A bit off-topic this, but we had some friends staying over the other night and Julian just took up learning to play the guitar a couple of years ago, and is doing what new guitarists do (I've been noodling on all sorts of guitars for about 18 years but can still remember this next bit): voraciously listening to as much as he can, and really listening to the guitar parts. We started talking about some songs that really stand alone, sometimes surprisingly, and I reckon you'll have to go a long way to beat the multi-layered acoustic rhythym guitar that goes all through Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs Robinson".

Maybe sometime next year I'll do a "High Fidelity" style list writing exercise... best drum intro (got to be Adam & the Ants' Kings of a Wild Frontier, surely?), bass line (Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall?) etc...

Happy New Year!

I like the Windows GUI, and particularly since I'm use to it, the Vista UI. I don't think I follow a particularly usual pattern, though, because I tend to make use of lots of keyboard shortcuts which many people may not know, or may know about somewhere in the back of their mind but never bother to use them.

Some examples:

ALT-TAB - cycles through open windows - everyone probably knows that. Yet, I still often see people manually minimising windows to get to the document behind ... and wonder "what's the point of a multi-window, multi-tasking OS if you only ever think about the one at the front?" On a similar vein, SHIFT-ALT-TAB goes back through the list of windows that ALT-TAB does, so if you over-shoot the window/document you're looking for, it's quick to go back one.

CTRL-SHIFT-ESC - not that obvious a combination maybe, but they're at least all down one side of the keyboard so can be quickly activated. Brings the Windows Task Manager up, and a good bit quicker than right-clicking on the task bar, or pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL and getting it from there.

And then there's the "Windows" key on most keyboards...

• WND-D "restores" the desktop; ie minimises everything and gives you direct access to the desktop. Annoyingly on Vista, this also minimises the Sidebar ...
• ... although WIND-SPACE brings just the sidebar to the fore again, withough making it Always on Top.
• WND-R is equivalent to the Start->Run command, so it's only one less keystroke but saves fractions of a second in screen painting time, which always seems like a better way to do it.

There are many other WND-combinations which I don't really use (like WND-E for Explorer/My Computer).

And finally (for now), one I found out purely by accident by hitting more keys than I wanted on my laptop... WND-Break. Opens the "System Properties" dialog which would normally be on (My) Computer -> Properties from the start menu.

I'll follow up another time with some other handy commands which can save a bit of time (especially when run from WND-R :))...

One of the neat things with HTC Windows Mobile 5 devices on Windows Vista is when you activate the Wireless Modem over Bluetooth, Vista will just see the device and automatically detect it as a modem.

When you plug the device in to a Vista PC using USB (having first enabled Wireless Modem over USB on the phone), you may find that it won't be recognised.

A solution can be derived from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837637...

If you grab your standard HTC USB Modem INF file (you can grab a copy here if you don't have one to hand) and add the emboldened lines below into the relevant places...

[Modem1.NT]
DriverVer=05/13/1999
include=mdmcpq.inf
CopyFiles=FakeModemCopyFileSection
...
...
...
[Modem1.NT.Services]
include=mdmcpq.inf
AddService=usbser, 0x00000000, LowerFilter_Service_Inst
...
...
...
[Modem1.NT.HW]
include=mdmcpq.inf
AddReg=LowerFilterAddReg

Save the file out under a new name, and when Vista starts looking for the driver, tell it you want to point to a specific location. If it finds this file, you should find that Robert's your father's brother!

Have a happy Christmas - see you in the new year!

 I said yesterday that I had a mixed experience from moving to the Orange SPV M3100 (aka HTC "Hermes"/TyTn design), particularly concerning the size of the device (compared to a regular phone) and the belt clip thing that it comes with.

Jason, however, kindly gave me a present to keep my phone from getting scratched (and keeping it nice & toasty in these cold nights) ... an iPod Sock (there's even DIY knitting instructions if you're a dab hand with the needles and don't fancy paying £19 for the official one)...

I suppose I should stick in the wash sometime soon as it's starting to look a little grubby...

It's almost the perfect size for the M3100 though - it pulls down to almost cover the base of the unit yet still alows a charging cable etc to be used. And it's often amusing that a guy from Microsoft rocks up and whips out what looks like an iPod... then pulls his phone from the sock :)

I switched fairly recently from using a Qtek 8500 Smartphone (which I still use occasionally and love for its form factor) to an Orange SPV M3100 Pocket PC Phone, and have had a somewhat mixed experience as a result.

Pros: The M3100 has a nice screen, a slide-out keyboard (making on-the-hoof email and texts that bit easier than Smartphone... though I do like T9 on the Qtek's keypad). It's also 3G, which is useful... never really use the WiFi so that's not a great value add.

Cons: Even with it's relatively diminutive size, the M3100 is still over-big for a phone. But the biggest annoyance is really with the phone UI - it's nowhere near as quick to use as a phone, compared to the 8500 ... anything that means you need to tap the screen pretty much means you need to be looking at the device and using 2 hands.

Now, a couple of weeks after I got the device I was wakened up in the middle of the night several days in a row, because I'd forgotten to switch it to "silent" before going to bed (not as easy as it might be, since there's no "Profile" like there is in Smartphone, that could switch between silent/normal/outdoors etc).

I figured "someone must have cracked this!", and was delighted to find a neat bit of software called PocketZenPhone which not only implements the ability to have profiles (with a lot more than just sound volume etc), but to be able to schedule when the phone switches between them!

Now, I have the device automatically go into silent mode at 11pm and go back to normal at 7am... so even if someone sends me a meeting request for a different timezone or something that would fire reminders in the middle of the night, the phone will let me slumber on...

This has to be the best £5 I could have spent on Windows Mobile software!