Crazy idea, but it’s amazingly cool!  Here’s an IDE that supports C#/Silverlight, ASP.NET, straight JavaScript, and PHP.  It’s amazingly full-featured and runs completely online.  You can try it out without even registering, or you can register for free to save your projects.  Think of it as CodePlex/SourceForge for online apps on steroids!  I haven’t played with collaboration, and I don’t think it does version control, but as a single-user app it’s really good.  Definitely something to keep an eye on. Link: http://coderun.com/ide/

I’ve been really excited about the Windows 7 sensors and location platform since the get-go, but I’ve been pretty disappointed by the lack of actual products to take advantage of it.  Finally someone has built a software –based tool that uses IP and WiFi location services (from Google) to find your location.  It’s not as accurate as GPS, of course, but it’s good enough to get city which works well for weather and general proximity applications. It’s free and available for either 32-bit or 64-bit.  Get it now! http://www.geosenseforwindows.com/

Awesome tool!  On Windows 7, you may have noticed the Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter.  This is automatically installed when you have a wireless adapter.  You may have also noticed that you can’t do anything with it!  What the virtual wireless adapter does is allow you to essentially multiples your wireless adapter to join more than one network at once.  As a matter of fact, you can also use it to share your connection.  That’s right!  You can actually host a wireless network from your PC! This way, if you have a wired connection, you can share it with...

I found a cool app recently: TouchFreeze.  I was tired of bumping my touchpad on my laptop while in the middle of typing.  This simple utility disables the mouse clicking while typing and for a half second or so after.  So simple, but so useful!  Occasionally I’ll click right after typing and it will take me a moment to realize why I lost that first click, but then I remember.  Much better that than how often I’ll be typing and suddenly my cursor will be moved to a random point on the page without me noticing right away! From...

I’ve been a great fan of the Windows API Code Pack for some time now (since it replaced the Vista Bridge anyway!).  It’s got great functionality to replace the need for interop when using new features of Windows 7.  I was having some trouble with a Jumplist and I decided to check if there was a new version.  Sure enough, when I wasn’t looking they released a new version of November 18th!  It’s got a few new features, and a lot of bug fixes.  It even fixed my trouble with nothing but a recompile!  If you haven’t checked it out...

It’s been a week since I got back now, but I spent a week in Los Angeles for Microsoft PDC.  It was three days which seemed short compared to other conferences I’ve attended.  I went to JavaOne for five years in a row and it was typically a week and just packed – both the sessions and the vendor floor.  This was some years ago, though, so it may not be indicative of a current conference.  I was disappointed by the number of vendors this year, at least compared to PDC ‘05.  It seemed to be at least half Microsoft...

OK.  So this is going to be a cross between a rant and constructive criticism.  I’m sure that Microsoft has great reasons that they created MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) the way that they did, but it’s just tantalizingly close to perfection, so I’m going to complain about it anyway! For two of my recent articles, I’ve been working with MEF to enable an addins platform for a utility runner.  MEF does some nice things: It makes it easy to designate classes as extensions (define an addin) It makes it easy to...

I just noticed something cool.  Anytime I’ve ever needed to paste a command into a command prompt I’ve always used the context menu Paste command:   I’m not sure how I missed it until now, but if you simply right-click in the command area (the black part) it instantly pastes it!  I did a quick search on it and it’s not a new feature, but I never noticed it. Another cool Command Prompt trick I recently learned is the history menu.  Just press F7 to see your history, then use arrows and the Enter key to select:...

I’m so happy!  I’ve had a chronic problem with Windows 7 for a build or two now (including RTM).  Every time I would create a new folder in Explorer, it would hang for a minute or so before coming back.  Then I realized that it was actually the rename operation that was the culprit.  Any file rename would cause the window to hang.  Strangely, if I checked at a command prompt it was immediately renamed.  The final weirdness was that a rename worked instantly from a command prompt.  So what was Explorer doing?  It turns out that the...

So I’m typing a document, and suddenly I realize that I must have just hit the CAPS LOCK key.  I noticed this right after typing “lOCATION” when all of a sudden Word autocorrected it to the right case *and* turned off the CAPS LOCK key!  Very cool.  I tried again with just typing it with CAPS LOCK on and getting LOCATION but it didn’t do it.  It’s smart enough to realize that if I type in reverse sentence case I probably didn’t mean it.  This is a welcome feature.

