Microsoft support document 955020 addresses the possibility that Vista's spellchecker may mistakenly claim the names Friendster, Klum, Nazr, Obama, and Racicot are misspelled. It offers an updater which will fix this problem.

The package which adds five additional words for the built-in dictionary consists of eight DLLs totalling 56 MB. By comparison, William Shakespeare's complete works contains over 905,000 words and is 5.3 MB.

The manual workaround is to type a word, right click it and select "Add to Dictionary".

In older news: Microsoft addresses software accessibility.

If you're in the States, and you want an iPhone 3G, and you're curious whether you'll be paying 50% more per month for an unavailable service, here's some help. Note that what AT&T says you're getting and what you think you're getting are not necessarily the same.

AT&T's interactive map of cellular coverage. Tick the 'Show 3G Coverage' button to see whether the big blue smear of high-speed data covers your house, workplace, and coffeeshop.

Cities Supporting AT&T 3G/Mobile Broadband. This doesn't necessarily agree with the map -- for example, my city's covered on the map, but not named on the list. Click on your nearest city and see what the map indicates.

As of this posting the site's getting hammered.

This is my sole attempt at ringtone composition. The Sony Ericsson T616 phone had a little-known ringtone editor built in, where you could build a sequence out of a variety of musical snippets, each a couple seconds long.

On a long car ride a couple years ago, I attempted to make the most annoying ringtone possible. Here's the original MIDI file, seventeen seconds long: ugh_surf.mid (popup window).

1 PixelOut Player is a freeware Flash applet that will play a single MP3 file. It was created as a WordPress plugin, but has since been ported to other systems. I'm the current maintainer of the Joomla! version.

The current version is 1.5.1.

The current version is 1.5.2 with some bugfixes and a new player control. It continues to be hosted on duvien.com, and I hope to contribute further improvements as I find the time.