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Category Archives: Windows

Microsoft Windows: love it or hate it, it’s here to stay!

Something very small causing big problems

Thursday, December 6, 2007

It’s amazing in this increasingly technical world how something so small can cause such big problems. My Thinkpad T61 laptop at work developed a single bad sector in one of it’s 2GB RAM modules (specifically a 6 byte range) which has caused endless random behaviors and blue screens. Funny how a single bad transistor, less than a trillionth of an inch across can cause an entire computing system to careen out of control.

Thankfully Lenovo was quite gracious about it and sent a new stick via 2 day air and I got it installed. Aside from perhaps an overly-aggressive feedback cycle they managed to impress me with their customer service. I just received and installed the RAM module and a quick 10 minute pass of MemTest86 revealed no errors and so far Vista seems much more stable. Here’s hoping that the stability continues - as best as Windows can provide.

Filed in Internet, Reviews, Technology, Windows | Comments (0)

Xbox 360 Chatpad

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Xbox 360 Chatpad

My Xbox 630 Chatpad arrived today in the mail - nifty little device. Barely feels like it will fit on the controller, but with a little force it pops on and feels very much a part of the controller. The key travel is nice, but they are spaced more widely than i usually like. Its lighter than I thought it would be, but does change the balance and feel of the controller quite a bit.

It makes both using the 360 implementation of Windows Live Messenger and the Xbox Live messaging service much easier to use. I wonder how long it will take before shooters and RPG’s start taking advantage of the extra buttons to make weapon switching and action selection easier - I suspect the day of the 360 MMO is drawing near now that both text and voice communication are so easy with the Xbox 360.

“Xbox 360 Chatpad” by sparktography

Filed in Gadgets, Gaming, Reviews, Technology, Windows | Comments (0)

Parallels rocks!

Friday, June 1, 2007

Months after having been given a key to activate Parallels I finally decided to give it a shot. I acquired a copy of Vista and installed it on Marbles, my macbook. I have to say right out of the gate I’m rather impressed! Vista runs decently well in a virtual machine, and I can run Outlook 2007 in coherence mode (where the Vista desktop slides away leaving your Windows applications on OS X desktop alongside the rest of my mac apps) - it’s a very zen experience and will make doing email from home a much more pleasant experience.

Bravo Parallels for the most polished and full feature emulation package I’ve ever seen - from installing Vista automatically for me from the DVD to providing slick OS X to Windows integration and hardware sharing features I’m impressed end to end.

Filed in Apple, Development, Reviews, Software, Technology, Windows | Comments (0)

Connect360

Saturday, October 7, 2006

Connect360-Splash-1

I just found the coolest bridge between my Apple iMac and Microsoft Xbox 360. I found some software called Connect360 from Nullriver Software. It’s a simple preference pane that allows any Mac to share it’s photos in iPhoto and music from iTunes with a 360 seamlessly. It’s now possible for both Windows and Mac’s to communicate with the 360 for living room entertainment.

Installation was a breeze: after opening the zip demo from Nullriver’s website I double clicked on the Connect360.prefpane to install the preference pane. After starting the service I was able to select what I want shared and configure transcoding options for any files that the 360 won’t be able to play natively.

Connect360 prefence pane

I walked into the living room and used my Media Center remote to browse to the media tab on my Xbox 360. My imac showed up and after clicking through an authorization screen I was able to browse my music library and playlists as well as browse through all my photos and albums in iPhoto.

Connect350-Xbox

The interface is snappy, and browsing the photo libraries were response. It even increments play counts and last played dates in iTunes when you play music. I have to say that Microsoft keeping media interaction open to developers is a big win. Connect360 supports MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF and AAC Lossless for audio files, and JPEG, RAW, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF for photos.

Update: With a photo update Connect360 now supports video as well. Check out the Connect360 website for more information.

If you have both a Mac and an Xbox 360 I suggest checking out the free demo. If you like it it’s $20 to unlock the ability to browse your full library rather than 1,000 items that the demo restricts you to.

Sadly for now Connect360 does not support transferring movies or iTunes store purchased content but hopefully that will be released in a future version. While waiting to check out Apple’s upcoming iTV it’s nice to have a good solution for getting my media from my Mac to my living room.

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Filed in Apple, Gadgets, Gaming, Gems from the web, Movies, Music and audio, Photography, Software, Technology, Windows | Comments (0)