Just a while ago I was examining a folder in Windows 8, when I accidentally pressed DEL. Boom, deleted, without confrimation! Ok, it has just moved to the Recycle Bin, but I'd like to have a confirmation.

Probably Microsoft saw that Apple in OS X deletes files without a confirmation, so they thought: "hey, if they do that way, it means it's the right way!". Well, on OS X, you delete files with cmd+del, not by just pressing the del key, so the accidental deletion of files and folders is harder!

Fortunately, it's possible to enable the confirmation, by following those three easy steps:

• Right click on the Recycle Bin
• Select "Properties"
• Select the "Display delete confirmation dialog" checkbox

In the official Steve Jobs biography you can read this story:

Bill fired up his demo and it quickly filled the Lisa screen with randomly-sized ovals, faster than you thought was possible. But something was bothering Steve Jobs. "Well, circles and ovals are good, but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners? Can we do that now, too?"

"No, there's no way to do that. In fact it would be really hard to do, and I don't think we really need it". I think Bill was a little miffed that Steve wasn't raving over the fast ovals and still wanted more.

Steve suddenly got more intense. "Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!". And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. "And look outside, there's even more, practically everywhere you look!". He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.

When Steve and Bill passed a no-parking sign with rounded corners, it did the trick. "OK, I give up", Bill pleaded. "I'll see if it's as hard as I thought." He went back home to work on it.

Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast, almost at the speed of plain rectangles. When he added the code to LisaGraf, he named the new primitive "RoundRects". Over the next few months, roundrects worked their way into various parts of the user interface, and soon became indispensable. 

At that time the computers were limited, typical user interfaces were simple and without frills, yet they decided to make it more enticing by using rounded rectangles.

Take a look around you, a lot of design elements use rounded rectangles.

Not in Windows 8 .

This shot I composed shows what I mean:

Shading? Gone. Gradient filling? Gone. The border it's just a 1 pixel line, I guess it would be almost invisible on a retina display.

Do you like it? I don't.

A while ago, Microsoft released Halo Waypoint, an app to follow the latest news from the Halo World.

For promoting it, they placed on the official website this image (already replaced):

I don't know what you think about it, but I find it very hilarious!

Have you ever seen a company that places their own phone with competitors phones, keeping it in a corner, half hidden, maybe too shy for a direct match, with the competitor names written in a BIG WHITE font, and their "Windows Phone 7" in grey, much smaller, as a remind to its lesser success??

Of course, after that someone let them know the problem, they switched the image with an inverted one, but it's still a big gaffe.

I'll continue to criticize: when the Nokia Lumia 900 was launched, there were rumours about the upgrade path to Windows Phone 8. Current devices won't be upgradable, the rumor said.

Of course if it was true, the sales of the Nokia Lumia would have been hurted a lot, so, Microsoft promptly denied the rumour, promising the upgrade.

What happened last week? Windows Phone 8 was announced and the upgrade won't be available.

A great way to thank faithful customers, right?

Do you use the Remote Desktop function in the Professional editions of Windows?

If you do, you might have noticed that, after the nth Firefox update, you can't open it anymore.

What to do?

The problem is that Firefox 13 (or 14, if you read this article tomorrow, or 18, if you read this article next month) wants to use the hardware acceleration of the video card, but they forgot that, in remote desktop mode, the video card is virtual, hance without hardware acceleration, making Firefox freeze at startup...

We will solve the problem in two easy steps:

Start Firefox in safe mode

Some time ago, in the start menu there was an icon "Firefox (safe mode)", then they had the great idea to make it much more intuitive. To start it in safe mode you have to press SHIFT (on Windows) or OPTION (on Mac), (on Linux instead they opted for a command line switch, because it's cooler).

It's SO OBVIOUS that pressing SHIFT will start it in safe mode, how I couldn't think it before???

Don't check any checkbox, otherwise you will reset all the settings!! Just press continue!

Ps: if you get a message that Firefox it's already running, close it from the task manager.

Disable the hardware acceleration in Firefox

Now, Firefox will startm go to Options=>Advanced Tab=>General Tab=>Use hardware acceleration

Done! Firefox will work again!

I found a Windows software to create HTML5 animations (but also GIF/Flash) without a serious effort.

This is the result of 60 seconds of playing around:

The program it's Hippo Animator, it's not free, but it absolutely deserves to be bought if you are gonna do simple animations 

I found a free Windows program to find and listen online music for free, it's Freemake Music Box.