I’ve blogged before about the product Pismo Mount.  This great tool lets you mount an ISO (CD image), ZIP, and a number of other archive formats.  Once mounted, it looks like a folder and you can just work with it like any other folder.  I’ve discovered some limitations that surprised me. Specifically, one limitation that has affected me several times.  For some reason, I can’t always install from a mounted ISO image.  I tried installing the Office 2010 CTP and the Visual Studio 2010 beta and neither would install.  The errors don’t even make sense (it’s not like it’s...

I do a lot of math work at home with my boys, and creating random problems for them to solve can be challenging.  I just discovered a Microsoft Education Labs project that generates worksheets based on a sample problem.  Kind of like Pandora (music), give it a problem you “like” and it comes back with more, with a similar difficulty.  The problems are embedded directly into Word with solutions on the last page.  You can do basic math, algebra solving, and more.  Use the Math Input Panel in Windows 7, or use their specialized syntax.  Very easy! App in...

As you may or may not know, Windows 7 finally adds native support for MPEG-4.  This is excellent news and reduces much of the need for adding additional codecs to be installed on the system.  Unfortunately, Microsoft did not see fit to incorporate support for the Matroska (mkv)container format (they still like AVI and ASF more).  There was good support out there from open source projects, but not for 64-bit systems.  Now Divx has made available a preview of a high-performance, Media Foundation implementation (successor to DirectShow released with Vista) of a Matroska container reader that works with both 32-bit...

The boards given away at WinHEC and PDC for Windows 7 sensor development are now available for sale from Freescale: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=JMBADGE&tab=Buy_Parametric_Tab&fromSearch=false These are a great way to experiment with the new sensors such as light, gyroscope, and accelerometer.  The price is pretty fair, and it’s a nice compact board.  Even better, the Windows API Code Pack support it nicely in managed code. Have fun!

Aargh!  Very frustrating.  I tried setting up a site on Godaddy.  The site uses Entity Framework.  Site failed.  Even though they claim .NET 2.0/3.0/3.5 it’s missing all the Entity classes.  Even when I copied them to my bin folder it fails since the System.Runtime.Reflection assembly is missing some attributes,  The compilation error tells me that it’s the 2.0 compiler.  Maybe that’s right, I don’t know.  They tell me EF is not supported though which is really strange.  After looking closer I noticed that EF is part of 3.5 SP1 (release last November).  Perhaps though don’t do service packs.  I’m not...

I should have blogged on this beforehand… but on Saturday I gave a talk about Windows 7 for developers at the Iowa Code Camp, and last night I gave another similar talk to the Cedar Rapids INETA group.  There are lots of neat new features to take advantage of.  The taskbar alone offers peeks and previews, custom buttons on preview, alerts/progress, even icon overlays (something that would have really come in handy with Notification Icons!).  The intent is to move away from the notification area now and they’ve really provided some good tools for it. I always have fun...

I spent more hours than I’d like figuring out why data caching didn’t work for me in a Word-based VSTO solution.  I did what I needed to implement a cached property: Public property Marked with Cached attribute Type to be cached marked as Serializable I saved the document on closing (after writing to the cached field), yet no luck.  After messing around for some time, I finally decided to test out serializing the type.  Since it’s specifically XML serialization that must succeed I used the XmlSerializer object, wrote...

This is part two in my series about taking advantage of newer C# features.  These have been widely available since Visual Studio 2008, but you may not be using them yet.  In this post I’ll discuss object initialization. This feature is a time-saver.  Just a language enhancement.  It’s cool though.  Anything that makes the language more expressive is a good thing.  Typically, you create objects, then set the properties. Person p = new Person(); p.FirstName = “Arian”; p.LastName = “Kulp”; Now you can do it in just a single-line.  With the default constructor, you don’t even use parenthesis.  Just use curly...

I’ve decided to start a series of C# 3.0+ features that every dev should know about.  Probably I’m preaching to the choir (and I’m certainly not the only person mentioning these), but it’s easy to get used to features from   Automatic properties This is such a simple feature, but a nice one to know about.  Good object-oriented design demands that you never expose class fields directly.  Why not?  It’s all a matter of control!  Who wants to take a chance that other code might invalidate your values?  A name field set to null, or an...

Well, so far I haven’t gotten Daemon Tools to work.  Apparently it’s not DT itself, but rather the SCSI Passthrough device (SPTD) that isn’t compatible with the new low-level changes.  I also couldn’t get Elby Virtual CloneDrive to work.  It installed fine, but just hung when I tried to mount a disc.  Fortunately, I’ve found a solution. I’ve never even seen something like this before, but a company called Pismo Technic, Inc. has created an application that mounts an ISO file (and many other formats) as a folder.  It’s not a virtual drive at all, just a way to...

