Log Out of Netflix on the PS3

Once you've linked your PS3 to your Netflix account, there is no GUI element to "log out", or deactivate. This is pretty annoying when you log in at a friend's house to watch a movie. Apparently the only way to deactivate a PS3 is using the following cheat code:

While on the instant browsing screen, press UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT UP UP UP UP. A diagnostic screen will appear, giving you the option to deactivate the device. I'm not kidding - this is really how you do it!

Monitor Stays Asleep After Remote Desktop in Windows 7

If you have a dual-monitor setup in Windows 7 and you use remote desktop, it's possible that you've run across a curious glitch: whenever you sit back down at your console session after using RDP, your main display remains blank. In fact, it's simply still asleep. You know the secondary monitor works because you can run the cursor to it, and if you're careful you can login blind and all the monitors wake up. There are several workarounds, including disabling power-saving on your monitor, disconnecting and reconnecting your monitor after sitting down, and other silliness, but those are annoying.

There's a simple fix that worked for me. Swap the displays so that your primary display (the one that shows the Windows login dialog or Welcome screen) is display number 1, as labeled whenever you ask Windows to "identify" the monitors. I have an ATI video card, so my fix looked like this:



Given the number of complaints online, this is a real bug in either Windows or ATI's and nVidia's drivers. I didn't suffer from the problem until I got a new display to replace my secondary one, with the new one becoming the primary display. Since ATI's driver assigned the new display as number 2 (even though it was "primary"), Windows started showing this problem. Swapping the monitors fixed it.

Spirit Airlines and the Carry-on Fee

The AJC has an article that describes one senator's effort to turn his anger into change concerning the Spirit Airlines decision to charge for carry-on bags. Unrelated to the senator's efforts, several facts about this situation are frustrating:

• Spirit has tried to justify the change by claiming that they've offset the $45 fee by lowering prices on tickets by $40. While that's still a $5 increase now, we're not stupid. Those ticket price reductions are temporary and we all know they'll disappear soon as ticket prices return to parity with other airlines. That's the whole point.
• "Spirit CEO Ben Baldanza has said having fewer carry-on bags will help empty the plane faster." - true, but I have a better idea. There's this big open space under all the seats where you can put stuff. Maybe we should encourage people to give us their luggage so we can put it in that big open space, thus getting it out of the way during passenger loading and unloading. DING!
• "Charging for checked bags but not carry-ons also means many passengers lug as much as they can onto planes." - hmm, I think I'm making some sort of logical connection here. The thinking goes something like this:
  1. Charge people for doing something they don't have to do (checking baggage).
  2. Thus, encourage them to do it a different way (carry-on).
  3. Now charge them for the alternate method (carry-on). Now we're charging a hidden (not shown in the ticket price) fee for every bag!
  4. PROFIT!

I have an idea for another fee: charging $30 for "premium seats" by putting soft material on exit rows, then (6 months later), putting the soft material on every seat in the plane.

Google's Next Nexus

I just wanted to post a little prediction here for the record. I think it's likely that the Nexus Two and Motorola Droid 2 will be the same device. Motorola was present at the Nexus One (N1) announcement, and though HTC makes the N1, Motorola was named as another Google partner in the Nexus series. My bet is that Google will balance the N1 with a keyboard-based Motorola product, and I think an enhanced DROID would be a good fit. Of course, I hope Verizon will make this phone available on its network, just as it plans to do for the N1.

Force Windows to Use a VPN's DNS Server

I often connect to my home network when I'm on the road, to encrypt my traffic as well as access my computers at home. Unfortunately, even though I had set up the VPN as the default route ("Use default gateway on remote network"), which encrypted most traffic, I noticed that my DNS queries were still being passed to the local (untrusted) DNS server rather than the one at home. Not only is this insecure, it also makes it difficult to use the hostnames of my home network devices.

Fortunately, the fix is pretty easy once you know it. Based on Microsoft KB311218, I discovered that the problem is a faulty binding order, which causes the dialup/VPN network adapter to be secondary to the local network adapter(s) with respect to DNS priority. These steps fixed my problem:

1. Open Regedit.
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Linkage
3. In the right pane, double-click Bind
4. In the value text box, select the "\Device\NdisWanIp" item, press CTRL+X, click the top of the list of devices, and then press CTRL+V.
5. Click OK, and then quit Registry Editor.
6. Restart your VPN connection.

The article only mentions 2000 and XP, so hopefully Vista and Windows 7 don't suffer from this problem.