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This is awesome. The Matrix in the style of a silent film. In Russian. And about 1/60th the length of the three movies. Matrix 1905, Starring: Chaplin

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So we have royalty. They sometimes have foot-in-mouth disease, but for the most part they're well meaning. As for the latest public outcry, it just seems like an excuse to bash the royals.

Granted when the risk assessment forms were filled in for my silver expedition, the most dangerous part of the whole thing was getting out of the minibus and crossing the road. Knowing that kinda took the edge off things untill we managed to distract ourselves with more pressing concerns like the distance we needed to cover. But without a feeling of risk it's just a walk in the woods. It's why white-knuckle rides and sports that involve jumping off mountains or out of perfectly good aircraft are fun.

Please don't rob future generations of any sense of accomplishment by going into risk hysteria. Most of our expedition training can probably be summarised as "how to not die of insert todays subject here."

Perhaps there's something increasingly wrong with the risk perception of modern humans. Perhaps it's something to do with the loss of childhood and teenage experiences that teach risk assessment. What's the most dangerous thing you did today?

By all means exercise your freedom to mock the royals when they do something monumentally stupid, but Prince Edward speaks the truth, so leave him alone. For now.

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Things have been a bit silent here. The best intentions to share the interesting bits tend to get bundles in with the low priority tasks and subsequently forgotten about. And I should probably add to that various levels of apathy, secrecy, and not having web access during the 1860s may have hindered my blogging.

So I've kind of joined the army, the 19th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment to be precise, at which point shrewd observers will note that I've never set foot in Indiana, and the photos floating round this site of people in uniform appear a little outdated. The kind of in question is in fact re-enacting. I've done a busy season of events now and it's been hugely eye-opening, beyond treating as much of the experience as a LARP as I can get away with (some of us play the game, some don't), I've really taken to camp cooking. My particular brand of bloody mindedness makes for coffee ground with musket-butt and finding ways to make hardtack edible. Expect me to start posting recipes. Pumpkin pie is imminent.

Re-enactors get better toys than LARPers. I played with this rampart gun at Spetchley park (not me in video), but our tools are a little more manageable, replica percussion muskets supplied as smoothbores, despite the originals being rifled, for convenience reasons. This makes it possible (both physically and legally) to load them with birdshot and fibre wadding and go clay pigeon shooting. Messy, smelly and very slow but reasonably effective and remarkably satisfying.

And the music. Yes, I'm doing musical stuffs. We're very close to having a set together, along with demonstrable and eventually publishable material. Just one hurdle remains: working out how the hell to market the entirely eclectic mix of what we do. Some of it might sound a bit like power metal. Some of it might be describable as synthpop. Somehow it all fits together, but it's most definately not the punk/thrash, nu-metal, grunge or other easily labelled stuff some of my previous projects have been.

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Last week several government databases decided I was living in Leeds again. Whilst I like Leeds, I'd quite like my post to end up in the same building that I'm living in. A few phone calls into the problem and the finger looks to be pointing at either the National Insurance Contributions Office or HMRC. I can't get through to NICO because all their lines are busy. As usual. However, as another department kindly sent me a letter saying they'd been in touch with HMRC about my tax code several days before things started going wrong, this is where I pick up the trail.

The phone number for HMRC in said letter leads to a recorded message telling me to call another number, which I immediately call and after navigating a tortuous path through their answering system I finally get connected to a tired sounding human. Before he can help me he needs to ask a number of security questions including my most recent address. Can anyone spot the fail here. Further fail seems to be a one strike policy on the security questions, and the final fail is a refusal to discuss how one can go about establishing one's identity if the system is indeed wrong, because I am assured that the system is never wrong. Have I woken up in a Terry Gilliam movie? Am I in hell?

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There is hope for the future yet, or is it the past, either way the Margarita of this Zouave was saved by a young jedi:

The sash wearer: ...enjoying a Margarita

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I had a Western Digital 1TB Green Power fail on me last week. No major disappointment, just a lot of stuff MythTV had recorded for me that I had either watched and was keeping on the off-chance I'd watch it again, or it was CSI Miami and I hadn't suffered from enough insomnia to need to watch it.

Anyway, the model I had is obsolete after a few months (big surprise there), and ebuyer don't have any in stock, so I have the purchase price of the old drive to spend on a new one, I choose a Samsung EcoGreen F2 1.5TB.

