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

New York magazine has a great piece up detailing the final days of the Conan O’Brien regime at “The Tonight Show” that includes this insightful passage:

By the time O’Brien signs off tonight, with a $33 million buyout and a green light to jump to a rival network as early as September, it will be on a wave of populist support. A younger, tech-savvier constituency—one that was more likely to watch TheTonight Show on DVR or Hulu and was now tweeting its allegiance to Team Conan over Team Jay more than 50 to 1—had remade him, with viral swiftness, into something he had not sought to be and, as a fantastically wealthy Harvard-educated showman, did not exactly match: a folk hero for the downsized age.

The phrase “folk hero for the downsized age” made me think, is there even more going on here than that? I think it’s a generational thing: Conan O’Brien represents the collective angst of Generation-X’ers and Y’zers who have had to sit patiently while a generation of Baby Boomers stubbornly refused to pass the torch. And Jay Leno’s continued willingness to stick around long, long past his cultural sell-by date could just be the perfect metaphor for the self-involved, decreasingly-effective generation of Boomers that continue to hog up the top slots in our nation’s workforce.

The sole bright spot likely to emerge from this entire embarrassing affair may turn out to be the uncharacteristically optimistic, final words from O’Brien’s final “Tonight Show” broadcast:

All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

Let’s hope amazing things happen for Conan much sooner than later, and let’s hope Jay Leno gets crushed by a Rolls-Royce Phantom II Continental.

“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