September 2, 2003

SnapStream Personal Video Station 3.0 review

Matt Haughey of PVRBlog has an extensive review of SnapStream Personal Video Station 3.0:

“Would I trade a TiVo for a small PC running Snapstream? After playing with it for a few weeks, I’d have to say it is certainly possible. A home theater PC can do more than a TiVo (play videos, any audio format, photos, show the web on your TV, etc), and this package certainly covers the TV recording features that TiVo pioneered.”

September 2, 2003

Explorer bar Maker

I love this stuff too…

“Explorer Bar (Band) Maker is a Windows tool (one-step wizard) that lets you create your own Explorer bar from any HTML page, picture or Macromedia Flash file.” (via Anil Dash’s Links)

August 29, 2003

Enterprise Social Networks

Don Park paints a picture of blog and wiki convergence in the following quote:

“Imagine posts and comments flowing from blogs to wikis like the way streams feed into lakes. Got the picture yet? Now think of a blog category as a wiki page. The picture changes so that the blog becomes a mountain and categories become the streams running down the side of the mountain in all directions toward wikis into which streams from other mountains also feed into.”

August 28, 2003

Remote Shutdown

I was just helping out a friend who was trying to remotely restart a server that was somewhat locked-up and I found this gem on the JSI FAQ, which describes a “feature” of the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) on Windows 2000 & XP that will enable you to remotely restart a server.

Q: How can I log off or shutdown a remote Windows 2000 computer? (Quoted from the JSI FAQ)
A: You can do this from your Windows 2000 desktop.

August 27, 2003

Collaboration and Process

Clay Shirky writes the following in his piece about, “Wikis, Grafitti, and Process:”

“A wiki in the hands of a healthy community works. A wiki in the hands of an indifferent community fails. The software makes no attempt to add ‘process’ in order to keep people from doing stupid things. Instead, it provides more flexibility, a crazy amount of flexibility, and intoxicating amount of flexibility, allowing massive amounts of stupidity and intentional damage to be done, at will, by roving and anonymous posters. And it provides rollback.”

August 26, 2003

HOWTO Guides: Hard Drive Data Recovery

It’s always good to keep HOWTO guides like this around.

“Killed a hard drive without backing up? This guide helps you recover the data ” (link via Lockergnome)

Of course you can never find them when you need’em because the system you bookmarked the guide is the one that’s dead. So I’ll just post it here :-)

August 25, 2003

Anaconda of the Amazon

Anna Kournikova: “Excuse me Mr. Bezos, is that an ‘Anaconda’ in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

August 22, 2003

SoBig Blackout Blaster!

Via Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley

“Rumors about SoBig and Blaster are propagating almost as fast as the worms themselves. The latest rumor circulating on Bugtraq: Blaster caused last week’s east coast blackout. Some are speculating that Blaster brought down the monitoring and control systems at a power-plant master terminal. Meanwhile, on the SoBig front, Gartner analysts are estimating that damages incurred by businesses from the e-mail worm could top $50 million.”

August 22, 2003

HyperText File System

Beau Lebens’ Dented Reality has some interesting projects, like this one…

“HTFS is a complete, database-driven “file-system” on the concept of hyper-text … The basic idea of this system is …[that]… files, emails, notes and links can be stored as unique items – ONCE, managed by a database.” [more]

Hmm, sounds a bit like Ted Nelson’s Xanadu.

I’d love to see some demos of it, maybe sample code too.

August 21, 2003

Canon EOS Digital SLR Rebel

Lately, I’ve been doing some research into the latest crop of Digital SLR cameras from Canon. Of course, I’d be nowhere without the help from my friend and coworker Les, who needs to get his weblog/photolog online ASAP (but that’s another story).

Anyway, initially I was led to the Canon EOS 10D, by Anders and Les, which is an awesome pro-consumer camera, based on the reviews and sample pictures that that I’ve seen.

Although, at roughly $1,200 – $1,500(US), the price of the 10D is still way more than I want to spend (even with the imaginary money I’m willing to put towards a new digital camera to replace my aging Olympus 2020-Zoom.)