Well, despite my previous post to the contrary, I have periodic issues with the Atheros networking drivers on my Aspire One.  They worked most of the time under Vista.  They work rarely under Windows 7.  The wireless device either simply disappears or just won’t connect to anything.  The Windows troubleshooting/repair functions do nothing to fix it.  I have no idea what I need to do, except, I suspect I’ll need to wait for newer drivers.  Atheros doesn’t seem to offer direct downloads for what I need, so this is a severe slam for the Aspire at this point! By...

So after playing with the TouchSmart from the user point-of-view, it was time to take a look at the dev story.  It turns out that touch-enabling your applications in Windows 7 will be a great deal easier than before!  This isn’t just detecting that there was a touch somewhere (like on a PDA/smartphone), but keeping track of multiple touch points, and understanding gestures (select, pan, zoom, rotate).  There are three levels of compatibility depending on how much work you want to do and what your app needs to accomplish: Level One: Essentially do nothing.  As long as your application...

Well this has been another great day!  The focus was on Windows 7 today.  I got to play with the HP TouchSmart PC for one thing.  It wasn’t as cool as I’d hoped!  Touch is a bit laggy and not all that accurate much of the time.  Instead of typical touch screen technology (capacitive or resistive) it uses cameras.  It can only detect two touch points, but it got confused pretty often. We talked a lot about the ribbon user interface paradigm as seen in Office 2007, and sometimes called the Fluent UI.  It looks like there will be...

Well it’s been another great day!  I love learning these under-the-covers details about Windows 7.  New updates to BITS, service control, PowerShell V2, and energy efficiency.  I’ve got lots of ideas for talks I’d like to do, code snippets to write, and blog entries.  Of course the concepts here are evolution for the most part so far.  The revolutionary stuff comes the next two days!  Still though, it shows some good work coming out of MS.  Still no FTP support in BITS.  This was disappointing to me.  From the start, this is what has prevented it from being a truly...

This week I’m in Redmond for some training on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  It was quite a day and it will be quite a week overall.  I spent a good chunk of the morning listening to Mark Russinovich.  Having used his Sysinternals tools for years, and seeing his move to Microsoft (currently a Technical Fellow), it was a neat experience to be able to be one of a fairly small group in this talk, getting to ask him questions when I needed to.  He’s a great speaker and knows the kernel like few people do! I...

Well I don't know if I set any world records, but I've definitely beaten my own records for file transfer over Skype – 24GB!  It took over ten hours to complete, but it was flawless.  I initiated it, the other person accepted, and we were able to walk away.  Much better than overnighting DVD's!  I've been really happy With Skype since it first came out.  Both audio and video are great most of the time, and file transfers are rock solid.

I’ve been really excited about getting my hands on the Windows 7 beta from everything that I heard about it.  I finally got the official download link and installed it on my Acer Aspire One (1GB RAM, 160GB HD).  It is just perfect so far.  I had been running Vista Home Premium on here before, and honestly it was pretty good, but Windows 7 definitely installed faster, boots up faster, and is just smarter to use. A few small things really make a difference.  The no-hassle wireless networking, Start items disappear when you are searching by typing, Aero Peek...

Well I decided to take the plunge.  At a virtualization roadshow event, a fellow lab proctor asked me if I was using it yet.  I’ve always gone with Virtual PC since it’s so straight-forward.  Virtual Server just seemed so… server-like!  I have wished that I could remotely startup a VPC, but in the past I’ve just gone to the computer in question and launched it.  From there, I need to either use the Virtual PC software locally or enable Remote Desktop sharing on the guest.  This isn’t ideal though.  If I’m running a client with RDP support (XP Home, pre-XP,...

Well I had a challenge recently setting up Vista on a new box.  I used an older hard drive (40GB) in it for the boot drive.  The BIOS clearly showed it just fine as first boot device, and the Vista installer showed it in the list of hard drives, but there was a warning stating that Vista couldn’t find a suitable drive and to check the BIOS.  This was quite perplexing.  I could format it and set it up, but it wouldn’t proceed to installation since it said it wasn’t bootable. The drive was an old Samsung one and...