Now on the the WD I'd had to set the jumper on the back to limit the drive to SATA I (150Gbit/s) in order for my old Asus/Nvidia socket 754 motherboard to recognise it. It runs quiet and cool and should I need to replace it it'd probably be a bigger power supply, a new case, and PCI Express graphics card. This would be expensive and overkill when the Nvidia FX5200 graphics card is perfectly adequate for displaying digital TV. I digress.

The new samsung disk requires one to use their software (ES-Tool, well hidden on their website and the kind of thing that expects you not to need a manual) to adjust drive settings. The problem is the computer needs to be able to detect the disk before the software can adjust the settings, but when the problem is the computer can't detect the disk in the first place there's a bit of a problem. The software in question is a dos-based bootable CD. I try using the the much newer PC in my room, that can't boot the CD, something to do with an out of memory error. This might be something to do with said PC being a modern multi-core multi-GPU 64-bit machine. It can, however, communicate with the disk so I know it works. My trusty Dell Precision is similarly too old to cope with the new disk.

Finally I get both the disk and the setup software running on my mum's desktop, which appears to finally have a feature that's made it really useful. It's an early EMT-64 capable 3Ghz P4, not as fast or as economical or as stable as anything else in the house but today the damn thing redeemed itself. I, on the other hand, need a small dose of public ridicule for not checking how to set the drive to 150Gbit/s before ordering it.

Having complained lots, it is very quiet, draws very little power, and and is more than quick enough to serve as a repository for myth recordings, however it'll be obsolete by the time I can tell you whether I think mine's reliable.

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I had a load of frosting left over from another project, so I looked for a really quick way to use it up, other than show up to my monday game with a bowl of frosting and some spoons. For some reason I decided to ignore the big "NO!" scribbled on the swiss roll recipe in my BeRo book. Needless to say my swiss roll tin was slightly the wrong size and the planned swiss roll kind of turned half way over and cracked. I think I remember why the grafitti is on that recipe now. I can't be bothered to take a photo, but as it's currently sat in my fridge wrapped in greaseproof paper and will be fed to sugar-addict gamers anyway, I'm going to call it the Doncaster Failbag.

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The episode of Star Trek Voyager entitled Q and the Grey there are some nice scenes based on the US Civil War. I was most enraged to see the Confederates running around with breachloading Trapdoor Springfields that weren't availalbe until after the war. I'm sure this was done for the benefit of certain tribes of geek.

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I wake up eary Sunday morning to find a laptop outside my bedroom door. This is generally indicative of sermon-stopping technical issues. I go searching for explanatory notes and the all important power brick and find them next to the kettle where I usually find instructions for locating whichever meals I've managed to sleep through.

The problem: mother cannot get pictures into PowerPoint.

On further examination the pictures are kindly wrapped in a PDF. Great. Not wanting to be permanently empolyed as a human PDF to JPG converter, I asked google. Google's answer, any number of shareware, nagware, registerware and part-with-$69-before-you-discover-it's-crapware. Great. Further searhching suggests some online tools that are full of fail, some imagemagick wresting that's garanteed to make my presence required for future operations. apt-cache search pdf isn't helpfule either. I'm 3 cups of coffee into fail.

And then I remember my old friend the GIMP. That's the GNU Image Manipulation Program, not an aquaintance with interesting tastes. The GIMP is all to eager to open the PDF, but Vista takes exception to a window being opened for each page of the PDF. Not wanting to fiddle with importing a few pages at a time, I sit down at my mum's desktop, which runs Ubuntu. No complaints there about opening about 50 GIMP windows. Open Source takes the win twice.

EDIT:It is entirely practical to use the GIMP under Windows as described, but if you're doing a lot of pages, use the import range option to process about 10 at a time or you might run into a few problems.

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A few days ago we were recording some stuff. It's not like it's sometimes portrayed on film/TV with the whole band playing at all at once. It's technically possible to do it that way if you have an enormous budget and an army of technicians but for the most part it's much easier to concentrate on one part at a time. First one records the drums, then the bass, then the rhythm guitars. This then give a nice firm foundation for lead guitars, violins, synths and whatever complicated stuff to be recorded on, and then we put the vocals in.

High budget set-ups have a separate recording booths and control rooms. Our cheapo set-up relies on double glazed French windows on both sides of the extension, the near-silent nature of the salvaged Dell powering the studio, remembering to turn the monitors off during recording, minimising the number of people in the recording room and a lot of patience.

