Do You Have a Floppy?

I know I don't, but I tend to click it accidentally in Windows Explorer sometimes and it takes a few seconds to respond (which irritates me every time I do it!). So, as always, with a little digging, I found this tidbit that should hide it forever!

1) Open the registry editor by typing regedit in the Run Window.

2) Goto the following key. If it doesn’t exist, create it.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

3) Create (or modify) a 32-bit DWORD key named NoDrives & assign it a value of 1.

That's it!

Open Source Software

I am a big fan of software in the Open Source community. I have contributed to projects (albeit minimally) in the past and have a few projects out there that I would love to one day make "official" and public for the world. Aside from the obvious (free!), I find that most Open Source projects are far more agile and forward thinking then their commercial entities. I could discuss this for hours... and seeing that my personal livelihood rests upon the sale of the commercial software that I design/write/implement/support, I can certainly understand the many arguments against it. There is a fine balance. That said, here is a list of some of the applications I use on a daily basis that I believe have a wonderful place in the world of technology.

FireFox
Internet Explorer alternative
Web Browser. Far more "standards" compliant then IE (which is a plus for a any web developer) and utilizes an amazing plug-in architecture that allows anyone to create new functionality very quickly.

OpenOffice
Microsoft Office alternative
Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation editor(s). I cannot express in words my hatred for MS Office (mostly Outlook). This one is a no brainer for me and you can even open/save documents in MS Office format for all those professional users out there who have no choice!

VLC
Windows Media Player alternative
Media player that can handle almost anything you throw at it without the need of annoying "codec packs".

Handbrake
Video conversion utility. I use it mostly to convert DVDs and TV shows to iPod compatible format so I can catch up while I travel.

GIMP
Adobe Photoshop alternative
Image editing software. Not as feature rich as Photoshop, but if you are like me, you use about 0.001% of the functionality of Photoshop anyway.

uTorrent
Torrent Management. By far the most feature rich torrent software I have found. Right now I use it mostly to download TV shows that I miss. Hopefully, someday, more commercial entities will use the torrent idea in practice (Windows 7 Beta?).

mRemote
Remote Desktop Connection alternative
Remote control viewer that puts all open windows in a tabbed interface and saves the connection information. It does far more, like connect using different protocols (Citrix, VNC, etc...), but mostly I just want the tabs. This software may be going commercial very soon, I am not sure. It's a shame.

Digsby
MSN Messenger, AOL, ICQ, etc... alternative
A multi-protocol IM client. If you are like me, you have accounts with all the big guys (ICQ, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, GTalk, etc...). This allows you to communicate with all of them in one tidy window. Also connects to Facebook, MySpace, etc... Really a great piece of software.

Filezilla
FTP client software that allows you to save connections, establish secure FTP connections, resume interupted downloads, etc, etc, etc... The gold standard in FTP clients these days.

** I am just going to throw out there that a lot of the applications I discuss above are "donationware" meaning that they are free, but accept donations to help with the high cost of writing and maintaining software. If you can afford to give anything at all to the creators of Open Source software that you love, anything will help. Please support these developers!

Blackberry Time?

I just noticed that the time on my Storm was off by about 4 minutes. I dug around and found that in Options -> Date/Time you can set the time source to be either "Blackberry" or "Network". I want to sync with the towers, but I know that the blackberry (as with most PDAs) cannot sync timezones, so I went digging for more info.

I ran across this. Interesting.

Vista + WMP11 + NAS + Xbox 360

Holy shit! I don't want to be overly optimistic here, but I believe I have found a working solution to this problem. It is working right now, but I am fearful that it will somehow break spontaneously. Pray for me children...

What's going on? Well, I have a XBox 360 that I connect to my main machine via the WMP11 sharing services so I can watch videos. Works great and plays MP4, DIVX, etc... unlike the Windows Media Extender functionality. It is clean. I love it. So, I have a LOT of video since I have started encoding my DVD collection. Because of this, I am running out of drive space and want to keep stuff like that off my main machine anyway. So, I have a NAS device (D-Link DNS-323) running in a RAID 1 (mirroring) configuration. No problem, just map it as a drive in Vista, add it to the WMP11 "library" and bingo, watch everything from there on my Xbox 360. Wrong! I have fought with this forever, but today, I may have found the answer.

So, there are two things that I had to do to make this happen.

First, I had to change the Logon of the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service to use an account that has access to the NAS. Makes sense. But that alone did not do the trick.

