The Shake!

Last Saturday Louisa and I popped in to Old Orleans in Enfield and we saw this drink called the double decker. Looked pretty tasty Baileys, Vodka, Kulha (Or something like that), vanilla ice cream little chocolate sauce, spray cream, and some of that chocolate sprinkly stuff on the top. Pretty tasty! shame is costs like £4.50 but you gotta try this stuff at least once.

I just bought myself a USB Flash Drive I thought it would be a good idea as I seem to always be running out of blank CD’s and DVD’s. I had a look around and found a nice 2GB stick for £34 (great price). The one I got was the SanDisk Cruzer Micro 2GB which has a really nice form factor and has a nice retractable plug. I liked the idea of the retractable USB plug as most people end up losing the end cap on normal sticks.

The Cruzer features a thing called U3 which is a like most things, a whole load of marketing crap. U3 is supposed to allow you to carry your personal settings between machines and also a place to store your applications. It has it’s own list of software that you can download to store on the special U3 system. so in essence U3 is just an application launcher. (wow a funky marketing name like U3 for a basic old computing idea! Smells like Microsoft to me.)

To achieve this automatic launch they have basically used a special kind on CD file so they can use the auto launch that a lot of windows CD’s use. This combined with carrying data between machines means? you guessed it viruses and nasty stuff can migrate nice and easy. So really if you wanted to use this to move work around and stuff your out of luck as most companies don’t like anything that could inject nasty stuff on to their systems and you could find your self getting lynched by the IT nerd squad.

Anyway this U3 stuff is Windows only so the nasty stuff doesn’t hurt my Mac but the silly CD image used to launch it all on Windows still pops up and gets in the way. The most annoying part is that even if you format the drive the U3 disk image stays there. I spent some time looking round the net and found the U3 website, they don’t provide any direct links from what I could see but you can uninstall this crap and return the stick back to a normal memory stick. The only problem with this is that the uninstall software is Windows only so you if your a Mac, BSD or Linux user your gonna need to either emulate Windows or use another machine.

Uninstalling U3
To uninstall the U3 stuff head over to www.u3.com/uninstall and answer the questions (don’t worry they don’t ask for any personal information so thats cool.) Just tick the options you want like if your a Mac or Linux user check the “I use Mac OS or Linux” option so these companies know we are buying stuff and they should support us better than they do, download the little app and run it. Done U3 gone forever! Now you can use your nice memory stick in peace, I formated mine as FAT32 so I can use it on all platforms.

If you fancy playing Space Invaders and you have OpenOffice (which you all should) just start a new spreadsheet and enter =Game(“StarWars”) in any cell. There are some other games so you can give these a try!

=Game(“StarWars”)
=Game(A1:C3;”TicTacToe”)

Have fun.