A new company called Plastic Logic, born from Cambridge University research, is coming out with a very nice looking E-Paper display early next year.  It's much slimmer than the Kindle, wirelessly gets content, and has more screen area than the Kindle.  It's actually heavier, but it's still small enough to be a very nice gadget.  I would love to have a laptop with an E-Paper screen for coding, email, and document work.  Smartphones, PDA's, SideShow devices, and remote controls would all benefit from this technology if it would ever be available cheaply.  Within a few years we'll supposedly have color...

I've decided to go get into the netbook craze.  I've been very excited about them ever since the Eee PC came out.  Unfortunately the super-small SSD drives have been a deterrent as have the micro-small screens on the first generation.  It's got to be a touch balancing act to create a small notebook that isn't too small to be useful.  The second and third generation netbooks are getting better with this, though some have just gone crazy with price point and features.  I'm getting an Acer One with 1.5GB RAM and 120GB hard drive.  I don't need that big of...

  You are bidding on an excellent condition Gateway tablet/convertible laptop running Windows XP Tablet Edition SP3.  This is a great laptop that is also a powerful tablet.  That means you can flip the screen around and even close the laptop with the screen facing up!  The included stylus lets you enter text using your own handwriting or draw pictures or diagrams naturally.  Windows XP Tablet Edition and Windows Vista include full support for handwriting recognition and interaction using the stylus.  Two gigabytes of RAM give you plenty of space for even the most demanding tasks.  Eighty gigabytes of hard drive...

I bought a Shuttle KPC from Newegg for my Windows Home Server and I couldn't be happier with it.  My only complaint was no case fan and not very many ports on the power supply.   Until I could get a hold of a power splitter I decided to just plug in a spare power supply (why do I have so many?!) so I could install a fan.  Yeah, it's a waste of power using a second power supply, but only temporary!  The problem is that modern power supplies don't turn on when you switch them on.  It's up to the...

In case you missed this, Microsoft recently released the Image Composite Editor (also known as ICE).  This is a very cool app for doing panoramic pictures.  I love Autostitch, but you need to reset settings each time, and you can only choose JPEG output (though 100% quality is darn good).  ICE lets you output in JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PNG, HD Photo, and even the interactive Silverlight Deep Zoom format.  It defaults to 100% scaling (Autostitch defaults to 25% or something like that), and it even auto-crops for nice clean borders.  Not only that, but it’s fast, and the user interface...

Arrgghh!!  Well that was an ordeal!  I took down the site last night to upgrade to Subtext 2.0.  I noticed it came out a few months ago and somehow I missed it.  Upgrading is always painful for me since I’m on Go Daddy hosting.  This means that I always have two things that necessitate a less than painless upgrade. You can’t set the trust level.  Go Daddy sets it at machine level and you can’t override it. All SQL scripts require extensive manual rework since they rely on the [INFORMATION_SCHEMA].[TABLES] object to...

So I've finally decided to inventory much of my old "vintage" computer stuff.  I have old Atari- and Commodore-related items and I'd really like to find a good home for them.  I considered throwing them away, but I know that there are plenty of people still collecting them and surely someone out there will thank me!  I'm not looking to make money on this.  Shipping money plus a dollar or two toward my site upkeep is all that I ask.  You can pay via Paypal if interested and I'll try my best to get it out the next day.  Just...

I've had this desire for some time now to see an entirely new kind of phone/PDA/media player.  It hasn't come out yet, and I don't think that I'll get around to making it myself, so I'll just lay it out here. I'm tired of the ridiculous array of communication devices.  I'm tired of obsolescence, crippled features, locked-down networks, and constant compromise.  I want a device that does less, and by virtue of that, does more.  Huh? The thing is, many people carry their phones in their pockets and walk around with headsets on.  What if we further decoupled...

I was just going through Skype settings today and I noticed this little gem: This was the setting for choosing Skype or IRC style messages in the chat window.  Usually they show cute little chat tidbits like "what time is the party tonight" or "did you get that proposal done yet."  This one really made me stop and think.  Or maybe didn't really.  I just don't know anymore...  :-) (Yes, it's from 1984.  Still funny though!)

I’ve got a new system setup now.  From the title you’ve probably figured out what it is!  I bought the Shuttle KPC barebones motherboard (only $99!!).  I also got the 650GB SATA drive from Newegg.  I already had 2GB of memory from my main desktop, and the processor was only another $40.  It runs like a champ and I now have four machines backed up nightly (I’ve never been able to say that before!) and all of my network files on a server-class OS. Installation was a snap.  It’s obviously Windows Small Business Server 2003 under the hood so...