Next, In the key HLKM/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/MediaPlayer/Preferences/HME, I had to add a DWORD called EnableRemoteContentSharing and set the value to 1.

I restarted the service, turned on the XBox and BAM, I saw the Video folder I had shared from my NAS. While holding my breath, I started up Kung Fu Panda (better then you would expect) and it played! Yay!!!! Hopefully this problem is now resolved. If so, I will be getting a couple of HUGE drives for that NAS asap. If not, I will scream and yell and report back to you all via this blog. Damn, I hope it works!

I search high and low for this answer, but to give credit where it is due, I found the final pieces that put it all together for me in this article.

---

UPDATE 1: As of this morning, it is still working, but I have noticed that WMP's library (which the XBox 360 uses to generate its list of available videos) did not update automatically. I had to refresh it from my PC. I am not sure if this was a one time thing, or will be an ongoing problem. I will keep a close eye on it.

Keeping Up!

I am a big fan of reading news via RSS feeds. Have been for a long time. Because of that and also because I move around a lot and therefore like to manage a lot of things online, I am a huge advocate of Google Reader. If you read a lot of feeds, you should check it out.

I find that I constantly add more feeds to the list that I watch. One day it will get out of control. I thought I would share with you the things that I follow on a daily basis. It ranges from world news to technology to programming, sports and even cooking. A little bit of everything!

Simply Recipes Food and Cooking Blog
.NET Tip of The Day
Ars Technica
ASP.NET Daily Articles
ATI Catalyst
Atlanta Braves
BlackBerry Cool
digg
DotNetKicks.com
Engadget
Engadget Mobile
Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets News
Gizmodo
Hacking NetFlix
HandBrake
Jungle Disk
Lifehacker
Maximum PC all RSS Feed
MoDaCo
msmobiles
Official Gmail Blog
Qusers
Ramblinwreck
RIMarkable
Rob Conery
SaintsReport
Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen
ScottGu's Blog
Slashdot
TechCrunch
White House.gov
xkcd.com

Embedding iTunes Artwork into MP3s

I have a HUGE library of music that I manage with iTunes right now. This goes back to my college days at Georgia Tech when a buddy came back from working one summer in 1997 and showed us that we could rip our CDs to something more portable then that god awful Real format. Anyway, since then, I have collected, tweaked, manicured and loved my music collection and that is a process that will probably never end.

I am an iPod user and iTunes just works, even though it can be a little slow with that xml backend (can anyone say SqLite?). One problem I have is that after my hours, days, hell months, of painstaking work to make sure that every single file in my library has album art, I would really like to have all that art embedded into the actual MP3 files. I really don't care that it will take up extra storage space, I just want to have that artwork show up on whatever device or in whatever application I am using!

Because I already have it all put together perfectly within iTunes, I obviously have been trying to find something that will pull that artwork and embed it automatically. While I still have not found the perfect way to do this, I did run across a piece of open source software called iTSfv. It seems to work, but in a manual sort of way. It also has about a million more features then I would ever need, but it does succesfully take the "folder.jpg" that iTunes references and embeds it in each and every MP3 file selected. Better then nothing, but the search continues!

Vista Sidebar

I am actually a big fan of the sidebar. I loved the Yahoo Widget Engine in XP (formerly Konfobulator), but the simplicity of the sidebar in a little 200px window on your screen is wonderful to me.

Here is a list of the gadgets that I use:

ProWeather
I want to see the current weather and stuff and this thing tells you EVERYTHING!

Analog Clock (built in)

Calendar (built in)

All CPU Meter
This one measures multiple cores which is nice to see.

Hard Drive Monitor
It's nice to see what kind of space you get left!

iTunes Controller
Because I usually have iTunes minimized and am writing code when I get a phone call. It is easier to just hit pause from this gadget which is always visible then to dig around for the iTunes window, bring it up, hit pause, etc...

MP4 and Xbox 360

For a while now I have been wanting to digitize some of my DVD library to 1) make it more portable and 2) so I can stream it to my XBox 360. After much trial and error I have found that the best way to accomplish both of these task is to use Handbrake on the XBox 360 preset to create an MP4.

The reason for this post is not really to talk about the encoding process, but to discuss the solution to a minor inconvenience I have been struggling with for a while. Namely, the fact that the XBox 360 cannot recognize files with the .mp4 file extension. Previously, I had to rename the file to .avi for the XBox 360 to see it, even though it was fully compatible. A minor inconvenience, but annoying nonetheless.

