You’ll have to disable “3D Acceleration” in Peggle Nights if you update to newer ATI drivers. But the UI of the menu screen freezes up so it’s hard to do that. Here’s a relatively easy, low-tech fix:

• Start your PC in safe mode (hit F8 at startup or use msconfig) and “Safe Boot”.
• Start up Peggle Nights and get a sticky note. Rip off three small squares of the sticky stuff up top.
• Stick one square directly on “Options”, one on “3D Acceleration” and one on “Done”.
• Reboot, but this time not in “Safe Mode”.
• After you’ve started up normally, start Peggle Nights up again. You’ll be on the frozen screen, but thanks to the sticky note squares, you can now click the areas you need to click: first, the bottom square, then, the top square, then finally the square in the middle.

By way of explanation, my daughter loves to watch people play Peggle Nights, so when this stopped working there was great sadness.

Keeping all my data in the cloud has become something bordering on an obsession for me. Here are my current suggestions on what the best bets are for staying nimble across a wide range of devices and operating systems — please feel free to leave your personal favorites in the comments:

Best web-based email: GMail

Full IMAP access and the excellent Google Sync keep GMail on top over recent upgrades by Hotmail and MobileMe. Google seems to be stretching for new features to add of late, but nothing else comes close.

What I’d like to see: More space. A recent influx of photos has me bumping up against the edge of my 8GB.

Best distributed file system: DropBox

Dropbox “just works” — it’s a dedicated part of my workflow to collect and distribute files for almost every project, so I’ll never be without that PDF, that Word document, that text file. If you haven’t tried it, hit this link to get a some extra space from day one.

What I’d like to see: “Play all music files sequentially in this folder” in the iPhone & iPad app, making simple folder-based playlists drag-and-drop dead-simple.

Best on-demand music service: Rdio

Not nearly enough tracks yet — the sync between my iTunes library and Rdio only picked up about 2,000 of my 6,000 songs — but the clean interface, killer mobile app and easy entry into this cloud-based music service makes it one to watch. I’m not sure if I’ll pay $10 a month for long — especially with Apple’s Lala-clone rumored to be close to release and Google working out something similar for Android — but for now, Rdio is your best bet for simple access to your music in the cloud.

What I’d like to see: Pandora still rules for casual listening and finding new music, so I’d love to see Rdio develop a music-discovery functionality for the desktop and mobile app.

Best browser sync: Firefox Sync

Chrome is steadily slowly adding browser sync features, but Firefox is ahead of the curve on this one with Firefox Sync (the Sync Service Formerly Known As Weave). I’m looking forward to the upcoming iPhone app, and having this feature ‘baked in’ to Firefox 4 will raise awareness of how great it is to have one single browser session.

What I’d like to see: Firefox Sync Extensions for Chrome and Safari could make this service the holy grail of sync services, with one set of bookmarks, history and saved passwords no matter where you are and what browser you’re on.

Best streaming video: No clear winner

YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix look poised to duke it out over the next 12 months for living-room supremacy (with Apple’s AppleTV as a dark-horse rival). It’s too close to call.

What I’d like to see: An open specification for streaming video so manufacturers and consumers can build “one set-top box to rule them all”. Good luck with that.

Best photo galleries: Flickr

Flickr’s recent ‘wide-screen’ redesign keeps them competitive with Picasa and whatever crap Microsoft is trying to trick people into using. The service remains a little pricey but the presentation and functionality is easily the best.

What I’d like to see: It should be easier to pull all your photos out of Flickr; users should not have to use a third-party client. Also, I’d like to see them build-in a fully integrated TwitPic killer for mobile users.

In the coming days or weeks, your friends, or neighbors, and/or loved ones may send you links and articles from Engadget.com, Wired.com, or even from noted child-pornography trading hub Gizmodo.com, articles that suggest that there is some sort of reception problem with the iPhone 4. Not that we would ever suggest that our loyal customers side with Apple over their own (often unreliable) family members, but we would like to take a moment to correct many of these ignorant, misinformed and outright evil statements repeated in the media and by your family members.

