flac to mp3

problem: downloaded 'king of leon - because of the times', and all in flac format

what im not doing: just leaving it, got a cheapo mp3 player that doesnt support flac (i know flac is lossless and so much better, but needs must). im also installing nothing with a gui, not needed!

installed on ubuntu, flac & lame

sudo apt-get install lame flac

get into the terminal and navigate to dir with files for convertion. a wee for loop should sort it out

for i in *.flac; do $(flac -dc "$i" | lame -h "$i.mp3"); done;

point - could have stuck in a bit of magic to chop off .flac from resulting mp3 (something.flac.mp3) but no curly braces on wee boys keyboard!

outlook express opening s-l-o-w-l-y

problem: outlook express taking 14 fortnights to open

what im not doing: just installing 'live mail' (although it is slightly better...)

seems that a dodgy autopatcher run has resulted in the above behaviour, but fairly straightforward to repair. logs show dcom error for

FB7199AB-79BF-11d2-8D94-0000F875C541

so a wee search in the registry takes me to

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{FB7199AB-79BF-11d2-8D94-0000F875C541}

InProcServer32

LocalServer32

default value seems to be path to messenger. remove this to blank entry and we are back to normal!