We made the following observations:

• It's very easy to forget to arm some part of the recording chain.
• Your lead guitarist will always be busy playing Diablo II when he's needed.
• Deprived of a musical instrument to hold, comic actions are required when doing backing vocals.
• a large number of takes (usually of main vocal parts) will feature someone wandering in and knocking something over, usually during the silent parts of the best takes
• almost every take ends in a declaration of the number of screwups the performer made, followed by quick agreement or a raise by anyone else within earshot.
• we really should keep a (video) camera handy to capture the scenes that have to be seen to be believed.

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I had to share this: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages . Awesome, somehow related to history yet wrong in the most amusing of ways.

I've not been posting here in a while, mostly through being occupied with another hobby that gets a similar descriptions. I'll post photos when I've dealt with the latest in a series of annoying tech issues.

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Satan is learning to play ice hockey. We are being dive bombed by flying pigs. Kurt Cobain is alive and well, working as a lounge singer in Las Vegas. OK, maybe not, but in equally unlikely news, I have chosen a digital modeling guitar preamp over a valve (aka vacuum tube) driven preamp.

Read on for the long version, but be warned, I talk much guitar related tech.

For many years I have derided digital modeling guitar amps as a joke. I freely admit to having owned a Korg AX100G Multi-FX pedalboard thing, which was great whilst I was learning to play and did everything reasonably well except sound like a guitar amp, but when I bought a 1970s Peavey Deuce VT with a valve power stage it gave a workable sound. It was waaaaay better sounding then the Zoom 505 and 707s that just about everyone had back then, but probably not as good as the Line 6 Pod. When I started buying better effects (first as individual pedals, later as rack-mount units) the AX100G was abandoned. I then decided that having a stack of pedals under my feet on stage was a bad idea, as it was taking me about half an hour to set up all the pedals if everything went right, and frequently the control knobs got moved between sound check and gig, and things went very wrong.

I swapped the peavy amp for a Marshall Valvestate VS100, which had a single valve in the preamp, foot-switchable clean/gentle overdrive/massive overdrive channels and an effects loop so I could insert effects units between the Mrshall's preamp and it's power stage. With an Alesis MidiVerb4 in the said effects loop, I had decent valve amp sounds and all the echos, delays, chorus, flange and pitchshifter effects I wanted. I added the Behringer Composer from my electric bass setup between the guitar and the amp as the noise gate killed feedback and electrical hum when I wasn't playing, the compressor provided a little extra gain and sustain, and the limiter stopped masty transistor clipping sounds that the marshall made when I hit the guitar very very hard when running on the clean channel. All of this was controlled from a Behringer FCB1010 MIDI foot controller (best thing I ever bought). This was unchainged as my guitar setup for over 7 years and has proven very successful in bands that don't have a hugely varied sound. A few people I've worked with now have similar set-ups after they saw just how much more versatile reliable and less costly this was than an extensive collection of individual pedals. The Marshall JCM900 and JMP-1 both work very well here in place of my relatively cheap VS100. It should be noted that the Marshall sound is very popular amngst a lot of the guitarists I have worked with and valve distortion is something of a religion.

I have also owned (and recently got rid of) a Behringer V-amp, which was handy for a quick recording (especially at 4AM) and my bass variant was good for lightweight trips to a practice room where a generic amp would be provided, but I never liked it enough to use it on stage or for recording anything other than concept/first take/initial demo stuff, using the above Marshall based setup for my guitar, and something similar around a Fender BXR300 (a punchy monster that never fails to surprise the unsuspecting) as my bass setup. I've played with a number of Line 6 products and the best I've found have sounded merely OK, but seem to feel wrong, never quite behaving like tubes when barely distorting or holding a note until it rings clean. I admit I haven't tried the new X3 generation or the Spider Valve.

Recent trends include midi controlled patch-bays (of both rack and floor designs) that switch between a number of effects pedals (or anyhting else you'd put in an effects loop) on demand, large floorboard style devices that replicate a large array of individual pedals, and ampst that combine digital tone and effect circuitry with valve preamp and power stages. All of which solve similar problems but tend to be more expensive.

Anyway, I ran into a major problem whilst rehearsing with my new band, on some songs there's 2 of us playing guitar in the classic wall of sound style I'm used to doing, sometimes I'm left to being the wall of sound whilst Chris plays violin and I need to be a bit louder. Sometimes Chris is playing a quietish clean part and I want my guitar to wail quietly in the background, and there's the imminent danger of what I'm calling an anti-solo* needing everything turing up to 11 or so or it doesn't stand out. That's 4 amp settings and I can't get that out of my Marshall. Brick Wall. Grmbl.

