Firefox and Thunderbird together

One of the most frequently asked questions is "why doesn't Thunderbird start when I have Firefox open?" (you can exchange Firefox and Thunderbird in the question).
The answer is that you should have installed a build of both Firefox and Thunderbird that use exactly the same DLLs, otherwise you most likely won't be able to use them together. What this really means is that the author of the port should have compiled the packages roughly at the same time, using sources that are at the same level.
Obviously, this is not something you are in control of, unless you're able to do your own port. And sometimes you may have a reason to use applications at different levels.
The most straightforward solution is to use the RUN! package by Rich Walsh, which sets up all the environment variables needed to achieve your goal.
You simply copy the run!.exe program to the directory where thunderbird.exe resides, and rename it to something like thunderbird!lk.exe. You then change your program object to point to thunderbird!lk.exe instead of the plain tunderbird.exe and you're done.
You can apply this fix to firefox.exe too, just remember you don't need to apply it to BOTH: just one of them is enough.

Installing mPlayer

One of the most useful ports from the linux world is mPlayer. However, like most linux ports, it is difficult to install and configure.
Again on OS/2 World you find another interesting article by Robert Mauro. The article details how to install mPlayer in eCS, and how to use it as a plugin in SeaMonkey/Firefox to stream audio and video.
Given the number of different ports and packages you can find out there, I have often dreamed of a guide that let me install mPlayer without losing one or two hours trying to figure it out. Finally it is here!
Now if only someone could put together a WPI package... (hint, hint) :-)

VoiceType on OS/2 4.5x (or eCS)

I have been following a discussion on OS/2 World regarding the possibility to run IBM's VoiceType on recent OS/2 (or eCS) releases.
The point of the discussion was that users find it seemingly impossible to run VoiceType on anything newer that Warp 4 (and thus on eCS too).
Robert posted a suggestion, saying that he has always been able to install and use VoiceType even on newer systems.
He later posted a link to a tutorial outlining all the steps to install VoiceType on OS/2 v4.5x. here you can also find a link to the latest fixes for VoiceType.
I have found this very interesting, since VoiceType was a very nice and useful dictation system, if a little memory and CPU hungry. On today's hardware it is probably even better.