I'm always into gadgets and just thought I'd share two new things I picked up recently.  I nabbed a mini-USB Bluetooth adapter from eBay for around $12 and it is just the coolest (like this one)!  It fits into the slot and only sticks out a half-inch or so.  Unfortunately, my stupid laptop (I hate it, I hate it) is very flaky with USB and keeps thinking that USB devices are being removed and re-inserted, but this device's size helps since it gets bumped less. The other device that I'm loving is my new PC Card smart card reader...

So what's the deal with the file format used by Windows Movie Maker?  I had this vague memory that it's an XML file format and I opened up a file last night to take a look at it.  It's a binary file containing a chunk of XML toward the end.  I also use Camtasia, and this is a completely XML-based format.  Not using straight XML is a liability here since 3rd parties can't interact with Movie Maker as well. After digging into it for just a bit, there's the Unicode XML blob at the end, but there's a lot...

I've had a very strong interest in Microsoft SharePoint Server for some time.  The idea of building a site on a content management system (CMS) is very appealing as there is so much grunt work otherwise.  That's the motivation for using a blog engine of course.  I could create simple web pages each time I had an update (not often lately...) or append to a single page, but the advantages of quick-and-easy publishing, syndication, search, keywords, and the rest make it more than worthwhile.  Working with a CMS takes things so much further by making the entire web site modular. ...

If you haven't seen this yet, it's very cool.  We all know that Office has way more in there than most people ever see.  The 2007 ribbon made a big difference in making the commands more visible, but it still doesn't reveal everything in the default views.  If you are ever unsure where to find a command, or better yet, if it exists, the Search Commands toolbar is for you! I've only had it installed for a few days, but I just love it.  It can be faster than trying to remember where something is, and I've found features...

If you've ever deleted a file when you should have really sent it to Recycle Bin, perhaps you have an idea of how I felt last night when I deleted 1GB worth of video files for my older son's school project.  First I "lost" about a dozen files. I still have no idea what went wrong.  Windows Movie Maker all of a sudden showed X's for clips.  The containing folder was just empty.  I had imported some additional videos into a subfolder of that one using Picasa, but I can't imagine it would just wipe out the parent during an...

(via LifeHacker) I'm digging the Call Graph call record for Skype.  It works well and does what it's advertised to do.  I can't find any bitrate or other settings unfortunately, but the files seem to be small enough and pretty clear.  For clean integration into Skype + free, you really can't go wrong! http://callgraph.in

Not the delivery service (though I love them too), but Uninterruptible Power Supplies.  I just had a circuit breaker blow three times (until I figured out what was causing the problem!), but nothing bad happened to my systems.  Considering how much I always have running, just having the power disappear is a Very Bad Thing(TM).  I recently bought a ~$30 UPS power supply which is more of a fat circuit breaker strip.  It's not all that powerful, but it's more than sufficient to keep me going for five minutes while I reset a circuit breaker.  What a great investment!  Don't...

A few Saturdays ago I participated in an industry panel at a University of Iowa ACM IT event.  We discussed the IT field and employment in the near-future.  My big message was about software being made into discrete components, composable, and extensible.  There are all sorts of hot new technologies on the web in terms of user-facing functionality, but in terms of IT effort, these are the things that I see creating value and leading to better software. The software (online or offline) that becomes the most successful is that which is the least restrictive.  If you create a...

Well this gave me a chuckle this morning!  It looks like the "Reliability analysis metrics calculation executable" isn't very reliable! I'm not even entirely sure what it was doing, but it happened during a file copy.  Yes -- I tried to copy a file on Vista.  I know that's not recommended without SP1 installed, but I'm that crazy risky kind of guy!  I think to measure problems like these someone needs to create a "Reliability analysis metrics calculation executable reliability analyzer application."  Phew. That's hard to say!

As a father with two boys who are both interested in science and technology, it seemed a natural choice to check out the LEGO Mindstorms NXT set when it came out.  Stepper motors with integrated rotation sensors, sensors for ultrasound, touch, light, and sound, USB and Bluetooth connectivity...  well, you get the point!  When my boys saw the NXT, they were very excited about it.  When the box arrived it was like Christmas and birthday combined! We built the model in the book first.  A fun start.  Then we built the models included on the CD.  Very...

Over the past few years, photos have become more and more important to me.  I keep upgrading cameras trying to find the best option, and trying out different catalog software to find the best fit.  So far -- nothing is perfect!  [As an aside: I have an idea for photo management software that would be a huge departure from what's out there, but no time to implement it.  The story of my life.  :-(  ] Anyway, one thorn in my side is the huge number of pre-digital pictures that I have.  I learned that Wal-Mart will scan negatives very...

