The Machets’ Blog

Tip For: Windows XP Professional

We’ve all agonised over this situation. “Updating your computer is almost complete,” it reads, “You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart now?”

You may be in the middle of a Word Document, ten tabs in Firefox or something else that’s very important. If you select Restart Later, you’ll get a bubble popping up every ten minutes, asking you to do a reset.

Fortunately, there is a solution that will delay this annoyance. Head to Start > Run. Type “gpedit.msc” and press OK. In Local Computer Policy, head to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations. Select Enabled and choose how long you would like the messages to interfere (in minutes). Select Apply, then OK, and you’re done!

Please note that it is important to restart your computer for the security updates to work, but it doesn’t need to be done in such a short space of time. Group Policy is an excellent ‘hidden’ feature of Windows XP Pro (not included with XP Home edition) that allows you to customise the intricate details of your computer.

[via Colin]

Google Maps has come to Australian shores! This excellent service now has maps for the whole country, as well as New Zealand. Unfortunately, however, it still needs some settling in. First of all, you are unable to search for specific locations, you have to manually find them. Secondly, they have not recently updated the satellite images, and many parts within an hour away from major cities cannot be seen properly. Finally, some names of roads are incorrect, such as “North Road” being “N Road.” Some roads are also not properly aligned in the ‘hybrid’ (street maps over satellite maps) maps.

It’s still worth taking a look; try and find your house!

Finally, after a couple of weeks, The Machets’ Blog is back online! We have been moving our domain name (machet.com.au) to a new server, and everything should hopefully go well from here.

Our blog should be going 10x as fast, as the MySQL server is now part of the hosting. Before we were using a free host that was gruelingly slow. If you spot any errors, please let me know.

The Machets’ Blog is proud to be 38% web 2.0 compliant! It’s nothing special, really, but rather a fancy term for “it is more than the conventional website and has features considered to be ‘new.’

Anyone who has a website can get this title, simply go to certifyr.com.

Microsoft has recently created a handful of useful programs. Windows Live includes both updated and new sets of software, aimed at making your computer more secure and improving your internet experience. Live products inculde Windows Live Mail (Formely Hotmail), Windows OneCare Live, Windows Live Messenger (Formely MSN Messenger), Windows Office Live, Windows Live Favourites, and more.

Over the next few weeks, we will be publishing reviews on most of the aforementioned programs. We will note what you need and how you can get them, depending on whether they are in an exclusive beta or not.

First up, we will be reviewing the security products offered within the Windows Live products, as well as other new programs such as Windows Defender (Formely Microsoft AntiSpyware beta 1). A new category has been created on The Machets’ Blog dedicated to news and reviews related to Microsoft. The first review will be posted in a few days.

Rumour had it that Google was about to launch a new calendar service. This turns out to be true, as Paul Stone has discovered. He came across another program called Google Links, where you can customise shortcuts and add them to the top of the webpage. One of the links you could add is called “Google CL2.” Under it, the text “A calendar for you and the world” can be found. Unfortunately, it cannot be accessed at this time. This proves that an excellent new service from Google will be coming our way soon. As soon as it’s released, we’ll write a review on The Machets’ Blog.

Edit 2/3/06: The link removed as it no longer works.
Update 28/6/06: Google Calendar has been released; you can find our review of it here.

The Machets’ Blog has just been upgraded to the new version of Wordpress, a powerful blogging system. From the outside, it doesn’t look very different, but when log in, you will notice all the changes.

Thanks to this upgrade, you can expect to see some new features and additions to our blog coming in the near future. Until then!

Happy New Year! Don’t forget - dd/mm/06 from now on!

It’s my birthday today - the 31st of December. Happy New Years’ Eve!

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas for today, and a Happy Chanukkah for tonight and the next 8 days!