Years ago Chris picked up a JMP-1, which will sound like the preamp stage of most Marshall amps and can store 100 presets. Handy, but rare these days and the price fluctuates quite a bit. I stuck my head in Electro Music remembering that I'd seen the same JMP-1 on my last vist as I'd seen about 8 years ago, hoping to twist some arms on the price. There's some other stuff in the testing room, and I started fiddling with a Digitech valve preamp / effects unit. It sounded ok, nothing special but satisfyingly valvey. In between adjusting the unit and playing guitar I could hear Chris talking with the staff in the store about a preamp that another member of staff hated passionately because it had motorised faders (a lot of guitarists seem to shy away from anything resembling tech). Anyway, I decide the digitech is a nightmare to program. I much prefer knobs over buttons and menus.. I work my way trough the stack of preamps until I come to a dark red yamaha unit. It's big and heavy and has retro chicken-head knobs. I power it up and am mildly surprosed when all the knobs slowly move from the zero they'd been left at to point at 5. This must be the much hated unit. Within a minute or so I've found a full on distortion that sounds ok, quite like a big Marshall being savagely tortured but with less hiss and hum. Shortly after I've dialed in a squeaky-clean sound that's usable should I ever need it, and then my favourite almost clean but like an old amp being tortured that's so hard to reproduce without valves. A few minutes later and surprises on it being entirely solid state and reasonably affordable and a decision is made.

I plug the Gate/Compressor/Limiter between the Yamaha and my guitar and it has another surprise, I can feed it a really hot signal without it getting too out of hand and it turns into a scary metal monster. I like it. I like it a lot.

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Jenson Button 1st, Rubens Barrichello 2nd, both in Mercedes powered Brawn GP cars that seem to have come flying out of the ashes of Honda. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it myself.

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It seems that F1 fansites are now fair game for lawyers.

Therefore, for the record, I have absolutely nothing to do with Red Bull and wouldn't wish to given how they treat their fans.

I can't seem to find an F1-lined product to consume purely as an act of defiance. Virgin Cola would be appropriate. And for the first time in a while I want a cigarette. Strange how I used to like Marlboroughs but mildly dislike Ferrari...

I'll shut up lest I convince everyone to stop sponsoring F1.

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The Chain sounds just as good as it ever did.

The super-deep-voiced intro that sounded like a 5 minute long marks and sparks advert did not.

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Sheldon (verb)

to make an inference based on obvious social rules and unintentionally demonstrate the flaws in said rule

Gifts are annoyingly complicated. To some more than others. Guessing an appropriate value seems fairly easy to me, finding something appropriate is much harder. I think the episode of the Big Bang Theory entitled The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis illustrates the difficulty I have with this, although pushed to comical extremes.

I'm lucky enough to have one sister that is addicted to Lush products, so the only difficulty there is enduring the sensory onslaught of the shop in question. Other people are more difficult.

Strangely I quite appreciate socks as it never occurs to me to buy them and I rarely have more than one matching pair. I appear to have a healthy supply if items that modify my smell and I'm not hugely enthusiastic about them. The correct piece of musical equipment is almost impossible to find without request but is often cherished way beyond thier monetary value.

Books. It's hard to go hugely wrong here, Sci-Fi is a good start, I believe techno-thriller is the currently fashionable term for a lot of what I've been reading recently, cyberpunk and fantasy round out the rest of the contents of my fiction collection.

I have no idea of an appropriate response to the aunt who gave me Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon last christmas. It took a significant amount of time to read - I only completed it this week, and is somewhat awesome. Cryptography, geeks, roleplayers, u-boats, Alan Turing and data-havens, it seems to be a check-list of ideas I might look for in a book and if someone were to show me a paragraph like this before I read the book, I would have insisted it was impossible to combine those elements into a good story. I would have been wrong.

This leaves me with a bigger dilemma. I started reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, a birthday present from a friend who was amongst the herd of boing-boing readers nagging me to read the e-book and finally provided me with a copy in dead tree format... If I wasn't feeling vaguely paranoid about the new ticket gates at Leeds Station (and the lotek meat-space equivalents in Doncaster), and wasn't having trouble with tickets that seemed to have the wrong day printed on them, and wasn't carrying a suspiciously huge sportsbag containing a large cuboid item that occasionally beeped then I might have found the book merely awesome, rather than finding myself scared shitless and way deeper in paranoialand than I wanted to be.

