Archive for the ‘HDTV’ Category

It’s been awhile since I last looked at Launchy, the open source application launcher for Windows. With this application, you use keyboard shortcuts to launch applications, files, folders, bookmarks and more with just a few keystrokes. Once installed, it hides in your system tray waiting for its next command. When you’re ready, you hit “Alt + Spacebar” to display the input window. Then you can just start typing what you want. Launchy finds it.

For users of Windows XP, this app has clear benefits. However, later versions of Windows offer a similar feature just by using the “Search” box in the Start Menu. Still, some Launchy enthusiasts prefer the app to the native functionality and, well, that’s the great thing about Windows – you can tweak away by installing alternative programs like this. 

Just recently, the developer released the next edition of this application – the Launchy 2.5 Beta. This version offers the following changes:

• Faster performance
• Icons displayed correctly
• Environment variables updated correctly when system changes
• Controly includes more items
• New shortcut keys
• New controls:
o Shift+tab or Shift+bkspc deletes previous tab
o Shift+Ctrl+Enter launches in elevated mode (Vista and Win7)
o Down arrow shows history (when there is no current search text)
• Default skin built into executable in case no other skin is found
• Down arrow
• Launchy now has an icon in the system tray
• Skins are simplified and easier to create

The executable is here. As with any beta software, the usual caveats apply. Install at your own risk. But this sounds like a good update to a pretty great program. Can’t wait to check it out!

New Beta of Launchy Arrives | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

Have you wished that Windows had an App store that was as easy the iTunes App store?  Then You will love AllMyApps.

Allmyapps makes software installation a breeze. No matter how many applications you need, 1 click is all you need to have all your favorite applications installed on your PC.

Allmyapps also keeps your applications safe! Would you need to reinstall your system, Allmyapps takes care of reinstalling all your favorite applications in the blink of an eye.

Allmyapps – Application Store for Windows XP, Vista and Seven to find and install the best applications

Gizmo had a great roundup of free software. 

Cleanup & Tuning File Cleaning, Memory Optimizer, System Tune-Up and more…	Desktop & GUI File Manager, Program Launcher, Start Menu, Tray Icons and more…	Disk & File Tools Backup, Restore, Encryption, Synchro-nization and more…
Educational There is always something to learn…	Games Computer games, chess and other diversions.	Home & Office Office Suites, Finance, Project, Spell-Checker, PIM and more…
Image View & Edit Bitmap, Vector, HDR, Viewer, Photo Organizer and more…	Internet & eMail Browser, eMail, IM, Download, Parental Filter and more…	Linux Our Linux section with tips and software…
Multimedia Audio/Video Edit, Ripper, Burner, Online TV and more…	Networking FTP, SSH, Remote Access, BitTorrent and more…	Programming Editors, Binary Extraction, Search & Replace and more…
Lookup & Cataloging CD, DVD, File and Software Cataloging and more…	Security Anti Virus, Adware, Firewall, Intrusion Prevention and more…	System Info Disk, RAM, Memory, Down/Up, WiFi Finder and more…
System Tools Registry, Time, Vista Tweaks, Font Manager and more…	Website & Server New! Web scripts and server software…	Video Tutorials Watch how things are done…

Gizmo’s Freeware Reviews

Windows: Booting your computer up in the morning is one of the most tedious parts of starting your computer use for the day. What if you could gain the benefits of a reboot and still start quickly out of a hiberation?

The premise of Boot Snooze is that it takes less time to pull the computer from standby or hibernation mode than to do a full reboot, but rebooting a computer is necessary and sometimes beneficial. With Boot Snooze you shut down your computer, performing a full reboot, and then Boot Snooze puts it back into hibernation or standby mode.

You could obviously do this manually by rebooting your computer every night and then hibernating it immediately after it finished up the startup routines, but that would negate the time saving benefit of having Boot Snooze do it for you and leaving your computer fresh and ready to use in the morning without the down time of booting up.

