The minimal xorg file I needed was (the entire file):
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce 6600 GT"
Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-0"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"

EndSection

I saved this file to (may be distro specific – I use archLinux)
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-monitors.conf

The only lines which may need changing are
Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-0"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"

The first one is setting the main X monitor (the monitor that gdm’s login and gnome shells header bar appear on). You can find the appropriate value by doing an xorg export from nvidia-settings
The second line is not intuitive – it says which direction the ‘secondary’ monitor is from the ‘primary’. This does not get the primary/secondary monitors from the TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder line unfortunately, but rather the ‘primary’ monitor is the screen used when there is no xorg config.

Options are
"RightOf" (the default)
"LeftOf"
"Above"
"Below"
"Clone"

This page from NVIDIA was quite helpful in setting this up.

Get the ical link from facebook by clicking ‘export events’ on this page:
https://www.facebook.com/?sk=events&ap=1

<?php

// Give the file a name and force download
header("Content-Disposition: inline; filename=events.ics");
print_r($output);
?>

A lot of forums seemed to think this was related to either sound or video cards, so I uninstalled, reinstalled and tried the default windows drivers for each. I tried disabling the HDMI optical audio on the graphics card because they apparently can interfere with onboard sound.

Finally I started wondering if the clocks timer was simply wrong. Doing a bit of googling for windows 7 x64 clock sync, I eventually came across a few people whose clocks seemed to run slowly when enabling an option called CIA1 on their motherboards BIOS. It didn’t mention anything about audio in games, but I figured it was worth a shot.

I’ve got a gigabyte motherboard on my home machine and like most of them, it had an option called CIA2 with the following options “Disabled, Cruise, Sports, Racing, Turbo, Full Thrust” of course with options like that, who’s going to leave that disabled, or simply select the cruise option? Mine was set to Turbo.

After putting up with this issue for over a year, turning CIA2 to disabled solved everything.
Now I can enjoy Portal 2′s great voice acting without having to enable subtitles and ruin the experience

Previously I was using RSS Graffiti for Facebook, and attempting to use Feedburner for twitter posting.
Now I’ve gone back to twitterfeed.
I did try it originally but it seemed inconsistant and didn’t format the feed like I wanted.
Now I’ve just used twitterfeed to import the feed which feedburner exports and it seems to all be working!

I tried out the post format of Twitterfeed to facebook as well, and it seems much nicer than the RSS Graffiti which I was using previously, although it’s served me well for a while now.

Maybe once I post a few photo based things I’ll see how it’s thumbnails work too!

Because Google reader’s rss feed of shared items is formatted a little strangely I made a short php script to parse it into a nicer format. OK, mainly getting rid of the annoying ‘Shared by <username> ‘ bit.

<?php

$username = "Psykar";

$url = "http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/10440293858886564202/state/com.google/broadcast";
$page = file_get_contents($url);

echo preg_replace('/Shared +by +'.$username.'/',null,$page);

?>

To find your shared items url, just open reader, get the url which gets replaced, and remove the html entities %2F either side of the ID
eg for mine:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/#stream/user%2F10440293858886564202%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Freading-list

is 10440293858886564202

Plug this ID into the URL above

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/<userid>/state/com.google/broadcast

I then used feedburner to import this php script (hosted on my server) and activated the ‘socialize’ feature, which should be publishing all my shared items to twitter now, in a nice format.

I followed most of the instructions here:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/12617/how-to-replace-notepad-in-windows-7/

and got the replacment notepad.exe file from here:

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/commun/misc/NppLauncher.bin.zip

But found that upon trying to run it, I would get a very annoying warning:

Despite my efforts, unchecking this box would still produce the same error, even running as administrator.

Even going into the properties of the file and ‘unblocking’ it wouldn’t stick.

I found this blog post:

http://blogs.xntrix.com/2007/09/replacing-notepad-on-windows-vista-with.html

But the links in it are dead!

My solution in the end: Copy the notepad.exe file I had downloaded somewhere else, unblock it there then copy it into the directories mentioned.

Silly me for not doing that to start with – because obviously it’s not the same executable you find in the notepad++ program files directory.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-365703.html
http://matt.matzi.org.uk/2008/07/03/reconstructing-heavily-damaged-hard-drives/

I combined elements of all the above to the following script which recovered most of the deleted files.

