This is the first of a series of web videos I’ll be making for friends and family that show how to use software and sites that I find useful.

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

My review

View all my reviews.

Debategraph

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  This could be an awesome tool for doing debates.  I particularly like how you can visualize an argument with this tool.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twitter

Twitter seems to be the latest fad, newest rage, or most up to date touchstone of your technological expertise.  It’s essentially a microblogging service where you leave messages of 140 characters or less to followers.  You also follow others, and people can search and see what everyone is tweeting about as long as it’s not a direct message to another user.  But for all I’ve researched, I can’t find a single person that has given a clear example of how this is anything more than another timedrain.

I dabble in a lot of technology under the premise that I’d like to see how I could use it in the classroom, but I really doubt I could or would use Twitter.  For the past few months I followed a few teachers, websites, and celebrities and infrequently tweeted what I was doing.    When I had questions about how to use diigo, I tweeted my questions and someone from the diigo website tweeted back with links and information to help me.  When I had problems creating my family tree at Geni, someone from Geni tweeted back.  That was pretty useful, however, most of the time I’m skimming over messages about what people are eating and making sure I don’t read spoilers for the latest episode of Biggest Loser before I have a chance to watch it.

I’m following Imogen Heap and it’s a bizarre experience.  I now know that she recently almost ate a caterpillar in some meal, and it is quite fascinating to know about a celebrity’s life in that kind of detail, but I don’t really need to.    If I scare myself and measure out the number of days, hours, and minutes left in my life and then think of how much time I have left to accomplish my goals, why waste time reading nonsensical tweets?

I admit it was very useful when Diigo and Geni responded to my tweets, but I could have just searched their forums or taken a few more seconds to learn their websites.  I definitely don’t need Twitter for that, and I’d welcome anyone who could argue for a use of Twitter that isn’t 95% finding out what other users are eating for dinner that night.

HTPC – Windows 2008 Server Edition

Windows 2008 Server Edition turned out to be a great OS to use to run my MediaPortal installation. I can’t take credit for getting it working. The thread I used explained in very good detail how to get a working installation here.

Why use Windows 2008 Server? I’m cheap. I tried getting Ubuntu working but I had significant problems with getting the appropriate codecs and video tearing issues (more on that later). In the end, I just felt like I was spending too much time trying to learn Ubuntu for a result other than what I wanted. I wanted tv scrapers getting me fanart from thetvdb.com and I wanted something that would easily allow me to install plugins. There were too many issues with setting permissions in Ubuntu and a significantly hampered wireless signal from the ndiswrapper drivers for my wireless card that made Boxee’s internet services useless and the downloading of plugins very frustrating.

So how was Windows 2008 Server edition cheap? It’s free for college students, and it’s apparently free for alumni of Stony Brook University. Microsoft has a program called Dreamspark which makes a few of its developer platforms free. All you have to do is confirm that you’re a student at one of the listed institutions, and I have heard that if your institution isn’t listed you can request that it is by email. Dreamspark let me download the software and provided me with a unique product key that I entered after the entire installation was complete.

Windows Server 2008 isn’t exactly perfect. The video tearing issue I had with Ubuntu didn’t go away. I later learned that this probably had more to do with the refresh rate I was choosing for my video settings than it did for the OS or the codecs available for that OS. However, WS2008 was able to immediately pick up digital audio through the HDMI port instead of the analog solution I was using otherwise.

If you want more information on getting free and legal Microsoft software, check out this Slickdeals post. You can see a basic video of what MediaPortal is like here.

Ubuntu – The how much is my time worth edition

I’ve recently put together an HTPC to act as a frontend in the bedroom mostly because the Radeon card I have sounds like a vacuum cleaner and I wanted something a bit more quiet. I’m doing this legitimately and cheaply, so knowing that Ubuntu was free of charge and has media software like XBMC to use was an incentive.

After a point, I had to start putting a value on my time. If I can buy Windows XP or Vista for $89 (no tax, free shipping at Newegg), than I had to ask myself if my time was worth 5 dollars an hour? Was it worth more than 1 dollar an hour? How many hours was I going to put into getting Ubuntu to do what I wanted before it just made more sense to use an operating system I already know?

I like a challenge, but Ubuntu is just plain strange. Let’s make an add/remove program option near the start button that doesn’t cover all the programs you could add, because the real place to add packages is in the system folder under synaptic package manager. Then let’s keep Ubuntu free, but make it a bit difficult to add restricted codecs and drivers by commenting a line in a config file and making you edit it in order to get the codecs you really want. Then let’s just make you enter some other random code to get root access to your computer in order to extract files to directories that you want.

I can do this now, and if it wasn’t for my 720p or 1080p video continuing to show lines every time there was more action on the screen, I might have continued to use it. Even if boxee and xbmc looked decent enough on my 1080p Panasonic plasma, each tended to freeze if you tried to exit the program while a video is playing. And honestly, boxee and xbmc just don’t look as good as Media Portal, in my opinion (and the wife’s, which matters even more).

I’m most likely going to try Ubuntu again in a dual boot scenario, but I’m assuming I’m going to have to look into virtual machines if I wanted to use Ubuntu exclusively since I probably won’t find a good substitute for Itunes, Left 4 Dead, or Reason.

In the long run, this experiment doesn’t matter as much since the new experiment will be trying to get my copy of Windows Home Server 2008 to run media portal on. I’ll be posting on that shortly.

HTPC – Trials and Tribulations

After spending a good fifty minutes at Best Buy this morning, I realized that there’s more to my indecision about a front-end HTPC than just whether or not I should spend the money.

It was easy enough to not even consider Dell’s Studio Hybrid before because the price range, even at the Outlet with the refurbished ones and the recent 20% off coupon, were still too expensive for my taste.

I love how that DVD gets loaded.

However, Best Buy is selling this at 399 recently and considering its pricetag otherwise, this sale makes it a lot harder to resist. I took a look at it. It is quiet enough, very small footprint, and it seems like it can handle Vista.

In the end I just couldn’t buy it. There’s something in me that is repulsed by the idea of spending extra money on less powerful components just for its size. I’m not even positive I’m going to have the front-end HTPC in a visible space.

I’ll update in a bit though, also not crazy spending $100 for an OS on my own if I build my own system again.

Inauguration

You will never be able to go to the inauguration of the first African-American president in the United States ever again. I’m even happier to have shared this moment with my wife and sister, and pleased that there wasn’t a single instance of violence that would have solidified the opposition’s disapproval of President Obama’s win.

Washington ben & jerry’s

The perfect ben & jerry container size.

Inauguration trip begins

So we’ve arrived in DC. The place seems normal and quiet enough the Thursday before inauguration