A few weeks ago I built a computer for my son. The parts were salvaged from an old PC my father passed along and after the long, arduous, process of locking down Windows I installed some kiddie software.

There is No Simple Menu Software for Windows

Children learn quickly but asking a three-year old to navigate the Start menu is a far stretch. Surely there was a kid-friendly “program launcher” reminiscent of Power Menu for DOS. I imagined a menu whose items included an image thumbnail and user-defined text adjacent to it.

After 20 minutes of Googling I found nothing.

Enter Kiosk Mode

Considering alternatives, I devised a simple HTML page with large images and text links. The page, rather menu, needed to automatically run at login and not easily exited from. This got me thinking about “kiosk mode” and web browsers. Internet Explorer does kiosk mode quite well, presenting a full-screen experience without any on-screen navigation controls (although [Alt-F4] can be used to exit).

It’s easy to do, don’t bother with registry tweaks, just use this command-line in your shortcut:

iexplore -k path-to-html.htm

You Can’t Get There from Here

Big usability problem though. IE won’t let you open a local executable from any web page, instead assuming you are being attacked by the Internet. This is sound logic but considering how user-customizable Windows is supposed to be, I could not find any way of overriding this for my local and trusted HTML file.

Regardless of my security settings I was always prompted “are you sure you want this HTML page to open a program?” Fortunately you only have to answer this question once per session at the computer.

Considering how far technology has come since DOS it’s astonishing that a simple (I said simple) program launcher does not exist for Windows. Interestingly enough, some distributions of Linux have such a menu. Typical.

I’ve had my share of wireless routers and, quite honestly, none of them have worked very well for me. The radios in Linksys WRT54G units couldn’t emit their way out of a paper bag, third-party firmware such as DD-WRT seems to have on-going issues with the SIP (VoIP) protocol, and most recently my Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 decides to stop passing traffic every 10-14 days. For fun I installed DD-WRT v23 SP2 and v24 RC3 onto my Buffalo and they still haven’t fixed the SIP issue and strangely enough I can’t connect to LAN clients once my WAN connection starts working.

My father mentioned his D-Link DIR-655 has been reliable and we have a similar setup of Xbox 360s, Macs, and mobile devices. I gave it a shot but it’s too early to say how much better the DIR-655 will be. At the moment my MacBook Pro’s Airport meter is waffling low and high - never a good sign.

The point of my post… I couldn’t get my Nokia E61 connected to my “Mixed N and G” network using “WPA/WPA2 security” with “TKIP and AES” (the latter two being the default). The D-Link access point would come and go on the E61’s WLAN scanner and would not connect. I changed the security settings and it connected properly. For awhile at least.

Today it reverted back to not connecting. After more noodling it seems the E61 won’t connect to the D-Link when set to “Mixed N+G” mode so I changed it to “G-only” and it connects straight-away. VoIP with Truphone works as well. Edit: Unfortunately Devicescape stopped working but a manually created Access Point works fine. Devicescape started working again but it seems to have a mind of its own on when it will connect to the wireless AP.

This doesn’t address the silliness of owning a Draft-N access point which is forced to run at G-only mode and leaves two issues:

• What is different about Mixed N+G and the E61?
• Why did Devicescape give up the ghost?

I hope to find out over the next few days.

P.S.
In light of this, D-Link must be doing something right. My wife’s Thinkpad has never been able to connect to her company’s VPN with the Buffalo access point (yes, VPN passthru was enabled) but it’s working fine with the D-Link.

Wow, fanboys everywhere have been screaming bloody murder for the fiasco known as the Phase 1 Beta Code Email Disaster. Bungie/Microsoft failed to issue the beta codes to those of us lucky enough to win a free code back in January. They claimed email issues (and client/ISP spam filtering) but put it on the back-burner to fix Crackdown beta code problems.

When they got back to the Phase 1 peeps, one generous soul at Bungie named SketchFactor started issuing codes by hand until a resolution was found. He finally went home for the evening and the following day found Bungie blaming Microsoft. Calls to Xbox support put the onice on Bungie and Bungie’s site claimed that all codes were emailed and that was it. No code, check your spam filter.

Ha! I use a semi-dedicated email server so there’s no reason mine didn’t come except the fact someone at Bungie/Microsoft goofed and it took a long while to sort it out. Perhaps it was just an email server issue (undoubtedly on a Windows box) but no details have surfaced (yet).

In any event, it’s a happy day because I just got my code. Play on Spartan, play on.

Halo is Microsoft’s creme-de-la-creme of console games. It sold like wildfire on the original Xbox and became an instant classic. The latest sequel, Halo 3, is slated to roll out on the Xbox 360 and Windows Vista later this year.

Bungie, the game’s developer, has opened (limited) beta testing to the public and I got the good news this afternoon - I’m in. I made the first-round selection process when I read about it at Xbox360Fanboy and I’m glad since the other selection methods involve more than a simple registration.

I’ve always thought the Xbox 360 will become Microsoft’s Media Center (scroll down) of the future. It plays games, streams music and video from other devices, downloads movies & TV shows. The only thing missing has been live TV and now its coming at the end of 2007.

This is a brilliant move by MS because a PC in your living room to watch TV is absurd. The Xbox is already there and ready to go. For Mac switchers like me, who thought of running Windows just for Media Center, has been put to rest.