Jenn and I went with some friends on Sunday to see Wall-E, the latest Pixar piece.

I enjoyed Toy Story and it holds a special place in my heart. I have enjoyed all of the other Pixar movies, too, to varying degrees.

Wall-E is my new favorite. There’s just something about cute robots that I can’t get over. The characters - most of them robots - were lovable and full of personality, the story was great… I was sucked in from the first minute. Something I thought was cool was that they did so much, particularly at the beginning, without a ton of dialogue. It was all in expressions and actions, and it was amazing.

While it’s obviously safe for kids to see, I don’t think they’ll really get it. I know that my niece was sort of bored by it. My sister-in-law fell asleep (she’s fired). Jenn, I, and the friends we went with loved it thoroughly. Definitely worth the full-price admission in my book.

I have a Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad T60 at work with a docking station. For the longest time, I’d get this error when trying to undock:

You cannot eject your computer because one of the devices in the docking station, “Printer Port (LPT1),” cannot be stopped because a program is still accessing it.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. I don’t have any printers hooked up, I hadn’t printed anything, I couldn’t find anything that was using the port.

There’s a KB article on it, and I found forum posts about it, but no real solutions. The way I solved it:

In the BIOS at boot time, there is an option for disallowing access to the printer port from the docking station. I set that. (There is an option to disable the printer port entirely, but I didn’t need to do that - I just needed to stop the docking station from accessing it.) A quick save and reboot, and I’m ready to eject from the docking station at any time - no more error.

Note that I don’t have any printers locally attached to my machine, so disabling the printer port connection to the docking station didn’t hurt me. If you have a local printer attached to your docking station, this may not be the best solution for you.

UPDATE: I am on ThinkPad T60 BIOS version 2.21 and the option is under Config -> Docking Station. Set the “Legacy Devices on Mini Dock” setting to “Disabled” to disallow the docking station access to the parallel port.

I’m not sure what to make of this, but it’s from Joss Whedon and stars Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion, so that’s really all I need to know. I’m in.

They finally released a tool on xbox.com that allows you to transfer your downloadable content licenses from one console to another. This is huge. I used to have to wait months (yes, plural) to get this to happen after repair, and people who bought new consoles (upgrade to Elite?) were out-and-out hosed.

That said, there are some important points they blog about on the Gamerscore Blog and there’s a FAQ about the tool. The two big points for me:

• When you get your console repaired by Microsoft, they’ll do this for you so you won’t need to do it yourself. That’s important because…
• You can only do this one time every 365 days.

Apparently this will work with all content but movies because movies aren’t “download-to-own.” I don’t rent movies over Xbox Live, so I’m not too concerned here.

The last time I got my console repaired, which was about a month ago, they did not automatically transfer the licenses even though they said they would. I called Xbox Live Support and it took about a week for them to do the transfer (as opposed to the months it previously took). I’m gathering that if I get another repair and need the licenses transferred, this won’t be the avenue I’m supposed to take - I’ll still need to call them. This is more for folks getting new consoles or getting repairs from non-Microsoft facilities. That said, now that we know there’s a tool, maybe they can do the transfer right there while I’m on the phone rather than waiting a week.

I finally got around to putting a new picture as the home screen image on my new BlackBerry Curve. The problem - every time I synchronized against the BlackBerry Desktop Manager software, my home screen image would get reset to the default for the theme. I’d go set it again, sync up, and watch my wallpaper disappear. The image file was still there, it just wasn’t my wallpaper anymore.

The answer: Store any picture you want as your home screen image on the device memory, not on a media card. If you store the image on the media card, it’ll get reset when you sync. If you store it on the device memory, it’s stays persistent the way you’d expect.