I feel the slightly delayed appearance of a sightly political allegedly punk album is a somehow inadequate reciprocation.

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...so spank me and call me eldrich.... Tomorrow I'm going round to see a few friends and there is the prospect of music being played. Ok, the intention is for all 3 of us to play instruments, whether it's music is debatable. Anyway, I have spent the last few hours collecting kit together. The intention is to sequence at least the drums, probably some synths too, leaving me with hands free to either pilot more synthage or to play good ol' fashioned electric bass. At which point I've never been satisfied with any preamp other than than the one built into my Fender amp, at which point I want one of the matching speaker cabinets as I'm scared of plugging in a less capable speaker and tearing it to bits. That and I know that if we're being quiet I can sit on that cab and at least feel what I'm playing. At least my rebuilt cab and amp housing don't weigh as much as the original one piece cabinet.

On top of the amp is a recycled dell workstation running Ubuntu Studio, my current favourite way of running Rosegarden, which is versatile enough to keep me happy, yet user friendly enough for me to wave at people who've never used any kind of computer music software.

On top of that is my trusty furry blue rack case, containing my Roland JV-1080, an almighty black box containing reasonable approximations of just about every instrument I've ever heard of. Actually the guitar imitations don't sound or play like a guitar, but that can be forgiven on a box that contains several decent sounding pianos, enough orchestral instruments to give me delusions of grandure, and with a bit of tweaking some very convincing 80s synth sounds. Oh and with the help of an expansion card, enough percussion to justify firing your drummer and trying to find a name for is that doesn't instantly reveal your master plan of someday cloning Doktor Avalanche. If only it could tell whether the stage was level...

Above that in the same rack is the Behringer Gate/Compressor/Limiter that always gets us very odd looks from backline folks that are used to having these somewhere on the way to the power amp, not first in the chain. I keep the left channel set for guitar and the right channel set up for bass. Why? Well firstly the gate kick in and cuts the sound right of when I'm not playing, eliminating most of the hisses, hums and feedback squeals that get really annoying. It's so much better than training lead guitarists to keep a hand on their strings at all times, which then turns the handling of beer into some kind of sideshow. Secondly the compression stage makes it a million times easier to keep a clean instrument in the mix, does amazing things to your sustain and give a much wider window between having enough gain for hammer-ons and pinch harmonics to sound right and having chords turn to mush. Then there's the simple luxuary of haivng a gain control before whatever's next in the effects chain, the Monster Strat no longer causes something to clip horribly, and a small nudge clockwise will sort the levles out if I have to switch to instruments that don't have insane outputs like the Shine and the DeArmond. Finally there's a hard limiter that cuts out the deafening pop of the cable accidentally coming out of the bass or other theatrical incidents.

Above that there's the MicroKorg, which makes a nice buzzing noise and the vocoder works when I can't sing but still want to. On top of that is the monitor for the dell, a bag of cables, a wireless trackball and a qwerty keyboard for when it all goes wrong, and propped up against all that is my magic briefcase, an M-Audio midi keyboard, a keyboard stand and last, but never least, my long suffering and much loved Washburn Mercury bass. It has this massive menacing growl that I've never been able to get out of anything else, and it's stood up to being put through a ceiling attacked by me (along with everything else on stage) when Sonia was using him in Thought Crime, and I've lost count of the number of times I've woken up wrapped round him.

Anyway I got sidetracked. my point is what don't I need to take?

It's times like theses I wish I was the singer or the violinist.

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There's something wrong with the Facebook row. FUD aside, I have some thoughts I'd like to share:

My understanding of the situation is Facebook would like any content you choose to share stays shared with the people you shared it with, and have tried to make the necessary changes to their policies and user agreements to reflect that, and have done so in legalese.

I believe that once something is published it should stay that way. There'd be uproar if an author decided to unpublish a book, and you were somehow required to destroy your copy of it? We've already seen the fury that happens when a DRM server goes off-line and people loose the ability to play their games of listen to their music. Suppose a friend had given you a print of a photo they took of you and your significant other, and ten years later it suddenly disappears from the picture frame above your fireplace?

As I found out with the Church of Pohawk project, any source of photos you make available to acquaintances will soon have its content replicated by well-meaning people that don't understand copyright, don't care about copyright, or have been too lazy to read the attached usage licence (first a vague Attribution license, later Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike), and if it's publicly browsable, it might well stay in the Wayback Machine forever. You might as well ask people to un-see something, a feat that anyone who's been around the internet a bit is still waiting to achieve.

