions and then saved all regions as separate files. I was pretty surprised to see that the Nero wave editor could read the Sound Forge marks directly, which meant I could burn the large WAV file instead of using the splitted WAV files. With the “no gaps between tracks” option enabled, the resulting disc sounded perfect!

Edit:
It’s now one month later, and I’ve almost forgotten the details on how to do this… Net Transport needs a rtsp link, and those are a bit tricky to extract. I did discover that selecting “File”->”Clip properties”->”View clip info” in the Real Player displayed the RTSP URL.