To start with: Apple products are not meant to be physically held. Simply by picking up an Apple product and leaving a single human finger print, you have voided your warranty in several of the continental United States — sorry, Tennessee. Customers that would like to do so may purchase AppleCare™ and a brand new, magical and amazing HoldingGlove® designed to enhance the natural shine and luster of our products when utilized outside the geographic confines of an Apple Store (not recommended).

Still, we have received reports that rogue customers who decide to use the iPhone outside of a Apple Store AirPort Extreme WiFi hot spot experience a dramatic drop in reception when they void their warranty, put the safety of their (often unreliable) family members in danger, and hold the iPhone 4 without the magical and amazing HoldingGlove®.

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising. Both!

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the graphics representing the bars we used were too short, giving users the impression that reception was somehow lessened at “1 bar” or “2 bars”. An upcoming, free software update will make all the bars the same length, essentially fixing the problem that was not basically even a problem in the first place, because come on!

However, because Apple strives to not only match customer expectations, but instead, to exceed them: an upcoming free software update after the other upcoming free software upgrade will actually reshape and reinvent the very way bars are displayed on the iPhone 4. We asked our team of designers and hipster futurists to think “outside the quadraphonic egg chair” and radically change the fundamental way that bars are displayed on cell phones, for now and forever. Our engineers immediately realized that to strip away everything that has held cellular telephones back, all that was really necessary was one, single, elegant, really long bar.

Thus we present: The iBar™.

The radically new iBar™ will eliminate the confusion and clutter that is created by having too many bars to keep track of. The one, single, elegant, really long bar does not change shape. The iBar™ simply appears and disappears when the iPhone 4 is turned on and turned off. Turn on your iPhone 4 — there’s the iBar™. Turn it off, and it’s gone. It’s longer than any other cell phone reception bar indicator ever, and with one single glance, you’ll know if you can see if it’s a bar or not. Which it is.

To conclude, we have gone back and double-checked our sales figures, and the results are the same — we have sold a shitload of these things. So: awesome.

Anyhow, thank you for your patience and support and buckets upon buckets of money.

Apple

(Also: Gruber).

Notice I did not say all Facebook users*! But some of them!

*but I was thinking it

“About a dozen of the soy sauce packets from Chinese take out; more of the hot mustard packets; and half a dozen ketchup servings.

Easy pick up from front porch in neighborhood off ### Street near #####. Preference to prompt pick up – Monday would be great.

######
Northampton”

10). 6

9). 3

8). 7

7). 8

6). 2

5). 5

4). 9

3). 10

2). 1

1). 4

Slick, right? I’ve watched this video twice, because I love reading and I love magazines and I love software demos and I love hardware demos. Full disclosure: I don’t completely love sports, so maybe there’s something I’m missing here. But all this tablet hype is reminding me of something I am almost hesitant to bring up:

CD-ROMs.

Remember CD-ROMs? I do. For about a year or so, you couldn’t buy a magazine without a CD-ROM falling out the side. Then it was DVD-ROMs, full of music videos and shareware demos and to tell the truth, I don’t think I ever even put one in the computer, because by that time there was something else out there:

The Internet.

The above video obviously represents a richer experience than can be experienced on the web right now (barring those fancy-lad, full-screen Flash sites that everyone in reality hates) but I maintain that the above product, once you finally iDownloaded all 860 MB off the iTime iMagazine iStore would be very boring, mainly because all those fancy photos and videos and stuff whizzing around on that tablet? They would be so old by the time they put all that together for you that you would have watched it or read about it already.

On television, and on the Internet.

Never mind that a multimedia presentation and layout as complex as the above demo is going to require an entire new generation of digital producers skilled enough to tightly integrate video, audio, print, web, fixed layout and dynamic, non-linear page layout. There are not many of those producers out there right now; the above product represents a pretty rare intersection of skills, most parts more akin to software designer than graphic designer.

So anyway. I tend to pooh-pooh ideas at first, before I eventually embrace them and via revisionist history pretend I felt positive about them the entire time. But, seriously, ‘mythical Apple tablet computer’ as white knight, print magazine savior?

We’ll see.

