Category: Product Reviews

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Product Reviews

T-Mobile Dash $49.99 For Developers

Found this from a blog yesterday, you can get a T-Mobile Dash smartphone for $49.99 from here

“Select “Save on the latest devices from T-Mobile” in the next page select “Click Here for Discounts” then “View Products” and last “Handhelds and PDAs”

The $49.99 is only for new activations, does not include activation fee, and only requires a one year commitment, which is pretty good. The better news is that you will be able to upgrade it to Windows Mobile 6 via a sofwtare download soon.”

I already signed up for one, hopeully I get it by the end of the week. It never hurts to try something new.

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Product Reviews

Amazon Unbox

So last night I decided to try Amazon Unbox Movie downloads. I read about it over at Fransen’s blog, where is using the Tivo feature. I tried “A Scanner Darkly“.

What is cool is, I use my Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender (I’m running Vista Ultimate). The Unbox video (even though DRM’d) played through the extender. Pretty sweet, exactly what I wanted. The one downer is it won’t play until fully downloaded, whereas if you use the unbox client on the pc, you can start playing it like 2 minutes after it starts downloading. They have a web load feature where you can order a movie or TV show from a remote pc and your PC at home will start downloading it, so it can be ready when you get home. That will probably be the next thing I try.

Still looking for the ultimate combination where I dont have to buy cable service, but still can get all the media I want and watch it on my TV. The quest continues, but for sure Amazon Unbox is another tool added to the belt.

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Product Reviews

Windows Media Player 11 – Video Support

I really like Windows Media Player for the music library features, organizing, rating, etc. In Vista, the Photo Gallery takes care of pictures well, and videos too (tagging) – gotta love it, the photo gallery handles the videos. But the Video organization in Windows Media Player is, lacking.

When you are in music, you can organize by Album, Artist, Genre, etc. Video just has Actor. I have like 250 music videos, and organizing them becomes a pain. One other thing that is just missing in my opinon is, video preview when you are in the library view. With a song, you don’t need this obivously, you just listen. But a video, you can’t see it unless you goto the “Now Playing” tab. So you end up switch back and forth just to organize, quite a headache.

Maybe as I use it more, I will uncover an easier way to organize all my media, photos, music and videos. A “de-duping” feature for music would be great. That is one thing Itunes has that WMP is lacking.
With 80+ gb of music, organizing becomes a part time job 🙂

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Product Reviews

Futuristic Alien Mouthwash

Got an email from ThinkGeek for a cool faucet attachment. It will make your water out of the spout blue or red depending on the temperature of the water. How cool is that?

I think I might get one, thing is, when the lights are off, I would want the water running all the time just so I could see the coolness 🙂

 

2117ab7.jpg

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Life Product Reviews

Microsoft Windows Movie Maker: I'm the next Steven Spielberg – "Star Wipe!"

So, I have a ton of pictures that I take with my Sprint Pocket PC 6700. I decided to take some and make probably the most basic movie, slideshow with some music. Works pretty well. You can just import the pics, import the music, say “AutoMovie” and then edit the beginning and ending credits.

The transitions are added automagically and it actually looks pretty good. Reminds of the time Homer tries to make a dating video for Flanders

Lisa: OK, I finished editing the gardening sequence. . .
Homer: OK, from here we star wipe to a glamour shot of Flanders paying his bills, then we star wipe to Flanders brushing his teeth
. . .
Lisa: Dad, there are other wipes besides star wipes. . .
Homer: Why eat hamburger when you can have steak?
Lisa: I’m taking my name off this thing.

Homer Simpson - Star Wipe

Anyways, you can publish out different formats (well, not different formats – just WMV from what I see) , but publish out different sizes (email, your computer, etc) which just makes the quality better or worse depending on size.

Might next gadget just might have to be a digital video camera. It’s only the next logical step. 🙂

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Product Reviews

My Own "Geek TV"

Well, I usually watch videos from channel9 or other tech videos online. I usually download them and try to watch them on my machine when I have time. Tonight, I had an idea.

Get the video in my Public/Video folder on Vista Ultimate. Watch it through my TV using Xbox 360 as the extender.

Right now I’m watching, “Steve Teixeira and Bill Dunlap: Visual C++ Today and Tomorrow” on my TV in my living room, and it looks/sounds great. Here is a challenge the the IT guys reading my blog:

Lets set this up on the TV above the fridge.

Set up a share to dump tech vidcasts to, and then have them play non stop in the break room.

With this new setup now, Netflix, and getting shows off the internet, I’m not sure I need cable anymore 🙂

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Product Reviews

FeedDemon is cool!

FeedDemon – no, its not the devil 🙂

I have been reading RSS feeds for some time now, probably 2003-2004, I started off with SharpReader, then moved to RSSBandit, then I tried out NewsGator. NewsGator had/has a plugin for Outlook, and before Outlook 2007 this was cool, I used it for awhile. I noticed though that I wasn’t getting as much out of it as I was from using NewsGator online. The one cool thing about NewsGator is that is more of a feed storage engine than anything. I can use the Media Center plugin to read feeds there, there is some mobile stuff, and I can goto any computer or use any program that supports the NewsGator API and my feeds OPML sync across all clients.

I have also tried BlogLines but just never thought it was user friendly enough. I also tried Outlook 2007 for about 10 minutes and knew right away I would be back like the NewsGator plugin for Outlook.

So, a while back, NewsGator aquired FeedDemon, and in it’s early form, it was kind of so-so. They recently upgraded it and you can get it here. I downloaded it a couple weeks ago, and wow – what a great tool.

I subscribe to between 350-400 feeds at any given time, and it gets to be a lot, and FeedDemon really helps me sort through the crap, and read feeds faster. The cool things are Watches and News Bin. I can set up a search on keywords and it will find them so I can read those faster, also, I can quickly save a post to a News Bin and go back to it later. It also integrates with IE (which is OK, I use Firefox all the time, but with IE7 at least I feel somewhat secure), and there are tabs within the app itself which makes life easier.

I will say, that there are some features that I think could be added .For one, an easier way to mark pages read, especially at the bottom of a page, and better emailing integration. There is a cool feature that will analyze your feeds and make a “front page” that shows the most popular posts. I wish I could run this on more than just all my feeds, maybe run this on a sub folder, etc.

In any event, if you read a lot of RSS Feeds, I would recommend checking out FeedDemon. It is a 30 day free trial, and $30 after that, which I am gladly going to fork over 🙂

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Product Reviews

Netflix

So, I signed up for Netflix this week. Started off with the 3rd season of 24. I really like the rating and social features of the site.

If you have a Netflix account and want to be my friend, here is the link

http://www.netflix.com/BeMyFriend/PjsorfqHmzu5xXFVQK5I

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Product Reviews

View Hard Disk Usage

A good tool to view files on your hard disk and see where you are using up space – SequoiaView. Gives a graphical representation of where files are and how big they are. Most other apps you find are going to be shareware or cost 20-30$. Using this tool I have found things I have forgotten about that were taking up GB’s on my hard drive, and made it easy, I didn’t have to search around in every folder. Pretty good util.

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Product Reviews

When does 687,300 = 1 Million?

When Sony says it does. They are losing, and they know it. If you know me, you know I despise Sony. DRM/Rootkit? No problem! Every product we make only work good with other products we make and nothing else? Heck yeah! The only way I will ever buy a Sony product again is if I get it for free or win it, which then I guess I won’t be really buying it.