It does just a simple task: search your song online (eg: YouTube/ftp, etc...), but it does it terribly well, the interface is clean and simple, without banner or adware (Almost impossible, I'll say: how they could monetize? With donations).

Finally QQ Yinyue found a challenger! (it's a chinese software that essentially does the same thing)

The only weak point that I found it's that you can't download songs, just listen. Will this functionality be added in a next version? Or it has been intentionally omitted for copyright reasons? We will see...

Today at the MWC in Barcelona was officially announced Windows 8. It will be available for x86 processors in 32 and 64 bits flavors and also for ARM processors.

You can download the consumer preview from here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/download there is a program that will download the version you need.

Otherwise, you can just download the iso from here http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso and then install with this serial number:

DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J

Compared with the developer preview, you can notice that the start button is missing, but the appstore is working, and all the apps are available for free for a limited period. There are also some small improvements, and it looks faster than Windows 7.

After the installation, I bet that you want to disable Metro, the new graphical interface: here is how to do, I wonder if this hack still works.

Due to the inclusion of Hyper-V, if you want to run Windows 8 in VirtualBox you need to follow some directives, otherwise the installation won't be completed.

Set your screen resolution higher than 1024x768, otherwise you can't open any app.

I installed AVG on my home computer, needing a free antivirus.
 After installation, you need a full disk scan, and since AVG bugs you every 10 minutes with no chance to say "don't ask me again", I finally consented to that useless scan.

After a few hours, it found a virus and deleted it without asking.
 Intrigued, I checked the quarantine to investigate.
 It was HackerNovello.htm, a very old file (more than 12 years!) from an ezine that I found on IRC; New Bies:

                 @-,”ì'ì”,.,”ì'ì”,.,”ì'ì”,.,”ì'ì”,.,”ì'ì”,-@
                 |   _   _               ____  _           |
                 |  | \ | | _____      _| __ )(_) ___ ___  |
                -+- |  \| |/ _ \ \ /\ / /  _ \| |/ _ Y __|-+-
                 :  | |\  |  __/\ V  V /| |_) | |  __|__ \ :
                 |  |_| \_|\___| \_/\_/ |____/|_|\___|___/ |
                 @-,”ì'ì”,.,”ì'ì”,.,”ì'ì”,.,”ì'ì”,.,”ì'ì”,-@

                       NEW BIES (num 2) (data 07/03/99)

AVG detects a virus in a story where the author says that in the DOS time he put førmat c: /autotest /q /u in the autoexec.bat. This is a command that does a quick format of the system drive without confirmation.

Ok, just find "format c:" in any file and automatically becomes a virus to delete without asking??

Then it detect as virus stuff in grey range, as trainers for video games, almost all keygens, even joke programs (style: Invert the screen) and bugs you if Chrome uses more than 300 megs of RAM when I have more than 6 gigs free...


Ugh... when I have free time I will uninstall AVG...

Update: I had to replace the o with an ø in the format command, because Avast is so smart to block the access to any page that contains the string!! Weird!

So, you downloaded Windows 8, and you installed it to try the new features.

Probably, like me, you have been shocked from the crazy new start menu that, maybe it's perfect to be used with a touchscreen, but it's so awkard to use with a mouse, with those huge icons and lack of features: where is the calculator??? And the notepad? What if I want to open "My Computer?"

There is a way to disable this new interface, just install Classic Shell. (I suggest to install only "classic start menu", don't install other tweaks that the setup is suggesting)

Once installed, you have the best of both worlds: classic start menu and, optionally also the new menu.

At this point you will ask yourself: "Why should I use Windows 8 instead of Windows 7?" Well, I think Microsoft did many improvements over it: it's much faster and Explorer.exe is much better

Honestly, after having some time with the new menu, I got used to it, and I like it better than the classic one: it's easier to customize and keep it clean from useless programs: I just missed the start button.

If you tried to install Windows 8 in VirtualBox, you saw that you could not complete the setup due to various errors.

If you want to install it you have to create a new virtual machine like this:

1. Make sure that your CPU supports the VT virtualization extensions
2. Create a new Windows 7 VM for 32bit
3. Give it more than 1GB RAM
4. After the creation, go in settings
5. In System, in the first tab, enable IO APIC (VirtualBox suggests to don't enable it for Windows systems, but we will enable it anyway)
6. In the second tab, enable PAE/NX
7. In the third tab, enable VT-X/AMD-V and the nested paging

Now the setup will be successful

After the setup, you might want to increase the screen resolution to run any Metro application.

If you want to disable the tablet interface, you can follow this other guide.