If like me you have been experiencing issues with the new iTunes 8.1 Windows release then this might help you out.

For me at least iTunes crashes during the transmission of Genious data to Apple, stopping this process with the “X” that appears in the notification area resulted in an immediate crash, if it was left it would simply crash a few minutes later.

If you really can’t wait for Apple to fix this issue and aren’t really bothered about using Genious then the most obvious solution would be to turn off the Genious feature until a fix is released, unfortunatly for me the Store > Turn Off Genious option was unavailiable so here is how I managed to get round it:

1. Go to your iTunes folder (mine was in C:/Users/Myles/Music/iTunes but yours may be somewhere else)
2. Find “iTunes Library Genius.itdb” and rename it to something like iTunes Library Genius.itdb.old (Make sure you can see file extenstion – if not untick the “Hide extensions for known file types” option in the Folder and Search Options Menu)
3. Start iTunes
4. iTunes will still try to generate Genious Data but after renaming the file you should be able to stop the process by clicking on the “x” in the notification area at the top without it resulting in an immediate crash.
5. Then Select Store > Turn Off Genious from the menu at the top

For some reason that seemed to sort the problem for me, or atleast long enough for me to disable the Genious Feature, it may not work for anyone else, but its worth a shot – iTunes has been running for about 10 minutes so far and no crash as of yet.

Hope this works for you!

EDIT: Didn’t realise this fix had already been suggested on the Apple Support Forums, you can follow the discussion at: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1938223&tstart=0

So yesterday I got given a corrupt SD card to recover. It was from Kim’s new camera which arrived a few days ago, she bought a 1GB card from the London Camera Exchange before we went to take some photos the same day. While we were out the SD card died and the camera wouldn’t read it.

So I took it home to my underground laboratory and started the pain staking procedure of recovering the data from the card.

After analysing the card it turns out that the card didn’t have a file system structure, something must have corrupted it, I tried Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional  but it only found 5 of the photos and could only find 7MB of unpartitioned space on the card. So I pulled out PhotoRec and scanned it. If you need to get photos off of a camera memory card PhotoRec is the app to do it, it works like a treat and has earned a place in my arsenal of applications.

It took about 30 minutes to scan the card fully, all 115 photos that Kim took were recovered, but here’s where the weirdness starts, along with the 115 photos I expected to be recovered there were also 50 or so photos of people I’ve never seen before at Goodrington and other locations…

The sealed SD card bought from the London Camera Exchange contained OTHER PEOPLES photos and videos!

Obviously they had been wiped from it previously, but even though it had been formatted, a low level scan of the data revealed photos in the sectors that hadn’t been overwritten. Below is one of the photos I found on there…It looks like someones holiday snaps.

One of the photos on the SD card

Looking at the EXIF data they were taken between April and May 2007 on a Nikon Coolpix S6 Camera, I have no idea why they were on the card and I have no idea why the London Camera Exchange sold a card that was sealed and apparently ‘new’ but obviously wasn’t.

It just goes to show what these companies get up to, recycling what is probably a useless card that had been returned into something they can sell again.

Google is a mystical creature of the deep, some love it and some hate it. There have been dozens of arguments about Google as a whole is too big and powerful, privacy advocates are throwing their hands up complaining about target advertising and other things, personally if Google want to show me targeted adverts based on my search queries and emails then go for it, I never look at them anyway.

But privacy and how Google may or may not be able to use their power to take control of the world is not what this post is about.

Google indexes my site, which is what Google should do, but because it indexes my site it allows me to login to the Google Webmasters Tool and look to see exactly what Google has indexed, as well as my page rank and other pieces of information that can be quite useful at times.

One of the pages on the Webmasters tool allows you to see words that Google has associated with your site, even casual readers will be aware of the vast topics I cover in my blog, apparently Google shares your sentiment, here’s a small list of some of the 200 words Google thinks relate to my site.

• Torbay Council
• Louisa Lytton
• Embankment
• Mobile
• Payroll
• Audit Commission
• Internship
• Sorry
• Girls
• Caprice
• Crowd
• Memories
• Maximillion
• River

These are just some of them, others are seemingly random ones like 29th and barrel, I have no idea what logic Google uses to mine keywords but I sure do have a diverse range of them.

It had to happen, just over a week after moving into our new flat our first major cooking blunder occurs, there have been others, but none of them ended with the same amount of smoke…

Here’s what me and Lloyd have learned: Don’t try and melt chocolate in the microwave….it isn’t as safe as you may believe…

A picture is worth a thousand words…

An admirable suggestion for someone to make; always be prepared for it to rain on you’re parade, always be prepared for the unexpected and always be prepared for a nuclear disaster. Most of those suggestions are reasonable ones, things happen out of the blue, nothing ever lasts and nothing ever works out the way it’s supposed to.

But don’t worry, I’m not going to invest in a fallout shelter and stockpile tins of soup waiting for the world to come to an end, instead I’m doing the next best thing….

The government have bunkers deep underground to protect the people that are crucial to the countries running, the military have underground command stations from which they can launch a full scale attack on wherever they want, I on the other hand haven’t got access to this level of military hardware so I’ve had to improvise…

Announcing my very own Mobile Command Centre

This thing has it all, a desk for the mountain of paperwork that needs to be done, a map in case the GPS says to take a right into the Thames.

Office line so I’m available to make all of those important office type calls

A discreet cupboard to provide me with lots of storage for my paperwork

A Board room for the many meetings that are held – this is where the grown up stuff goes on

A clock so I can see when I get to have some of the soup I stock piled

A productivity meter, as you can see it must have been lunch…

A reading light for those late nights…

Fully functional alarm system…

And finally a panic button, if banks have one I don’t see why I should go without

And before you ask…no

I’m not selling it…..

Not even to you!

Ok, me and Shane have been thinking about this for a while, we’ve come up with various ideas that might work. The problem is simple:

How do you stay awake for a very long period of time without needing to go to sleep?

A lot of people would suggest Caffeine or a Coke based product, this is good but it doesn’t give us the length we’re looking for, being as strange as we are and also being uni students we sometimes need to stay awake for days on end – either to wander about campus in the middle of the night or to do the odd bit of work that we are given every now and again.

This presents a problem, since the human body can’t store sleep, I mean it’s not like we’re camels and have lumps on our backs to store sleep in so we have to improvise. My original plan was to have Liquid sleep that could be drunk whenever you have to top up but this didn’t seem to go down well, perhaps a little bit too far fetched.

This morning though, while waking up at the insane time of 7am I started to think, instead of liquid sleep, why not just sleep in a bottle, it’s not liquid but it is in a bottle, does this solve the problem?

I’m sure there will be some commentary from the Ice Queen that resides in my comments so i’d check them out, she does want to become the cancerous lump on my blog afterall.