The Shirley Temple Pilots were due to play at Finns this coming Saturday (the 13^th August), but Drummer Bloke seems to have broken his hand which means we're minus a bongo player. So, unfortuately, we've got to cancel the gig. Sorry to anyone who was going to come down.

I downloaded a copy of Windows Vista Beta 1 last night (legitimately I might add) and installed it on my 3Ghz workhorse system first thing this morning.

Installation itself was a breeze - I'd already prepared for the installation my shrinking my primary XP partition by 25Gb. The installation procedure pretty much boiled down to:

1. Boot system from DVD
2. Select empty space for installation
3. Name the system
4. Provide activation key
5. Wait

Unfortunately, it looks as though I'm going to have to wait before I can see what the Aero Glass experience is like, as the 6600 GTOC I currently have installed doesn't have any LDDM (Longhorn Display Driver Model) support yet. Hopefully it won't be too long before nVidia provide a beta driver to play with.

Update: nVidia released some alpha LDDM drivers almost immediately, but on my system I ended up with a physical screen resolution of around 640 x 480 with a much larger 'virtual desktop' which does not pan or scroll. I'm going to wait until nVidia come up with newer drivers before I play around with Vista again.

Be sure to visit all the options under "Configuration" in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 16 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.

Joy of unbounded joys, Ed Wood's seminal (and truly abysmal) film Plan 9 From Outer Space has been released to the great unwashed under the Creative Commons Public Domain license. Thanks to the wonderful people at archive.org, it can be downloaded here.