For those who remember installing Internet Explorer either an an upgrade or fresh install, the process was specifically tailored to replace your default browser settings when electing to use the "Express" installation method. This is no longer the case.

This comes shortly after it was announced that Windows 7 upgrade for UK users would not come with IE 8 preinstalled due to an anti-trust ruling.

What will happen now is that if you choose to install Internet Explorer 8, the first run will be much more straightforward, directly asking you, "Do you want to make Internet Explorer your default browser?"

This is a welcome change that was applauded by not only Windows users but other competing browser software makers, such as Mozilla.

From then to now

Fortunately we now live in a time when most software we install doesn’t try to hijack any settings you don’t want changed. This is drastically different compared to what it used to be like 10 years ago.

For example, in 1999 software like AOL and RealPlayer tried to hijack everything. It was a sad time for computer software back then.

This is not to say that all software stays on the Light Side of The Force. Some titles still do things that are, shall we say, unethical.

Do you know of software that still pulls hijacking tricks?

Let us know in the comments.

One of the best RSS feed readers out there is Google Reader. However one (very) longstanding complaint is that it has no ability to change the name of folders/tags. However there is a workaround, that being to "move" subscriptions from one tag to another. It’s sort of a long roundabout way of doing it, but it least it can be done.

Here’s how:

Above: I have two tags, that being Florida and keywords. These are two tags I custom made. I want to change keywords to tech keywords.

In Google Reader, I click Settings at the extreme top right.

On the next page I click the Subscriptions tab (in yellow-orange).

After that I type in keywords at the top right (where it says Filter by name, folder or URL).

All my subscriptions show up for that tag, like this:

On the first subscription, I click the Change folders… button and choose New Folder, title it tech keywords and click OK. The reason we do this is because the new tag must exist with at least one subscription in it before we move the others.

Now I see this for my first subscription:

Next to Select there is a link for All (in this case All 8 subscriptions since there are only 8). I click that to put a checkbox in all of them.

From the More Actions… drop-down menu I do two things:

1. Under Add to folder I choose tech keywords.
2. Under Remove from folder I choose keywords.

I click Back to Google Reader, and…

Success! I’ve "moved" all subscriptions from keywords to tech keywords.

The only thing left now is cleanup.

I click Settings, then the Folders and Tags tab, then delete the keywords tag as I’m not using it any longer.

And that’s it. Done deal.

For those of you out there that run a dual-boot system with Windows XP and Ubuntu, you’ve noticed that Ubuntu is the default OS that loads on each system startup. There is a way to change this so that XP is the default OS instead.

Full documentation:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GrubHowto/ChangeDefaultOS

What that documentation instructs you to do:

The boot order list is in a text file called menu.lst. You can edit this using a terminal text editor or by using gedit (a GUI-based text editor).

The OS choice in menu.lst is defined by the default line and title.

If for example the default num is set to 0 and you have the following in your grub.lst:

title      Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.15-27-amd64-generic
...
title      Ubuntu, memtest86+
...
title      Other operating systems:
...
title      Microsoft Windows XP Home

“0″ is representative of the first title (it starts from 0, not 1), so you would want the default num to be 4 to start Windows XP first.

For those asking “Um.. okay, so Other operating systems: is technically treated as an OS choice?” Yes it is. That’s the way it’s done in order to display it in the menu on boot.

On my personal system, Windows XP Professional is listed as title 6.

This may sound confusing but it isn’t. All you have to do is when counting the title entries, find the first one (which is 0) then count down until you find the Windows XP entry. Change default num to that number, save the file and reboot. If successful, XP will start first on boot.

If you visited Google today and got a bit confused that something doesn’t look right, you’re right. The big G changed what is known as a “favicon”, a small 16×16 graphic that appears to the left of the URL in most web browsers.

 
(note the lowercase blue ‘g’)

It used to look like this:

Whether this is temporary or permanent is unknown.

But most would agree the old G looks better than the new g.