Last night, I ran across this article which describes the process necessary to make WMP11 and in turn the XBox 360 recognize the .mp4 file extension. I tested it out and after a reboot, it has worked like a charm!

Blackberry Storm

In late November, I upgraded my "Zak Morris"-esque Blackberry 7130e to the new Blackberry Storm. Personally, I think the only thing not to like about this phone is the touchscreen keyboard (which is far superior to the iPhone keyboard if you ask me). At this point, I have learned how to use it pretty well and love everything else about the phone. The upgraded Blackberry OS is amazing!

Here are some key features that make this phone pretty amazing.

Application Store
Well, there is nothing great about it now, but Apple led the way, so if RIM can make their store 1/10th of what Apple's is, it will be a huge hit.

GPS
I do not pay for the Verizon VZNavigator stuff, but Verizon has unlocked the GPS for use with other applications on the phone. As of right now, it works with the included Blackberry Maps and also with the camera (geotagging photos is pretty hot stuff if you ask me). It does not yet work with Google Maps, but I am sure it will in the future. Google is too good to let that pass.

Camera
3.2MP, motion stabilization, intelligent flash, auto-focus and did I mention geotagging? I am in no way a photographer, but for snapping a couple of photos to commemorate a stop at the "Howling Cactus" during a random road trip through rural New Mexico... it is a masterpiece. You can also upload the photos to Flickr or Facebook with just a few clicks.

VyMail
I'd be happy to pay the $3/month to Verizon for Visual Voicemail if there was not already a much better, free alternative. I already used YouMail for all of my voicemail because it sent MP3s to my email that I could archive, forward, etc... It was just somewhat inconvenient to listen to it on the phone. Well, thanks to Joe Krill for putting together this amazing app.

WeatherBug
Not only is this a great app to give you weather information right on your phone... it also gives you the current temperature and weather as a part of the icon on the home screen. On top of that, it uses the built in GPS and changes the city accordingly if you are traveling. Pretty amazing, especially for free software!

Or course this phone is not without its problems.
The accelerometer is just too slow, period. Verizon has already released one firmware update that has helped, but it is still a problem. Also, there is an unofficial firmware available that is supposed to help even more, but I have no given it a shot just yet. I have faith that Verizon will fix this.

The image associated with a contact is just too small when shown on incoming calls.

And finally, answering a call can be just a little flakey.

I am very hopeful that all of this will get fixed, in short order too, but at this point I definitely think the pros far outweigh the cons for me.

Building a New Computer

Over the past year I have been pouring over tech magazine, podcasts and blogs to come up with the best possible computer specs to fit my needs. Luckily, I stalled long enough for the release of Intel's Core i7 processor. I have just finished the build and could not be happier. Here is a quick rundown of the specs...

CPU
  Intel Core i7 920, 2.66GHz

Motherboard
  Asus P6T Deluxe

Memory
  6GB (3x2GB) Corsair DDR3

Graphics
  Visiontek Radeon 4850, 512MB

Enclosure
  NZXT Tempest

Power
  PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W

Optical
I recycled what I already had. A nice (superfast) Lite-on 52x, IDE DVD-ROM drive and a pretty standard 16x, IDE DVD+/-RW drive. I had used IDE/SATA adapters for the optical drives and everything seems to be working fine so far.

Storage
I also recycled my storage (Two 120GB, 7200RPM, SATA hard drives), but have plans for an upgrade in the next couple of months. I use a D-Link DNS-323 with two 500GB, 7200RPM, SATA hard drives in it as my main storage right now. I am planning on one of two scenarios for the storage upgrade.

1. If Seagate can get the kinks worked out of their 1.5TB, 7200RPM, SATA, $130 drives (or a suitable alternative pops up), I would consider grabbing two of them and throwing them into the NAS device. That would free up the two 500GB drives to either stripe or mirror in my main computer.
2. Wait for the release of Western Digital's 2TB, 7200RPM, SATA, "green" drives and just throw them in my main computer mirrored. This would allow me to get rid of the NAS device all together.

I am not sure what I am going to do just yet, but it will probably one of those two options.

Operating System
Once the machine was built, I immediately threw Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on there (64-bit to take advantage of the extra RAM). After I get it up and running and assured myself that the hardware configuration was stable, I went straight to Windows 7 Beta! I will admit that I was impressed with a lot of the changes in Windows 7 and look forward to its release (hopefully in 2009), but the Beta was not ready to be my full time OS, so I am back to Vista.