Via Lindsay Robertson

Not that I am like Dr. Blog Von Bloggington over here but I can give out this one piece of advice with some certainty:

1. Do Not Post Hour-Long Videos To The Web.

OK, I’m ready for some questions now. You, sir?:

Q: Yes, I recently shot flipcam footage of a community council meeting I recently attended, and it’s an hour-and-a-half of unedited, shaky footage with unattractive people speaking off-camera in a nearly inaudible monotone. Should I post that to the web?

A: Great question. No. You should not. Because nobody cares and nobody will watch it. Next question!

Q: Hello, I have a two-hour long video of an acedemic talk I recently attended, should I post the entire unedited video to blip.tv, YouTube or Vimeo? So hard to choose!

A: Excellent question, I get that a lot. Actually you should not post it at all, because no one will ever watch it so you are really wasting your precious remaining time on Earth; time that could be better spent with loved ones, or even just staring into the middle distance. So, I think I have time for one last question.

Q: Can iMovie HD handle videos longer than three hours long? Or should I use Final Cut Pro? Because I have this recording of a marketing seminar we held last month that I really think people would enjoy big time.

A: It is doubtful that iMovie could handle that much footage without issue, but again, the problem there is not hard drive space or network bandwidth but instead the problem is that your video is longer than Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather movies and infinitely less interesting. You do your viewer (completely hypothetical — I assure you, no one is watching) no service by dumping raw, unedited footage on them; ninety-nine times out of 100, aggressive editing is a kindness and demonstrates respect for your audience’s attention span and amount of free time.

I hope this helped some people out there today. If you have any questions about the advice above, please post it in the comments!

I’ve been seeing a lot of ‘Google Money Master’ ads on various sites. You click through and you get a page explaining how you can ‘work at home’ (the American Dream, apparently) and a pitch:

Step 1: Get Google Money Master, only pay the $1.95 for shipping.

Step 2: Follow the directions on Google Money Master that basically shows you how to and set up a Google account. Then they will give you the website links to post. Start posting those links. Google tracks everything.

You heard right. It basically shows you how to and set up a Google account. There there are some fake comments at the bottom, which you can’t add to because of ‘problems with spam’ (kudos for that).

What you should do is check Google before attempting to become a Google Money Master:

• complaintsboard.com says: “This is based out of Phillipines. It posts FAKE blogs on how people made money posting stuff on google. They initally took out $2.87 from my account and I just found out they will take out $70 something monthly. Oh and of course the 800 number stays busy so there is no way to contact them.” (and the comments agree)
• ripoffreport.com says: “A couple of weeks later I received a phone call from a Fredricka Mills from the grant center telling me I would receive 7 free days of google money profit, and 7 free days of advance benefits plus 7/24 medical to try. In return I would receive a gas card and $1,000.00 in grocery vouchers. I told her no thank you I only wanted the grant cd and had not signed up for anything else. She then informed me that I would be charged $39.95 per month to be a member. Well it sure did not say anything about that either when I ordered the grant cd … I thought it was all over until I got this package of membership cards etc. for this advance benefits plus 7/24 medical emergency stuff. I called the grant place back and they told me they were a third party (which is bull) and gave me a phone number to call. In the meantime my credit card was charged $29.95 …”

Long story short, don’t fall for it.

Also of interest the same leaderboard ad shills for a fake Rachael Ray blog at rachelrayblogs.com:

We know we spelt her name wrong, but it’s too late! Did you know most people who search Google actually type the wrong spelling in?

…you don’t say.

NOTE: “Google Money Master” is now “Google Home Income” but it still continues to be a HUGE SCAM.

~Jeff

Enjoy!

And the SEO expert says, “You guys, I’m so thirsty. Is there anything to drink?”

And the CEO says, “I just drank the last of my water 30 minutes ago.”

And the web programmer says, “I have plenty of water, a true abundance, but I won’t give any to you. Because, you are the worst. I hate you with every fiber of my being. Your very existence is an inherent refutation of the basic concept of quality workmanship and craft. Every additional second you remain on this planet is a deep, personal offense to me.”

Then the SEO expert died slowly and painfully of thirst, and over the next several days his body slumped, shriveled and shrank as his organs collapsed upon themselves with a hissing sound while the CEO and web programmer sat and stared. And the sun set, and rose, and set again.

THE END