USB speakers too loud

Recently got the Logitech S150 USB speakers for my laptop (Windows 7 - 64bit). They work great but are way too loud. Same issue with a headset/mic combo connected to a USB sound adapter. Googling for "usb headset too loud" came up with many others experiencing the same earsplitting issue.

I did find a solution for the speakers in this post by mgoblue62 in a Logitech forum thread and the response from SamuelBMorse:

1. Go to the volume mixer
2. Set the USB speaker volume to 70%
3. Set the volume of your application to a comfortable level

It didn't seem to work as well on my USB headset, at least not with Windows Media Player. May have to go back to using the KOSS volume control for that.

iPhone application development, step by step from OpenLaszlo Project Blog.

List of IE CSS bugs

Good list of IE6 bugs and workarounds from the CSS-Tricks blog.

Ukulele fingerpicking tutorials

Ukulele tutorials for strumming and fingerpicking at the Ukulele & Languages blog.

Optical Illusions

Collection of optical illusions on Yahoo!Games.

Getting "access denied" errors on SharePoint WCM pages

This happened to me after setting the portalsuperuseraccount:

stsadm -o setproperty
-propertyname portalsuperuseraccount
-propertyvalue mydomain\cachesuperuser
-url http://blahblah.com

Need to give the portalsuperuseraccount full rights.

jQuery plugin jCarousel gives "No width/height set for items ..." error on Safari

Need to make sure that the container that jCarousel is applied to is visible (e.g., not styled to display:none) when the carousel is initialized (got the clue from this discussion on drupal.org). In the case of a couple carousels activated by a tabs (implemented also with jQuery), initialize the hidden carousel only when the tab is activated, say, in a callback function like this:

function myTabCallbackOnActive() {
  // Find carousel object from active tab
  var activetab = $('#blahblah .selected a').attr('href');
  var carousel = $(activetab + '.jcarouselstrip').data('jcarousel');
  if (carousel == null)  {
    initCarousel(activetab);
    carousel = $(activetab + '.jcarouselstrip').data('jcarousel');
  }
  // Do other actions as needed for now-active carousel.
  // For example, go to the first item:
  carousel.scroll(1,false);
}

Old Filipino words we used to hear

See the column by Gilda Cordero-Fernando on the Philippine Daily Inquirer:
It's hacienda and hacendero, not haciendero!

Enabling eSATA on Dell e6400

Found that my work Dell e6400 was not configured on the BIOS to use eSATA, and changing the BIOS SATA settings to AHCI to allow for eSATA causes Windows boot to fail. You’ll need to change a registry setting first. Found the proper steps here:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19269913.aspx
(look for the Jason Hofmann posting)

For step 5 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976), I changed the subkey
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
to have Start value = 0 (originally: 3 hex).

Graphics Card Comparison

From Notebookcheck:

• Comparison of Graphics Cards
• Laptop Video Graphics Cards - Benchmark List
• Gaming Performance