January 2009 – Page 2 – ReadMyDamnBlog 2026

YouTube launch TV friendly interface.

If you enjoy YouTubing with friends and family and your computer is not connected to your tv (or eg. if your TV is not HD, which is true for some us still, sigh) then this has not always been straight forward 😐

YouTube to the rescue with a TV friendly interface to use on your PS3 (what PS3 😉 ), Wii (what Wii? 😉 ) or other console with buildin browser.

To try out the new interface simply launch http://www.youtube.com/TV (note TV appear to be CASE sensitive)..

One thing to note is that the special TV version of the site cannot be accessed in your PC’s browser without using a special browser add-on like User Agent Switcher, which can trick YouTube into thinking that you’re visiting the site from your console. If you’ve got a Mac Mini hooked up to your TV, this might be your best bet.

Note, interface may look different from console to console.

Source;
http://news.cnet.com

2009-01-16/by Mike

A virtual makeover.. www.taaz.com

Fun

Well today’s tip is a bit off topic, but it is REALLY neat (especially for the female gender, we men look hot as we are).

Ok, this web site www.taaz.com offer people the chance to see how they would look with different makeup and hair.. I guess that has been seen before, but this is REALLY well made, you can upload your own photo and then adjust the parameters and start changing hair and stuff. I was amazed at how well created it is and how good results it makes.

So tell your wife, girlfriend or teenage daughter and you won’t be allowed near your computer the rest of that day 😉 but you will score some cheap points and that’s always worth doing..

The site again; www.taaz.com

2009-01-15/by Mike

X-OOM Media Center for Wii™

Fun, Video

1123_media_center_for_wii_3d_300dpi_cmyk Just thought this may be of interest to Wii console owners, now you can get a mediacenter-extention for your Wii, and at a price of US$ 39,- it should be worth a look. I have not tested this myself as I don’t have a Wii, what is wrong with my good old XBOX 1 which by the way DO have a mediacenter installed 😉

X-OOM Media Center for Wii™

Direct access to all your movies, videos, photos, music etc.
Fool-proof installation and navigation
Optimized for widescreen (16:9)
Access to more than 1,000 radio and TV channels
Streaming of multimedia files (audio/video)
Extensive support of media files: MP3, WMA, OGG, DivX®, Xvid, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV, JPG, BMP etc.
Common network connection through WLAN or LAN

http://www.x-oom.com/usa/products/mediacenterforwiiSUB.htm

2009-01-14/by Mike

Diagnosing network problems

Utility

So your old mother calls and says she cant connect to the Internet, bummer you have to go through hoops to make her open a command prompt, ping this and that and before you know it you have spent an hour or more.

Well Windows today actually has a decent looking utility for testing network connectivity (it may be enough for that initial test), and this may thus be worth a look before getting into the command prompt.

The utility is here;
C:WINDOWSNetwork Diagnosticxpnetdiag.exe

Or you can get it from here;
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=ea541e8e-85a3-4d2f-a3a4-b329d03fc2fa

2009-01-14/by Mike

Classroom Spy Professional

Utility

ss_main_window Just heard about this and have thus not tested it myself, but it sound nifty..

From the website;
It is hard to teach a group of people how to use a PC, or even how to use a specific program on a PC or the internet.

Yes, PC or web training isn’t easy. For someone who’s doing something right, there are probably two others doing it wrong, playing games, checking email, shopping…

Classroom Spy lets you see what everyone’s doing – without leaving your desk. You can monitor the activity of all the PCs in your classroom remotely. Plus, you can share your screen with your students’ PCs, making demos and presentations much easier.

http://www.classroomspy.com/
http://www.classroomspy.com/download.htm

2009-01-13/by Mike

Gladinet your friendly Skydrive cabbie

Web

feature1_1 A new addition to the Skydrive saga (or rather to many of the online storage services – gmail, S3 etc etc). This tool should be capable of adding your Skydrive/S3/Gmail etc as a drive letter, this would be a GREAT help as Skydrive is neat but requires you to create the directory structure manually 🙁

It is still in beta but free (lets hope it stay that way :-)).
http://www.gladinet.com/p/index.htm

Tnx to CRHO for the tip.

UPDATE January 16th 2009. I discovered an unfortunate effect of the above software, anything you have on your eg. Skydrive is cached locally, the issue with this is that if you have 25gb on your skydrive then the folder below will ALSO have 25gb, and for some with sparse disk space (or roamingf profiles) this may become an issue.

Windows XP cache folder;
"C:Documents and Settings\%username%Local 
SettingsApplication DataGladinetcache"

2009-01-13/by Mike

KanManDet now with Google Translate

Fun, Web

I just added a gadget that can translate this page to a bunch of languages, neat 🙂

And yes I know Google Translate is not perfect, but it still do a decent job (and its a laugh to read the funny translations)..

You will find the gadget in the lover left part of the sidebar – Have fun 😀

2009-01-12/by Mike

MSRT – Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool

Antivirus, Security

2009-01-12_0924 As you may have noticed then Microsoft monthly ships you a new version of something called MSRT (Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool), this comes via Windows updates.

What does it do? Well its a very basic cleanup utility for certain mal/spyware, once Microsoft deems that a mal/spyware is widespread enough it is added to their MSRT and is thus cleaned from all machines that run their Windows Updates. It is NOT a malware/spyware scanner as such as it only cleans known and targeted mal/spyware and it offer no realtime protection, it runs – cleans and exits.

As mentioned all this happens behind the scenes about once a month, should you however want to do the scan again (you may be infected with mal/spyware 2 minutes after the MSRT are run, and then it will be an entire month before the scan is performed again) then you can download and run the MSRT scanner yourself (or rather a GUI version of it, the original run 100% behind the scenes).

Download it from here;
http://www.microsoft.com/security/malwareremove/default.mspx
or here (I am not 100% the latter is updated regularly)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=ad724ae0-e72d-4f54-9ab3-75b8eb148356

UPDATE January 26th 2009;
It’s even easier than this, see;
https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=574

2009-01-12/by Mike

Windows Server 2008 R2

OS

Before I even got really started on Windows 2008 Microsoft is releasing a beta of their Windows Server 2008 R2. My first thought was – well that makes sense as Windows 7 is also in beta, but then I came to think – are they actually related?

I heard something about “Direct access” that would require Win 2008R2 and Windows 7 to work.

Anyhow, if you are interested, then you can download the beta via;
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/r2.aspx

2009-01-12/by Mike

DVico TViX R-2230

Gadgets, TV, Video

It would seem DVico has released TViX R-2230 a small form factor mediacenter with DVB-T build in, it looks quite interesting even though there seem to be some confusion regarding HD playback (supports 1080p but not MKV and H264). I really liked the previous versions of TViX (se earlier post) and thus this is interesting for when I will be decomissioning my good old X-Box1 classic (which I use as a mediacenter today) 🙂 one major issue however, it would seem it does not come with a network adapter which seem kind of silly 🙁