The main trick was the arguments on icat – I was confused for a while because it was finding all the files, but only creating 4kb of them. Turns out I needed the -r -a arguments.

Script is below, run on a file created by the following command

# The -r argument is used to recover only deleted files
ils -r /media/Images/USBImage | awk -F '|' '{print $1}' > /tmp/inodes

#!/bin/sh
imgpath="/media/Images/USBImage"

# This was due to taking the raw disk data rather than just the partition
# The offset was found using autopsy - part of sleuth tools, used for this.
imgargs=" -f fat -o 63 ${imgpath} "
outpath="/media/Images/Recovered/"

for inode in $(cat /tmp/inodes) ; do

	ffind ${imgargs} $inode

	if [ $? -eq 0 ]
	then
		echo "INODE: $inode"
		INODEDIR=$(ffind ${imgargs} $inode | awk -F "* " '{print $2}')
	 	echo "INODEDIR: ${INODEDIR}"
		REALDIR=${outpath}$(dirname -- "$INODEDIR")
		FILENAME="${outpath}${INODEDIR}"
		mkdir -p "$REALDIR"

		# I found this worked better than the method used by one of the links
		# to create directories. What happens is a directory inode may create
		# a file if a later file tries to write to a directory which IS a
		# file, the file is removed and the directory is created instead

		if [ $? -eq 1 ]
		then
			rm -R "${REALDIR}"
			mkdir -p "${REALDIR}"
		fi

		echo "FILENAME: $FILENAME"
		#echo "${imgargs} $inode > $FILENAME"
		icat -r -s ${imgargs} $inode > "$FILENAME"

		echo ""
	fi
done

Amusingly that sleep was probably better than the night train to Venice (after a stop by Munich to pick up a laptop charger I’d left behind – and of course a visit to an Augustiner beer hall)

Venice while touristic is amazing. Also the most expensive place I’ve visited yet. Wandering lost through the streets was fun, finding markets churches and streets dead ending onto canals at every turn. It was even fun to wander in the rain.

Florence was nice – like a quieter and smaller version of Vienna. More friendly and of course full of gelati. Saw the orginal David, and a replica on a hill. Ran into Michelle from Melbourne who happened to also be going to Cinque Terra when I was.

Cinque Terra – simply beautiful. The coastline itself is quite spectacular, if not entirely unique, however no other coastline like this has 5 small historic and rustic towns built into them. The 7 hour hike between them was breathtaking and full of photo ops, gelati, stairs and amazing pasta and pesto.

I’m beginning to dispair of finding time to catch up with 3 weeks of blog posts! Hopefully my memory doesn’t fail too soon.

Then I headed over to Rothenberg o d Taube (lit. Rothenburg above the Taube (river)) a quaint medieval walled village full of tourists.

Then 3 days ferrying down the Rhein – staying in a castle, a hostel, and a cute little bed and breakfast run by a woman who knew next to no english. The Rhein (not Rhine as I keep misspelling while I type this) has castles galore – oftentimes you could see two at once, on various hills overlooking the river.
I visited Rheinfels (one of the largest castles in Germany – now a ruin) and Burg Eltz (one of the best preserved castles in Germany – still owned by the Eltz family) both were amazing.
Then onwards to Berlin, where I wish I had’ve spent longer than 2 nights, but I’d already booked Prague, where I ended up staying 4 nights. Both amazing cities for their history.
Now I’m chilling in Vienna. Or rather boiling, while fighting off oversized slow mosquitoes. The city itself is amazing architecturally. For me it’s the sheer volume of magnificent buildings – someone who knows what they are talking about might say there is no variety or something, but I don’t know any better!
Tomorrow I’m off to Salzburg, day after I may head back to Munich so I can drop by the Dachau concentration camp – which I missed on my first visit – as I need to visit at least one.
Then on to catch a few more castles in the south of Germany, and then in to Italy finally, where I hope to spend the majority of my remaining time in Europe. Venice first, and we’ll see from there.

So, yes I am still alive, and when I get the time I’ll write a bit more about the places I’ve already been =)