Wow!  Micro-mirror laser scanning is cool!  This hand-held device is a projector that can create an 848x480 resolution image up to several feet wide depending on ambient light and distance.  No focusing, no bulb (all lasers), no heat!  It's only as big as it is because of a rechargeable battery pack that runs it for up to 2.5 hours.  The company envisions it built into cell phones, media players, etc. soon.  This model should be out this year and they're apparently targeting a $300 price. In every possible way this is cool.  I would take this...

Wow!  This is my first post of the year.  I'm such a slacker these days! In case you haven't seen this yet, a new company, Bug Labs, is coming out with a very cool hobbyist concept.  It's a modular device development kit.  There's a touch LCD module, GPS sensor, an accelerometer/motion sensor, a camera, and the base unit.  Each device physically connects to each other and communicates via TCP/IP for the ultimate in easy integration.  The software is all open source and there's an incredible array of features.  Programming is via Eclipse (presumably Java-based) and an SDK is available....

Already a little old news, but wow!  I love hacking projects and this one is just awesome.  Now I want a Wii even more than before!  This guy has come up with a hack to use the infrared camera built-in to the Wiimote to watch a specially modified pen (an infrared LED added to it).  With the Wiimote sending pen tracking info to the PC, it can track your movements like a mouse on any surface like an expensive digital whiteboard.  Even better, it can track more than one spot at once!  Incredible job, with obvious applications.  If I...

I recently had to work with an Excel spreadsheet that originated as a data export from another system.  The problem was that all dates had been imported as string values -- that is, with the leading single quote.  I needed to create PivotTables/PivotCharts from the data, but none of the date grouping would work.  So what to do? The first thought was to just change the format of the field.  Logical, yes?  Successful?  No.  The format field (as makes sense) is for formatting.  It has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of a field. I considered writing a macro...

So my newest system (dual core, AMD 64-bit, PCI-Express, DDR2...) had a VGA and an HDMI port on it.  "Eh?!" I thought to myself.  Why not DVI at least!  I was worried that HDMI might only be good for digital TV, or worse, a direct digital connection for the analog VGA output (given Vista's dislike of protected content over an analog connection).  I ordered a $5 HDMI-to-DVI adapter from an eBay seller, and it arrived this morning.  I popped it in place, toggled "Force TV detection" in the ATI settings, and voila!  It sees it properly and drives my Viewsonic...

On December 3, I spoke at the Cedar Rapids INETA meeting about LINQ.  Titled, A New World of Data Access with LINQ, I had a great time sharing my enthusiasm about the newest data access technologies for .NET developers.  LINQ is fully supported in Visual Studio 2008, even Express editions.  I just love how LINQ unifies data access between databases, in-memory collections, and XML sources.  The language constructs are a bit of a departure from standard programming, yet I felt acclimated to them pretty quickly.  Of course there's a whole range of features that I haven't dug into yet.  As...

Recently, I received a review copy of the book, "The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Idea Book" by Martijn Boogaarts.  I'm definitely an avid Mindstorms user, so I'm always looking for good books.  My sons and I are always playing with our set, I started a robotics club at my younger son's elementary, and I co-coach a junior high FIRST LEGO League team.  Finding great projects is a good way to supplement the creative homebrew creations.  The included instructions are great for ideas, but you want more after some time. I really enjoyed this book.  The layout is well-done with a good number...

This may be old news, but I just came across this cool-sounding virtualization tool called Returnil.  It's not processor-virtualization, but rather environment-virtualization.  Using Returnil, you can install, move, delete, muck up anything you want on the system (provided it's on the C:\ drive), and when you reboot you are reset.  Somewhat like System Restore, but faster, and more comprehensive.  Unlike System Restore, it only supports one rollback and you can only revert by rebooting.  You also can't seem to just commit your actions. To me, it looks like a great tool for installing a trialware app to see how things...

This looks really cool.  It's a microcontroller with everything that you need to get started.  You get the controller module, a mini-breadboard for adding hardware to the controller, power supply, batter holder, USB cable, and assorted LED's and other components for fun.  You plug the device into a USB port (Windows/Mac/Linux) and use a supplied application to program it in C. click for more information It looks like a very easy way to dig into hardware with the foundation already taken care of.  As a big fan of robotics and hobbyist tinkering in general, I'm very tempted to...