Boot Snooze is freeware, Windows only. Have a favorite tool of your own for speeding up boot times or just helping you to spend less time waiting for your computer to do things? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Boot Snooze Reboots and Hibernates Your Computer for Faster Startup Time – saving time – Lifehacker

If you are like me, you love Pandora. My problem was that I would have 10 brewers open with 20 tabs each.  I would often close the browser that was playing my music.  Now Pandora One is a pay service, for 36 dollars a month, that comes with a great Adobe Air app, but I did not want a pay service.  Yes, Pandora One comes at a high bit rate, but regular Pandora sounds great.  I Binged and found OpenPandora. OpenPandora is an open source windows desktop application that exposes Pandora music discovery service.  It does every thing I want, without the pay service. 

Features

• Integration with Last.fm, Microsoft Messenger, Xfire and Skype
• Hide to tray and popup tray notification window with full info
• Full control from tray icon
• Control with multimedia keyboard and global shortcuts
• Support for Logitech G15 keyboard
• Control with Wiimote
• Lyrics
• more …

* Requires Internet Explorer 5.5 (or later) and .NET Framework 1.1

OpenPandora Home

Office Casual: Why Monster’s resume templates are easy

Now you can use and submit a resume template designed by Monster.com without leaving your Word program. Doug Thomas shows you Monster’s Easy Submit Resumes.

Office Casual: Why Monster’s resume templates are easy | Tina Wood | Channel 10

 You may remember seeing the Microsoft Research project Kodu for Xbox last year. The game allows programming novices to develop robust games on the Xbox and control interactions between the characters. Now the PC version is available in beta form which is great news as most schools don’t have Xbox 360’s.
With Kodu, the idea is to give kids a way to accomplish something they didn’t think they would be able to do while strengthening their design, math, and problem-solving skills. It was created as Matthew MacLaurin, director of Future Social Experiences Lab, watched his then three year old daughter interact with a computer. Realizing there was a disconnect between the passive experience she was having and the coding that went into applications, MacLaurin began the project. Kodu is now used in more than 60 educational institutions around the world including a pilot program across 26 schools in Victoria, Australia. You can download Kodu for PC and get started here.

Kodu Now Available for PC | Larry Larsen | Channel 10

What do David Allen, Dwight Eisenhower and Stephen Covey have in common? Apart from believing in the ‘time as a virtue’ maxim, and practicing it, I can’t think of anything else. It turns out that all three are gurus of time management (or task management) theories. All three (and some more) of their time management ideas find a place in the free personal productivity application called TimeGT.

The thing about time or task management apps is that there’s no “one size fits all” (thus TimeGT also might not be the final solution you are looking for). We all have our own foibles and like to see them accommodated in the solutions offered to us. Perhaps this see-saw of human nature gets mirrored in the numerous ‘get things done’ theories that are propounded, and by extension in the web or desktop apps that spring up.

My own confusion has seen me try out quite a few, keep some and discard some more. The strange thing is that we all think that there’s something better around the corner that can help with personal productivity. If you have yet to turn the corner, try out the posts we have covered on GTD and time management in the past. If you are beyond those and are looking for another one, then let’s head for TimeGT.

TimeGT is a personal task management desktop client for Windows, Mac and Linux. It comes in two favors – Rabbit (the free one) and Hedgehog (the paid version).

The paid version that’s called Hedgehog comes with online server backup features and gives the user some say in adding new features. Otherwise, both the versions are exactly the same. It is on the Rabbit we will focus on for now. So, let’s pull the rabbit out of the hat and see how it helps us with our personal productivity.

TimeGT can be installed using the 51MB sized Windows installer which also includes Java runtimes. As I have Java already running in my machine, I opted for the more ‘portable’ 19MB zipped version. I can run this without an install straight from its unpacked folder. The latter zipped version is also multi-platform.

Even for the free version, a TimeGT account needs to be created. That done, you can log into the app and create some projects for your life. TimeGT follows David Allen’s GTD workflow and that’s apparent from the interface. It also puts in some additions from other theories.

Projects are what take more than one step to complete. Think of them as major areas of life that can be further drilled down to as many levels as possible.

Each project has individual tasks and tasks in turn need some actions to move it towards completion. The middle panel shows how each task can be organized. The Inbox is the dump for all your tasks in each project. There are three actions you can perform on a task and organize it – you can do it right now (Next Action), you can delay it for some time (Waiting For) or you can defer it altogether (Someday/Maybe).

Completed tasks can be moved away from sight into a separate area. Each task can be assigned a status like Completed or set a priority like In Progress, Important or Urgent. The most urgent ones move to the top, to be done in a top to bottom sequence. The Horizon slider on top also helps to review all your tasks in one go. Drag it around and see which tasks need action according to the time periods.

