Getting Shaz's old laptop set up

This morning I went on Animal Crossing, went to Church, then went on Animal a bit more.

In the afternoon I tried to get Shaz's laptop setup for taking to Korea and Japan. It probably would have been best to just format it and re-install windows from scratch, but McRad probably wouldn't be too happy with that since he uses the laptop sometimes.

Firefox was taking up about 60MB of RAM with only one tab open, so I tried to see if there were any better browsers to run on underpowered netbook/laptops. According to the info I found (I didn't find any benchmarks, just people's opinions), Opera is the best mainstream browser in terms of memory usage, but K-meleon is even better. So I downloaded K-meleon, and it was only using about 8MB of RAM. Windows XP uses lots of memory, but not a lot you can do about that.

According to the comments I read, Google Chrome is fast, but uses a lot of RAM and CPU. A lightweight webkit implementation suggested was Arora. I haven't downloaded it to the laptop, but have downloaded it to my PC so I can check it out for general use.

In the evening I looked at the Market Harborough and Rutland Living magazine that came through the door, which had this skill picture in it:


Also, when uploading that picture, I had to agree to Google Picassa's new TOS, which says that Google can use your uploads for promotional purposes:

In addition, by submitting, posting or displaying Content which is intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. Google will discontinue this licensed use within a commercially reasonable period after such Content is removed from Picasa Web Albums.

Bit cheeky of them, but I'm okay with that. The photo in question isn't actually mine (obviously since I scanned it from a magazine), but I did use tineye to see if it was already available on the web, and couldn't find it.

I also watched quite a bit of a rubbish film called 'Comrades' with Moccle. It was too confusing to tell who the different characters were and how they were related.

I also did some image processing, and tried to get it so I can write the xmp sidecar files Bridge creates to the .nef raw files. I think I can probably work out how to do that with exiftool okay, but I also need to delete the .xmp files after the xmp has been embedded into the NEFs. I did some searching on windows shell scripting, and read that windows shell scripting is quite poor and you should use something like perl instead. So I guess I'll have to look into that tomorrow.

The weather started off warm and sunny, then in the afternoon it became overcast, and stayed that way for the rest of the day.

Food
Breakfast: Tangerine marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken curry; bit of sausage; rice; sultanas. Pudding was: Piece of bread pudding; hobnob; chocolate crinkle crunch cream; coffee.
Tea: Mature yet mellow cheddar cheese with mixed leaf salad sandwich; 4x plums; Large choc chip cookie; cup o' tea.
Supper: Large slice of delee carrot cake that Moccle and L made today.