Month: October 2006

Skype has yet another campaign! After free calls within USA, Canada and France, Skype offers now “free calls made within the UK to
UK landlines for the next six months…
…when you buy Skype Credit.”.

So Jaanus‘ hint was correct! ;).

Happy Skyping! 🙂

Technorati Tags: Skype, campaign
—-
Do you like the new background? Please vote in my forum! 🙂
—-
No more ICQ Support? Get active! Complain now!

I never thought installing IE7 would cause such positive side effects like those I will write here now.

Example 1) NASCAR Racing 2002 Session suddenly works 100%. The game has been updated after installation. Anyway, the crew speech would be cut off after a few seconds so I never heard complete sentences (which is no biggie since you can turn on text OSD.

So somehow installing IE7 totally fixed this! 🙂

Example 2) ICQ 5.1 operates more smooth and faster now! Thanks to the fact that ICQ 5.1 calls functions of IE. (As a result, ICQ 5.1 will stop to work correctly if something is wrong with your IE! (see my answer to the common Xtraz problem @ AllExperts). Thank you!

Example 3)

Opera is the real default browser now for surfing and email. Result: When I enter an URL in “My Computer” or Windows Explorer, Opera will start up and open the page (instead of MSIE as in earlier versions of IE). Clicking a mailto: link inside IE7 will open Opera instead of trying to open Outlook Express (which will trigger an error message since I don’t have installed it!)!

Technorati Tags: IE, final, Windows
—-
Do you like the new background? Please vote in my forum! 🙂
—-
No more ICQ Support? Get active! Complain now!

Internet Explorer 7
is out. I decided to install it but I won’t prsent a full review here since this has been done by many people in past.

Instead just some pictures and things I have noticed.

IE7 doesn’t like i-Nav which was there to enable Unicode URLs. Doesn’t matter, since IE7 supports them right from the start! 🙂

Also the ICQ 5.1 System Requirements need updating, because now, IE7 is perfectly compatible to it! (as written earlier, they didn’t quite like each other!).

Next to phishing protection settings, we can also find a native support for the ClearTypeTuner (now, why would somebody prefer to disable it?).

Also new is that you can import quite a number of search engines.

Technorati Tags: IE7, final, Windows
—-
Do you like the new background? Please vote in my forum! 🙂
—-
No more ICQ Support? Get active! Complain now!

It’s always interesting to have a look in people’s bookmarks, thanks the the quite new Network’s Badge. I found something great in the ones from Mr. Dew and that would be Feebutton that has all buttons to add to your fave feedreader! So, have a look on my feeds page.

Technorati Tags: Blog, feeds
—-
Do you like the new background? Please vote in my forum! 🙂
—-
No more ICQ Support? Get active! Complain now!

Recently, the Xtraz from the German ICQ 5.1‘s from Pro7 and Sat.1 display in ICQ 5.1 but playing the multiplayer games is working only if both users use it in Germany.

If it’s not used in Germany, you get the error message saying e.g.:

“Send Vier Gewinnt Invitation
Cancel (ALT+Q)
Vier Gewinnt: This Plugin is not supported by the other side”

You can see on the screenshot that really all Xtraz are listd under “Hot on ICQ”

Great, no? 🙂
So no need to use the branded ICQ5.1’s anymore! For none of the Germans, at least!

Technorati Tags: ICQ, 5.1
—-
Do you like the new background? Please vote in my forum! 🙂
—-
No more ICQ Support? Get active! Complain now!

According to this and that source, Opera 9.1 (latest version is Opera 9.02.
It will work different than the one from IE7 and Firefox, as it will work real time (and this only causes a tiny bit of traffic and will only transfer non-critical data as plain text to the Opera servers!

(screenshot source: Opera Watch).

Technorati Tags: Opera, 9.1
—-
Do you like the new background? Please vote in my forum! 🙂
—-
No more ICQ Support? Get active! Complain now!

Due to the fact that the old Leo Dict Opera Panel is dead now 🙁 and the new one is bad and the search setup did not work, I had to modify the search.ini file myself and finally maanged to add all my fave search engines and dictionaries! Especially, the Urban Dicitonary is great! Heheh

Technorati Tags: Opera, search
—-
Do you like the new background? Please vote in my forum! 🙂
—-
No more ICQ Support? Get active! Complain now!

26th Nov: Update: Of course it will crash again if the contact that causes the crash is still online.
Try emptying bartcache folder and write protect it.

However I _strongly_ recommend you to sign up for the ICQ 6 Preview: http://www.icq.com/download/preview/

If your problem still exists in ICQ 6 Preview, you can report it as a bug and then it will most likely fixed for the final release.

——–

17th Oct: Update: uninstalling won’t help, sorry.

The problem is caused by Trillian, Miranda, &RQ transfering a damaged image file into the Bartcache folder of ICQ5.1.
This folder is in C:Documents & Settings/WindowsUsername/Application Data/ICQLite/ICQNumber/Bartcache.
Notice that the Application Data Folder is a hidden one.

You will not lose data this way. Only the cached images will re-load.

——–

Because many people asked me how to fix the ICQ 5.1 crash prpblem, here is the solution:

&RO Is not developed anymore:

From the homepage of &RO:

“IMPORTANT: this project is actually NOT developed anymore.
&RQ is still in developing stage, you can’t rely on it, so USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK.
You pay nothing for it, so you can’t claim nothing.
Feel free to try it if you wish, but keep in mind that’s intended for expert people.”

In some cases also Miranda causes the problem.

Here is how to find it out:

You login with ICQ2go, send messages to your contacts. Those contacts who write you back and the ICQ2go! message window shakes and you here the uh-oh but no message appears, use ICQ clones which cause the problem.

Please notice: The ICQ Team is not responsible for ICQ clones. The developers of the ICQ clones that cause the problems have to fix it themselves!

UPDATE: The problem with Miranda seems to be connected to some avatars as seen here. However this problem wasn’t before Friday anyway according to my knowledge, so it is still connected with some protocol change I think. And Miranda needs a serious update.

Technorati Tags: ICQ, crash
—-
Do you like the new background? Please vote in my forum! 🙂
—-
No more ICQ Support? Get active! Complain now!

Technorati had some database problems a while ago, and caused by this, also some blogs linked wrong in their database.

One of the most weird experience is probably clicking on an English blog post and find myself on a Japanese site having a demonstration called Hell Of Sand which is an interesting “game” in which you can decide what will happen and those poor line drawn guys will humble and fall all around.

Technorati Tags: Technorati, blogs
—-
Do you like the new background? Please vote in my forum! 🙂
—-
No more ICQ Support? Get active! Complain now!

Since quite some people said, that the old background pattern was disturbing the readability of my blog, I decided to change it.

So please vote & post whether you like the new one, prefer the old one, or suggest a totally different one.

Technorati Tags: Blog, background
—-
Do you like the new background? Please vote in my forum! 🙂
—-
No more ICQ Support? Get active! Complain now!