prepare to be amazed, my friends.

okay, so only slightly underwhelming.

this is a traffic light electronics kit I bought in Tennessee and soldered together as soldering practice for the x0xb0x I bought the other week. The x0xb0x is a Roland TB-303 synthesizer replica (the short version of the long story is that they reverse engineered a Roland TB-303, sourced all the original parts, and now sell it as a kit that you can build yourself) – it’s arguably the closest you can get to the sound of an actual TB-303. Here’s a x0xb0x in action (it’s not mine, since mine’s still in pieces).

anyway, to get some soldering practice I bought a couple of electronics kits, and the first one I’ve managed to complete is the traffic light kit you see above. It’s got a lot of parts for something so simple, but it does the trick. It says on the box you can use it for model railroads, but it seems pretty big to suit that purpose, not to mention it would be hard to put a prototypical box around it to make it look like a real stoplight, but I’m sure someone’s found a use for it somewhere. My current use for it is to put up on the mantle (where you see it now) and ooh and aah as it changes colors. Well, nobody ever said I wasn’t easily amused.

perhaps the most annoying dialog in the world is the Windows XP (and potentially elsewhere) dialog that pops up once your computer has finished installing automatic updates from Microsoft. It’s a really good idea to get automatic updates from Microsoft, by the way. If they find some insidious bug that needs fixing before someone uses it as an exploit and hacks your machine (and there are quite a few of those), they can fix it and get it up and installed on your machine as quickly as possible.

the dialog reads:

Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?

your options are limited to “Restart Now” and “Restart Later”. If you click “Restart Now”, of course, your computer immediately reboots, which you might not want to do right at that second. If you click “Restart Later”, your machine waits 10 minutes, then pops up the dialog again. Then you have to click “Restart Later” again, wait another 10 minutes, click it again, and so on. If you’re not at your computer at the time (maybe you went to get a drink or something), there’s a timer that counts down, and if you don’t click on “Restart Later” during that time, the machine shuts down and reboots.

I can of course see why Microsoft would do this (see above where I talk about wanting to get problems patched as soon as possible so that you don’t get your machine hacked), but there’s nothing more annoying than having this dialog pop up every 10 minutes while you’re trying to work on something, and you just can’t make the darn thing go away.

for those of you in this situation, here’s what you can do. When you get this dialog, you can go ahead and turn off your Automatic Updates. The dialog will stop showing up, and you can get back to your work (or wasting time, as the case may be). Then, at your leisure, you can go ahead and restart your machine. Here’s how:

1. Click on Start > Run
2. Enter: services.msc (I’m guessing the msc stands for Microsoft Configuration)
3. Find “Automatic Updates” under the Name column
4. Right click on it, and select “Stop”
5. You’re done!

hope this is helpful to whoever might be reading this, as figuring out how to do this, was to me…

edit: As per the conversation below, I should point out that this doesn’t permanently stop the automatic updates. Once you reboot the machine, they turn back on at startup… so as long as you remember to do the reboot once you’re done with whatever you’re working on, the automatic updates will continue.