A couple of times recently I’ve needed to create new Google accounts. If you’ve recently needed to do this you probably noticed that Google’s default form now wants you to effectively create a ‘screen name’ which will come with GMail.
I’d imagine this is a ploy to push more users to Google+ and its a smart way to do it, however if you want to use your existing email address then you will need to use the old formatted signup page which you can find at https://accounts.google.com/newaccount?hl=en.
An odd bug in OSX Lion means that the keyboard repeat rate options in the Keyboard preference pane doesn’t get honoured. To enable this, you can run the following command at a Terminal prompt:
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
Then either logout or restart your machine to force a re-read of the defaults configuration.