After lots of charge/discharge cycles, your laptop battery may or may not be at its peak, and sometimes the computer reads the battery wrong.  The solution is to calibrate the battery every so often.  This fully charges the battery, discharges it to zero, then recharges it again.  This is supposed to give it the baseline it needs to make sure that the batteries are being read properly.  Typically, at the end, numbers seem to go up (capacity/time), and you can trust your low-battery level indicator.  Sometimes, however, it's best not to know! As you can see in my...

Wow.  This is probably old news, but I just came across it.  It absolutely amazes me what people can do.  This is a binary adder machine made entirely out of wood with marbles representing the bits!  It's incredibly elegant in its simplicity.  Drop the marbles in the top, and the rockers either drop the ball or shift it to the next position.  You could keep adding columns to represent the next bit and count as high as was practically possible. What amazes me the most, is how people can recreate technology in low-tech ways.  It really makes you think about...

Back in March I blogged about a cool steampunk keyboard that I guy made all by his own self.  Well, he's done it again!  He decided to take apart his $300 Dell LCD monitor and make it match his keyboard better.  The results are really amazing.  He has some vintage brass, some brass-looking paint jobs, custom metalwork, and the coolest faux-marble base I've ever seen on any LCD.  Period.  His step-by-step instructions are fun to read through and really give you insight into the process.  He's one talented guy. Source: Steampunk Flat-Panel LCD Mod

The Matrix trilogy was one of the most exciting movie series I've ever enjoyed.  The fresh story, the great effects, and the general atmosphere was just something else.  V for Vendetta was alright (not really a worth successor though...), so I've wondered for some time now what the Wachowski brothers will do next, and it looks like I must have missed the announcement!  They are directing Speed Racer.  It's not a cartoon though, it's all live action and it sounds like they are pushing the envelope again. Some new kind of camera will capture every element in the scene in...

I have another dead laptop.  Yep, that's another.  I bought a gorgeous HP laptop two or three years ago -- 3.2GHz, Hyperthreaded, 15" widescreen, full-sized keyboard, DVD burning, and it worked like a champ -- except that you could cook on it.  Seriously, it was the hottest laptop I'd ever seen.  It routinely shut itself off due to heat unless I propped it up just right.  Eventually I think it damaged itself.  The monitor flickers funny sometimes, it blue screens at random, and is just generally unstable.  HP will fix it for roughly the cost of a new laptop. I...

I've been working with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 for a few months now, and I'm really excited about the changes coming.  The WCF support is so much better with auto-generated service stubs, a built-in test client, and direct right-click access to the WCF Configuration Editor from Solution Explorer.  Add Web Reference actually creates WCF clients now with lots of great control. LINQ is everywhere.  The namespace is auto-imported for easy access, there's a LINQ Data Classes class template (DBML file).  Working with data whether from a database, XML, or object collections is just so much cooler than ever (yes, I...

I've blogged about my nifty little ViewSonic ViewPad 100 before, but it's been awhile.  The little guy's been working as an RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) client for some time.  It's so compact you can hide it away, you can plug in USB devices like a keyboard and mouse, and it has a touchscreen.  Even cooler, you can use the built-in PC Card (16-bit) expansion slot to plug in a wireless adapter.  I use the older Linksys WPC11 card, but it's kind of hard to find the old version 3, 16-bit version.  If you get the newer version, it's CardBus (32-bit)...

I recently bought two (yes, two) robotic lawnmowers.  The Friendly Robotics RL500 mower can mow your entire yard with just a wire perimeter to setup.  It's pretty cool to watch and you can forget about mowing!  I bought two since they were a good price, and I figured I'd try to sell one on eBay and turn a profit.  We finished setting up the one that we're keeping today, and once the battery charges (overnight the first time) we'll get it started.  My kids are so excited!  They got to watch us set up one at their grandparent's house,...

OK.  Now I'm curious.  The Joost streaming video service sounds really cool.  If I remember right, it's from the same people that made Kazaa, then Skype.  TV-like features in streaming form.  Of course there have been similar efforts before, but they're never all that great in the end.  If anyone has any invites, I'd be grateful if you sent one my way! UPDATE: Thanks a million to Matt who set me up with an invite!  After I have some time to play with it I'll blog about the experience.  So far, it's pretty cool.  Definitely avoid full-screen though for now...

