Category: Product Reviews

Categories
Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

ScaleOut StateServer

ScaleOut Software has a product to manage sessions on a web farm. I have tried this product and have had nothing but issues. I did actually end up getting it working once, but it turns out, even when it does work correctly, it gives your network problems

It seems that the fix for any issue is “You arent running the latest version” – which might be true, but many times, we would be running version 1.3.2 for example that we downloaded two days ago, and then they release 1.3.2.1 the day after we downloaded 1.3.2 – this is a cop out in saying that its on our end, when in reality it is just buggy software that has releases every other day to fix bugs. I dont know if there is any other competing product in the market right now though, so they kind of have it locked. You can use Microsoft’s ASP.Net Session provider, but that is limited when in a farm scenario. Using MSSQL for your sessions has performance issues. I have heard that ex-microsofties tell people to just roll their own, but that seems too much, especially in a small shop. Hopefully ScaleOut gets more stable, because it could be a good product, if it just didn’t cause issues 🙂

Categories
Product Reviews

Veign Pixeur Tool

ok, im blogging this because on every pc I install, I always install this tool but can never find the homepage. This is the coolest little color picker for windows, I use it when I want to hack colors 🙂
http://www.veign.com/download_app.asp?app=107

Categories
Life Product Reviews

Ipod – Day 2

well, I finally got all my music copied over. I also figured out, that if you want to charge your ipod and listen to music at the same time (without itunes installed) – in my computer, find your Ipod, and eject. Then you can listen to music while it charges – cool 🙂

Categories
Life Product Reviews

Ipod

At work, I moved to a tempoary building until construction on our new building is completed, and we are running over a wifi bridge. Since I can’t stream music anymore, I needed to get something – so i picked up a 60 GB ipod. Im not using Itunes though, using MediaMonkey instead, didnt even have to install Itunes – pretty slick. Its a video ipod, so i will have to check that out, and since I have roughly over 40 GB of music, I have some room to spare, for now 🙂

Categories
Product Reviews

mp3tunes.com

so, I signed up for mp3tunes.com. Upload all my music online, and be able to get to it from anywhere. 40 dollars a year. Im in the process of uploading, have been for 2 days now. Im on the “B”‘s 🙂 ….

Once I get it all up there, it will be sweet. I like it already, and if my drive on my music server crashes, no biggie 🙂

Categories
Product Reviews

Ask.com Maps

I’d have to say that I am impressed with ask.com’s new mapping features. The imagery for Waite Park and St. Cloud area is better than google maps and local.live.com, or any I have seen so far. You can actually get somewhat close with satellite view and it isnt blurry!

Categories
Product Reviews

4Flix – DRMLess Videos

If you dont want to get tied down to DRM with videos with Google/Yahoo/Itunes video (like with music – MSN Music, Napster, Itunes, etc) – check out this site. 4Flix is DRM less video!! I downloaded a free movie just to test it, and it works, I think this is my new allofmp3, but for video 🙂

Categories
Product Reviews

Hauppauge WinTV

I purchased a Hauppauge WinTV 1.5 PVR card recently. What a cool device. First off, I can watch tv down in the corner of my desktop while doing other things. I can record shows directly to my computer. I can use MSN remote record to record a show that I might want to see but I am not at home. I can use orb to stream the recorded shows over the net to anywhere, or even stream live TV. This week I have been streaming MSNBC and just minimizing it, listening to it over the headphones instead of music. It is just so cool, being able to be connected to your media all the time. With Media Center Edition, Orb, a TV Tuner Card and TV Recorder Card you are all set. Add in your music collection, dvd’s and then downloaded movies, you are all set. The only thing missing is the abilty to remotely play your video games!

Categories
Product Reviews

NewsGator 2.5 Upgrade – bad!

Ok, so I get an email from NewsGator, saying I can upgrade to 2.5 from 2.0 for free, so I go for it, install it, and now it doesn’t work. They say it is because I have .NET Beta 2 installed (I have the 1.1 and 1.0 installed also). They say no fix until the end of the week.

Did they not test the release? I can’t believe they didn’t see any issues before they released it to the public.

I am kind of peeved about it as now I don’t have NewsGator on my laptop at home.

Update: after many days of fiddling with newsgator support I have decided to install version 2.0. So I install it and it works great. I am waiting to see if any new version they have doesn’t have issues. This was one of the worst upgrades I have ever dealt with!

Categories
Product Reviews

Blue Frog Broadband

New wireless internet provider for the Central MN area. Check it out. It competes with Clearwire and Cityscape.

Blue Frog Broadband