The right click menu gives you all the commands in a trice.

You can describe a task, add Notes and give it a time horizon using the start and due dates on the Task Details panel.

When you have a lot of tasks Tags help to keep them organized. Tags also help as a one touch filter.

It’s also easy to add tasks on the fly. TimeGT can be kept minimized in the System Tray. You can add tasks with a right click on the little icon. These tasks get dumped into the Inbox and can be organized later.

Reviewing It All

Did I get my share of stress free personal productivity? To a certain extent, yes because TimeGT makes it easy to dump my tasks into it. It also helped me to move the tasks around and organize it in context. What I liked about it was the ease of arranging our life areas into projects and the prioritization of tasks that come under it.

But it is also not perfect. A calendar view of how my month is panning out also would have been nice. That’s there in the paid version which allows sync with Google Calendar. What’s missing is a dedicated help file. Newbie’s will have to play around with it a bit. To get a hang of it though, you can watch a screencast at the site

Some More GTD & Personal Productivity With TimeGT

Windows: What’s the most popular and powerful editor on Windows among text aficianados? Notepad++, by a hefty margin. Want something a smidge less menu-rich and, well, different? Notepad GNU is a very clever, open source alternative.

Notepad GNU has a lot to recommend on its own, including optional background transparency, loads of HTML and other code-minded plug-ins, a menu that can quickly send a file to a browser or other app (even Notepad++), and all that text tweaking tools you need without the Office integration nonsense you don’t. It doesn’t offer everything that Notepad++ does, but that’s kind of the point—it’s a different layout and setup, and one newcomers might find pretty useful.

The one drawback, for English speaking users at least, is the hit-and-miss translation of some of Notepad GNU’s more obscure features. You’ll be able to grope your way around in the linguistic dark, most likely, but if you speak Russian and like the app, by all means—offer to help with the translation.

Notepad GNU is a free download for Windows systems only. It comes packaged in a RAR container, oddly enough—you can easily unpack it for free using 7-Zip.

Notepad GNU [via Download Squad]

Notepad GNU Boosts Basic Text Editing on Windows – Text editor – Lifehacker

The newest HD player from Itoos, the M6HD is looking a lot better than its brother the iToos M8. But don’t be fooled by its sleek design as the iToos M6HD is officially a $58 PMP. Itoos swapped the full 1080p HD support on the M8 pulling the video support down to a 1360 x 768 pixel resolution. It’s still HD and it will still play a host of video formats (H.264, MKV, VOB, DAT, RM/RMVB, AVI). The 4.3-inch TFT LCD screen gives you 16 million colors. For the full 720p experience you can plug it to a bigger LCD screen via the HDMI out. It features FM radio and a remote control. Ownta has the model available for $86.75 including shipping.

For more photos, Akihabaranews has them here.

[store via akihabaranews]

iToos M6HD PMP, A Cheaper 1080i Player You Cannot Find | PMP Today

If your like me, your ready to cut the cable, and ditch your local cable provider.  Many cable providers have used the Digital Transition as an opportunity to screw over the consumer, so it is time to move ditch cable and turn to the sky. 

Between IP sources of TV and over the air sources the amount of free content is mind boggling. With and HDTV and the correct antenna, you can be watch higher resolution content for free than you are paying for now.  Combine that with a HD Tivo or even better a Windows 7 Media Center, you will have access to tons of free over the air and the internet for free.  The cost savings alone will justify the purchase of the antenna and Windows 7 PC. 

To get you started check out this great site called AntennaWeb.Org

AntennaWeb

Windows only: Free application Hulu Desktop Integration brings Hulu’s remote-friendly desktop app to your Windows Media Center.

Whether or not you’re a fan of Windows operating systems, there’s no denying that Windows has one of the best media center apps available (especially if you want to turn your PC into a media center powerhouse on the cheap). It’s got its problems (TV recordings are encoded in an absolutely irritating DRMed file format), but it ships with Windows (so in a sense is free) and it can extend to common hardware like the Xbox 360 with aplomb (see the media center powerhouse link above).

Now that sites like Hulu have become a viable destination for free TV, Hulu integration seems only natural, and Hulu Desktop Integration makes it simple for users to jump between Windows 7 Media Center and Hulu Desktop.

