4oD (Channel 4 on Demand) on Vista

I recently got quite into Peep Show, but only as the previous series was coming to an end on TV.

In order to watch a few older episodes I thought I would try out 4oD. The first hurdle was that they won't let you download it if your browser advertises that you're using Vista. The second hurdle is that the installer won't run if it detects that you are using Vista. Not to worry though, a modified installer (or for the more paranoid: instructions on how to download and modify the original installer) are here.

A pound to rent one episode is a bit steep, but it will do while I wait for the box set to arrive from Amazon.

Joost (on Vista)

I got myself a Joost invite the other day. First things first, I had to make it work with Vista (it moans about C:\Windows\AppPatch\AcGenral.dll). I found running:

cd /cygdrive/c/Windows/AppPatch
mv AcGenral.dll AcGenral.dll.temp
mv AcGenral.dll.temp AcGenral.dll

at a Cygwin prompt did the trick (the AcGenral.dll file is then owned by the user I am running Joost as and it stops complaining). If you don't use Cygwin, using a DOS prompt instead and running:

c:
cd \Windows\AppPatch
ren AcGenral.dll AcGenral.dll.temp
ren AcGenral.dll.temp AcGenral.dll

probably works just as well. As for Joost itself, there is a shortage of content so besides my short little test I have no reason to use it. The channels do start playing very fast after selection albeit at a slightly too low quality (you wouldn't want to pipe it into a nice TV). I'll certainly keep an eye out for improvements though.

Make the Vista Alt+TAB more like the Mac task switcher

I was really excited to here about Flip 3D but was a bit disappointed when I actually saw it. The previews are big, and they are live which is great, but they are all on top of each other and only use one monitor -- not great. I wanted something a bit like when you press F10 on a Mac.

The closest I have managed to get is some registry tweaks to make Alt+TAB behave a bit like I want, here is what I have come up with:

REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AltTab] "OverlayIconPx"=dword:00000064 "OverlayIconDXPx"=dword:00000000 "OverlayIconDYPx"=dword:00000000 "ThumbSpacingXPx"=dword:00000014 "ThumbSpacingYPx"=dword:00000014 "SideMarginPx"=dword:0a000000 "BottomMarginPx"=dword:00000064 "MinThumbSizePcent"=dword:00000064 "MinWidthPx"=dword:0000015e "TopMarginPx"=dword:00000258 "MaxThumbSizePx"=dword:000007d0 "MaxIconSizePx"=dword:0000015e "TextBottomPx"=dword:000001f4

It is not great, the way it spans monitors could be more tidy, if the tops of the monitors are not aligned some of the live previews go off screen and the previews could be bigger. However it is, in my opinion, better than the default Alt+TAB behaviour.