Just a quick note to tell you all that I’m off on a weeks holiday to New York baby! We’re going out on Saturday and will be back on Friday. Wifi may be available so don’t count on too much happening with me online. I’ll post photos to Flickr when I can, and will probably be doing a bulk upload when I get back. Follow me on Twitter to see what I’m up to

My company builds their machines based on a USB rebuild solution, applying a Windows WIM image with Windows PE. I wanted to get this into a VMWare Fusion VM. After some googling, I managed to get it working, and here is how. My main resource was this invaluable page. I have put my steps here for clarity.

1. Follow the instructions here for creating a Windows PE boot disc. You will need a Windows system to create this with. Unfortunately the file resultant ISO file is 180MB, not really suitable to share here.
2. Get your WIM image on a USB drive.
3. Create you VM, selecting the appropriate OS, in my case, XP. Use the ISO image you created in step 1 as the install media.
4. Start up your VM and wait to be presented by a command prompt.
5. Type DISKPART to start the disk partition tool. Type the following commands

list disk
sel dis 0
clean
create part pri size=30000 (for 30GB, change as necessary)
ass letter=c
format fs=ntfs label=XP quick
act
exit

6. Next you need to insert the USB drive with your WIM image on. And we need to go back into DISKPART. You need to assign a letter to your partition on the drive. So do this

list disk
sel dis 1 (confirm disk number from list disk command)
list vol
sel vol 3 (in my case, my partition on the drive was 3)
ass letter=m
exit

7. Back at the command prompt, you can now begin applying the WIM to your VM. Type the following command, inserting your own wim file name where I put in filename.wim
imagex  /apply m:\filename.wim 1 c: /verify

The variables for this are of course your wim file name, the destination drive should usually be C:, and the “1″ is the index number on your wim. This is likely to be 1 but if you are unsure or have issues, refer to the Microsoft Support pages.

Then, give it about 10 minutes to apply your WIM and once done, type “exit” to reboot the system. You will probably need to shutdown the VM when it reboots, to allow you to remove the ISO image which will be attached to the VM as a physical disc. Once that is out, reboot and make sure you’re plugged into your company network if needed, and that the networking mode is Bridged. This will give your VM a physical IP address from the DHCP server, rather than using NAT routing to reuse the IP address of your Mac.

During my job I make a lot of trips to Oxford on a bi-weekly basis and it was only this week that I actually bothered to put on my “All Time Faves” playlist to listen to. And I thought I would share it here.

The history of this actually goes back to an iPod leaflet I picked up in John Lewis in Norwich one time while walking past their Apple selection. On their screenshot of iTunes, they had a “All Time Faves” playlist, which I stole and adjusted to create this.
iTunes links are provided where available

1. Alanis Morissette – Hands Clean [iTunes]
2. Avril Lavigne – Don’t Tell Me [iTunes]
3. Barenaked Ladies – Aluminum [iTunes]
4. Blink 182 – Here’s Your Letter [iTunes]
5.Box Car Racer – There Is [iTunes]
6. Busted – Meet You There [iTunes]
7. The Calling – Adrienne [iTunes]
8. Dashboard Confessional – Hands Down [iTunes]
9. Dashboard Prophets – All You Want
10. Death Cab For Cutie – Summer Skin [iTunes]
11. Dido – White Flag [iTunes]
12. Fastball – Fire Escape
13. Goo Goo Dolls – Slide [iTunes]
14. Guster – Amsterdam [iTunes]
15. Hoobastank – The Reason [iTunes]
16. Incubus – Talk Shows On Mute [iTunes]
17. Less Than Jake – Look What Happened [iTunes]
18. Lostprophets – Last Summer [iTunes]
19. Mark Owen – Four Minute Warning [iTunes]
20. Michelle Branch – All You Wanted [iTunes]
21. OutKast – Hey Ya [iTunes]
22. Robbie Williams – Feel [iTunes]
23. Ryan Adams – New York, New York [iTunes]
24. Semisonic – Secret Smile [iTunes]
25. Smashing Pumpkins – 1979 [iTunes]
26. Sponge – All This And Nothing
27. The Starting Line – Best Of Me [iTunes]
28. Steriogram – Walkie Talkie Man [iTunes]
29. Superfine – Betsy Went Flying [iTunes]
30. Tenacious D – Tribute [iTunes]
31. U2 – Beautiful Day [iTunes]
32. The Vines – Ride [iTunes]

You can now get the whole playlist (minus a few tracks) in an iMix on iTunes. Get It Here

When it comes to home media centres, there’s no shortage of options. You have Windows Media Centre, AppleTV, MythTV, XBox, and more. If you’re looking at something on the Mac platform, you’ve got plenty of choices. All new Mac’s come with Front Row, that gives you remote controlled access to your iTunes library of music, videos, podcasts, as well as access to iPhoto pictures. But what about if you have non-iTunes suitable content or you want to use some of the online streaming services? Front Row just won’t cut it. Read the rest of this entry »

Jude Alex Wheeler

Originally uploaded by domster83

Quick post here to say welcome to my new nephew, Jude Wheeler. He came into the world on friday at about 11.30 and joined his brother Reuben. Mother and baby are all fine. Looking forward to seeing him in the next few weeks.

Also just wanted to mention I’ve started a 365 on Flickr, that is a photo a day of me, not necessarily my face, but I’ll be in that photo somewhere. I’m hoping to learn some new techniques and get on with photoshop along the way. Check that out here