bsod

A couple of months after Easter itself came and went, the Easter egg Google shipped with its Chrome OS prototype laptops has finally been discovered.

Brad Wells found the Easter egg. Aided by a little Google searching, he found out how to activate a fake blue screen of death--one of the "legacy" leftovers from the PC era Google hopes to banish with its browser-based operating system. Then, with an ASCII code converter, he found a parody of the legalese that causes me a lot more heartburn these days than BSODs.

Wells dug up the egg after Chrome … Read more

This episode had a number of potential titles. Nerd Alert, Nerd party, Nerdgasm... but we honed in on the one that really encapsulates the sheer nerditude of stuff covered in today's show. Let your inner nerd shine through.

Nerdgasm: HTC Evo 4G

Pong and BSOD belt buckles

Cell Mate headset heads-on

Binary Flow, officially the hardest watch to read ever

Sticker pockets change everything

It’s About Time, Best Edition Evar. Luxury watch made from dinosaur crap

What a Concept Heatswell coffee cup grows a sleeve when hot liquid is poured in… Read more

You win some, you lose some. Microsoft is getting its brand on the Beijing Olympics in more ways than one, in one case to very poor effect.

Reports from China suggest that Microsoft's Silverlight is delivering exceptional streaming video for NBC's Olympic coverage.

Unfortunately, Microsoft also had the shame of the Blue Screen of Death afflict the opening ceremonies, with the BSoD up on the big screen for more than two hours during the ceremony. Li Ning, who lit the main Olympic torch, actually walked in front of the BSoD, immortalizing the image of Microsoft XP failing on … Read more

Like many of you, my copies of Windows XP crash with the now-classic "blue screen of death" (BSOD). When this happened a couple times recently to a new ThinkCentre A61 tower, I called Lenovo tech support. As the title of this posting suggests, it did not go well.

When Windows XP crashes, the default behavior is to create a minidump, a small file (only 88K) with a summary of, hopefully, the most important information about the failure. I wrote about minidumps back in November (see Dealing with software crashes, Part 2). If your copy of Windows has crashed (… Read more

Don't say you've never thought this before, but Apple types can be a bit on the smug/annoying side at times. Case in point: in the newly released Leopard operating system, the icon Leopard uses to represent Windows machines on your local network is a sight that should be familiar to Windows users the world over. It's a bulky old-school CRT monitor displaying the infamous blue screen of death (aka BSOD).

This little in-joke is actually pretty funny, but Engadget's Ryan Block wants to be a uniter, not a divider, so he put together a handy set of instructions … Read more

Back in the day, it was skulls, snakes and Iron Maiden's undead mascot, Eddie. In the post-heavy-metal Internet era, to express your anguish, malaise, or traumatic childhood, you have to get a tattoo of the Blue Screen of Death on your arm. What better to display your frustration with software and your sense of irony than the text that lets you know you've lost an afternoon's work?

The artist, 23-year-old Sam Rulz of Auckland, New Zealand, has this to say: "Paul's tattoo is based on the Windows 98 error code, which is what you see … Read more