What Facebook and countless other sites need is a very clear and simple human readable summary backed by no more legalese than is required, and a gentle user education policy that goes along the lines of

IF YOU DON'T WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW WHAT YOU DID (LAST SUMMER) THEN DON'T DO IT, DON'T TALK ABOUT IT AND DON'T PUBLISH THE EVIDENCE

Excuse my shouting there. Faceparty appears to be unique amongst social networks in explaining the rules in an easily understandable format (NSFW). Without going resorting to obscenities, there is an organisation looming in the background that provides a brilliant example of what's needed to explain complex contracts, Creative Commons. They produce a number of licences with human-understandable summaries linked to the required equivalent legalese.

Two of the websites I'm involved in, arguably social networks in themselves, leeds.scifi.me.uk and leedsrocksoc.co.uk now use the Attribution - Share Alike licence because we believe it's a close representation of the rights users think they have and the rights the organisation requires to host such a site. Something as simple as a conversation in one of the Forums is a collaborative work, and as a whole it's mostly coherent, with each reply being a derivative of the comments that came before it. If half of a conversation ceased to exist the whole conversation is ruined for anyone trying to keep track of what was said, so the community needs to have the right to use and reproduce. In order to serve pages, make backups and do anything else with regard to operating the site, the organisation responsible for the site needs some kind of right to reproduce. On the other hand users expect their words and pictures to be theirs in some way, so there's an implicit attribution requirement. As for sharing, none of our users (with the exception of one who chose to exercise his right to satirise a Microsoft EULA and include it in his signature) have objected to the idea of a contract to share with anyone else who will also share.

I've noticed that in the course of writing this post there is a post on the Creative Commons website inviting Facebook to join in the sharing. I doubt it'll happen but it would be a step in the right direction. It seems that I have to try to explain copyright law or software licences to someone nearly every day and I get the feeling that I'm quite often resented for being the bearer of bad news, yet everywhere we see unintentional copyright violations. The BBC accidentally used a photo from flickr without authorisation because no-one thought to check, university courses in web design make vague recommendations to get photos form the internet, yet deliver the plagiarise and we'll throw you out speech. Almost everyone ignores the small print included just about everywhere. Of course there's layer upon layer of conflicting interests. Vendors want to hide how badly they're screwing their customers and ensure their arses are covered, and legalese is better than armour-plate. The lawyers writing the legalese benefit if lawyers are needed to read the legalese, and of course if it needs to be written in legalese in the first place, well a mere mortal can't do that. As for enforcing copyright on the very documents containing the laws, well that's just not in the public interest.

How can we change the world? I don't have all the answers, I am vaguely human after all. But perhaps we could follow the Creative Commons example and try and build voluntary standards for contractual small print. Maybe expand the idea of a summary and symbol or abbreviation linked to the legalese. Perhaps creating an international standard for certain legal phrases so they can be recognised when they appear, as opposed to being subject to interpretation and cut out all of the qualifying clauses. Perhaps impose minimum sizes for small-print. What about requiring any company that produces a legally binding document that uses clauses outside of approved standards to pay for an independent party to explain the agreement in detail to anyone that they consider to be in breach of the agreement. Maybe that's going too far but this leads me to one very important question:

Have you have read and understood the terms and conditions you agreed to when you joined facebook, opened a bank account, and installed their favourite piece of software?

• To leave an insightful comment below
• To read all of ITEF RFC 3751
• To buy me a pint (of the substance commonly known as beer, details of exact specifications given on request)

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If one installs Service Pack 1 (as opposed to installing a version of vista that included service pack one), copies of all the updated files are retained so that Servce Pack 1 can be uninstalled. Once you are satisfied that you won't need to remove service pack one, there is a utility that can remove thse obsolete files. Just find and run c:\Windows\System32\vsp1cln.exe. Note that the .exe extention is hidden by default in Windows Explorer.

I appear to have reclaimed about 2Gb of diskspace, which is a drop in the ocean if Vista is installed on a huge disk, but for those with small hard drives (often of the small and fast variety, notably WR (Veloci)Raptors and recent solid state drives) it's a noticeable space saving. Either way it's another game that can be squeezed in.

vsp1cln.exe is explained on Microsoft TechNet

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A time-saver for those that forget to sudo, bash substitutes !! for the last command entered, for example