Hulu Desktop Integration Brings Hulu to Windows 7 Media Center – Hulu – Lifehacker

There are apparently an awful, awful lot of people out there with shoe boxes full of spare SATA drives. Somebody is buying all these new HDD docks, and while most surpass the previous editions by adding support for another obscure format of memory card, Brando’s latest seems like an actually useful update, adding HDMI and component ports through which it can output video at either 1080i or the always popular 576p. Standard resolutions may not be its strong point, and sadly there’s no mention of which video codecs it can unravel, but it does at least support the major flavors of audio files (MP3, WMA, AAC, etc.) and of course will read memory cards and thumb drives to boot. No, a bare drive may not look particularly appealing while rattling away on your entertainment center, and at $69 you’re not far from the price of a Windows Media extender or the like, but don’t let such practical concerns dissuade you from adding this unique focal point to your home theater.

Brando’s latest HDD dock adds HDMI into the mix

On Thursday, Hulu announced  a new desktop software program for watching videos on your PC without a web browser. The software, simply called Hulu Desktop, was designed to operate with Windows Media Center remote controls. So now, instead of having to choose from a ton of add-ins in Media Center, you can use the official software provided by Hulu themselves to see videos on your desktop.

Unfortunately, what the Hulu site doesn’t explain is how to fully integrate their software with Media Center so you can watch Hulu on Media Center extenders, like the Xbox, which would allow you to watch Hulu on your TV. Fortunately for us, the folks over at Missing Remote have put together a guide on how to add Hulu Desktop to Media Center as a shortcut from the main screen. This isn’t the only way to get this done, but at least it’s well-documented! Thanks guys.

STEPS (via Missing Remote):

Note, the following steps assume you installed into the default Hulu directory, which is C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Local\HuluDesktop. If you changed the directory, simply replace the directories in the ini and xml files.

1. Download the file here: HuluMCE Plugin
2. Unzip the folder into your Hulu directory (which default is C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\HuluDesktop\)
3. The files should result in a HuluMCE folder (C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\HuluDesktop\HuluMCE).
4. IMPORTANT STEP: Browse to the above HuluMCE folder, and Right Click on the HuluMCEreg.xml file and select EDIT
   1. Replace the username "Mike" from the following line with YOUR USERNAME:  imageUrl="C:\Users\Mike\AppData\Local\HuluDesktop\HuluMCE\icon.png"
5. Still in the above folder, right click on the InstallHulu.cmd and select Run as Administrator
6. A dialog box will appear with the message Success
7. Close all your windows, launch Media Center with your remote, and the shortcut for Hulu Desktop will appear under the TV+Movies row, as well as in the Program Library

*NOTE: If you prefer to have the shortcut appear in the TV+Movies row, you will need to edit theHuluMCEreg.xml file (Right click > Edit). On the line which says  <category category="Services\TV"/>, replace TV with Pictures. (eg., <category category="Services\Pictures"/> You can visit the followingMSDN Webpage for a full list of category entrypoints you can launch from.

For more details, check out their blog post.

Integrate the New Hulu Desktop into Media Center | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

A new Zune released later this year: the Zune HD. Besides the “HD” component, which will deliver HD Radio and HD video, the new Zune will also feature an OLED screen with multitouch capabilities.

If you’re unfamiliar with HD Radio, it’s basically terrestrial radio but broadcast in digital instead of analog. A lot of traditional radio stations broadcast simultaneously in HD Radio along with their analog signals. You can see which ones do so in your area at hdradio.com.

The other major HD feature in the new Zune is support for playing back HD video from the Zune to an HDTV. The Zune will connect through an HDMI docking station to hook up to your TV.

Speaking of the big screen, Zune content will also be available on your TV through another platform: the Xbox Live Marketplace. The new Zune-branded service will soon occupy the first slot in the Xbox user interface, taking over the existing video marketplace. However, details on how this integration will work won’t be revealed until the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) next week.

The Zune HD’s OLED screen will be great for watching video with its 16:9 widescreen display (480×272 resolution), especially since OLED delivers richer colors and blacker blacks than an LCD screen.  Even better, the screen will offer multitouch capabilities which can also be used in the new full-screen web browser.

Zune HD Coming this Fall | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10