Friday, May 29, 2009

hulu Desktop

I just installed hulu desktop on my PC. All I can say is wow! I have a PC that I use for Media Center capabilities. It is connected to an HDTV via component video. The interface for hulu is fantastic and the video quality is simply amazing. It's the same as my Uverse, which is IPTV.

I may be able to scale back my TV subscriptions with all of this great content on the 'net/

Cheers!

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Hi, I'm a Mac...

Ok, so I finally took the plunge and made the switch to a Mac. Specifically I grabbed an older Mac Mini off of eBay. $200 for a 1.5GHz Core Solo Mini with 512 MB ram and a 60GB HDD. Not the most blazing fast of Mac, but something to start with. First things first, I installed iLife 09 and iWork 09 and got to business. Well, Leopard blows with 512 MB of RAM, so I grabbed a couple of 1GB sticks I had laying around, and since I'd be cracking her open anyway I also grabbed a 160 GB 7200 RPM drive I had handy. Now, first things first. I cloned my existing drive to the new drive to avoid a needless OS install. Then I watched about a million 'hack your Mini' videos on the interwebs. Finally I cracked that baby open. It was really easy! Installed the RAM and new HDD and fired her up. Perfect! Or not. Suddenly core sound was gone. Errg. After trying everything on apple.com I had to open her up again. No worries. I found a ribbon cable I had inadvertantly pulled out the first time. Plug in, boot up and tada! Sound!

Post upgrade the machine is quite usable, but I think a CPU upgrade is in my future. And the reason for the switch? Windows failed me too many times. I still use Windows (ver 7) at work, and I have a Windows box at home, just in case. But my daily non-work computing is all on the Mac now. Maybe once I upgrade to a Core 2 Duo I'll throw VMWare on it and ditch the fulltime Win box forever.

Cheers!

Friday, May 08, 2009

Foxmarks = Xmarks = Greatest Thing Ever!

Ok, so I love Foxmarks, soon to be just Xmarks.

It's a tool to allow you to sync your bookmarks on one machine to all of you machines. And the best part is it works on every platform I've tried it on so far. OSX and Safari, check. Windows 7 and IE 8, check. Ububtu 9.04 and Firefox 3, check.

Simply amazing. Only problem is they somehow got reordered. I blame IE 8.

iPhone OS 3 Beta 5

So I finally got access to the beta and SDK. Yeah me! Anyways, the huge thing for us here at work is that you can now ADD calendar events to your phone, and INCLUDE invitees!! This is huge for our CEO who wants to schedule meetings on his phone and invite other people from the company to the meeting.