After following the steps in my XBMC Live Drives Mounted as Odd IDs article, wherein the user modifies the label of the drive and sets it to be recognized as part of the fstab process, I found myself occasionally seeing the message that indicates that Ubuntu can't find the drive. I found it frustrating that I would occasionally reboot my XBMC setup and the Seagate USB harddrives would have issues until I power cycled them.

With a bit of quick research, I found that there is an option as part of the fstab setup called nobootwait which lets the operating system continue to boot up even if the drive isn't present. In order to add this option, take the following steps.

Open the fstab file in your favorite editor:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Modify the line for your hard drive to add the nobootwait parameter:

UUID=1234-5678           /media/SeagateHDD              ntfs-3g defaults,umask=002,gid=users,nobootwait               0 0

That's all it should take. Next time you reboot, the system should skip past the waiting screen ("S to Skip").

During the normal operation of the diNovo Edge keyboard, the battery light on the top of the keyboard will indicate the battery status of the keyboard:

• The light will remain off during normal use, indicating more than 10% charge remaining.
• A single red light indicates the battery level is critical and will require recharging.

During the charging operation of the diNovo Edge keyboard, the battery light will indicate the battery charge status of the keyboard:

• As the battery recharges, the light will blink green.
• When the battery is fully charged, the light will be solid green.

If the light is not on or it is blinking red on the charging cradle contact Logitech Customer Care for your region.

When reading RSS feeds in Outlook 2010, I was always bothered when images were automatically downloaded. When reading feeds in my RSS reader, I prefer to focus on the content rather than an image. In particular, I've noticed that a number of RSS feeds are now including very large images in their RSS feeds which caused me to have to scroll a full page-length before I was able to read the content.

Outlook has an option to disable image downloads in RSS feeds, but it was a bit tucked away. Here's how to enable the feature:

After installing Windows 8 on one of my test computers (a Panasonic ToughBook  CF-19), I noticed that I had lost my option to dual boot Windows XP and Windows 8. The new bootscreen for Windows 8 is really nice - it has the metro look, it's touch friendly, and it's mouse friendly - but it didn't automatically add a boot option for my Windows XP installation which was pre-existing on the computer.

Here's how you can dual boot Windows 8 with a Windows XP option.

1. Boot into Windows 8
2. Navigate to the traditional Windows Desktop
3. Open a file explorer window
   I find the easiest way to do this is just to click the folder icon from the start menu
   
4. Navigate to the "Computer" option
   The easiest way to do this is to click the Computer option in the left side of the file explorer
5. Click the "System Properties" button in the ribbon at the top
   
6. Click "Advanced system settings" in the left pane
   
7. In the Startup and Recovery section of the window that pops up, click the "Settings" button (on the Advanced tab of System Properties)
8. Change the "Default operating system" option from "Windows Developer Preview" to "Earlier Version of Windows"
   
9. Click Ok to close the settings popup, then click Ok again to close the system properties menu
10. Reboot and you should be presented with an option to boot into Windows XP (Earlier Version of Windows) or into Windows 8 (Windows Developer Preview).