Wow!  ComputerWorld is running a great article on the whole "cell phone on airplanes" controversy.  It definitely echoes thoughts that I've had.  It makes no sense that they are a risk, if they are a risk then that reflects poor technology on the aircrafts, and it's more about managing the passengers (by restricting information) and maximizing profits (charging for SkyPhone services).  Definitely a good read. Link to Why cell phones are still grounded

  I've recently switched my Media Center box to Windows Vista Media Center.  It's working well for the most part, but it took some work to get it there.  I wanted to reduce the number of utilities and codecs installed as much as possible, and go for free/open software wherever possible.  My biggest problem at this point is that performance just isn't really there.  I went from a 1GHz machine to a 2.4 GHz machine, yet the video seizes up fairly frequently and tears whenever there's lateral movement.  I think the NVidia drivers just aren't there yet, which is crazy considering...

 Slashdot had a link to this sweet-looking brass keyboard hack: I am definitely a fan of good hacks and custom mods.  Very impressive!   Link to Steampunk Keyboard Mod

If you use Visual Studio Express, you may have been disappointed by its lack of an icon editor.  I've recently come across an amazing icon editor called IcoFX.  This beauty extracts from DLL's and EXE's, and creates new icons with an interface that looks like a paint program.  It exports and imports standard bitmap formats, and just generally does a great job.  Best of all, it's free!  Even if you are using a version of Visual Studio that includes the icon editor, it's worth it to give IcoFX a try.  Link to IcoFX - The Free Icon Editor

I was doing some searching or documentation on WDS and came across this blog entry which mentions that a new version of WDS has been released pretty recently.  I have downloaded and installed it.  We'll see if there's anything noticeably different.  I'm guessing probably not, other than it now has built-in support for UNC locations.  This is nice.  It seemed silly to install a MS add-on to index my network drives.  Considering I have 500GB on a NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit, any indexing tool really needs to be able to handle shares.  It's worth the update (no worse than...

Everyone knows that the Windows key () pops up the Start Menu, but it has a few other cool shortcuts built-in to XP. +E brings up Windows Explorer.  Much more convenient than navigating the Start Menu! +R brings up the Run command for typing shell commands. +Pause brings up the My Computer properties dialog.  I'm not sure why this is built-in, except it might be handy for support issues. +TAB switches between applications using the buttons in the task bar (at the bottom of the screen) instead of popping up the task switcher dialog.  In Vista,...

Have you ever wanted to create non-TXT files in Notepad?  I've always done it by changing "Save as type" to "All Files" and used a different extension.  If you forget to do that, it appends ".txt" to whatever you enter.  What a pain!  It turns out that you can just use quotes around the filename to give it any extension that you like.  Here I am saving a file with the "htm" extension:   So easy to do!

I've been working with Zooomr for a number of months now and have uploaded almost 200 pictures.  I never jumped onboard any photo provider because I'm so cheap!  Flickr looked cool, but was too limiting with the free account.  PicasaWeb is looking much better (very nice UI, awesome integration with Picasa), but still not enough space with a free account.  Zooomr has a promotional deal offering "Pro for Life" accounts to bloggers so I decided it was time to give it a try. It's clearly cloning Flickr in many ways, though it does do a few things better.  You must...

Microsoft has released a great new tool for working with digital photos.  Photo Info adds shell extensions to improve the tooltip hover for photos, and adds a context menu item to work with photos individually or in groups.  You can manipulate all common EXIF and IPTC tags, and it even has very flexible date manipulation features built-in. Why date manipulation?  I had a camera a few years ago that would lose the time on every battery replace!  Of course I didn't always reset it, so I had many shots taken January 1, 2000.  More recently, my wife went to Guatemala...

Maybe you've written VBA macros for Office, or used COM interop to leverage Microsoft Office clients (Word, Excel, etc.).  When I worked at MCI (WorldCom, Verizon, whatever it is now!), we had a system to watch a database for rows to be inserted in a given table, then generate form letters with Microsoft Word based on that data.  When I first saw the application (obviously, I didn't write it!), I was amazed that such a thing could even be done.  It was like a world of opportunity opened having access to Microsoft Office features as part of your code. ...

Working with the LEGO Mindstorms NXT using the included (LabVIEW-based) development environment, I feel constrained.  For someone starting out with programming, it's an awesome way to visualize program flow, but working with more advanced concepts it becomes a bit tedious.  Part of it is I just don't 100% get the pin-based connections, but it's more than that.  If I want to process data in another thread, I just can't.  I'm also really limited by the small amount of memory available.  I've blogged about this before, but it's really a big deal to me.  An SD slot or at least a...

Talk about overused!  I love that expression though.  I won't use it again though.  I promise.  If you use GMail and keep track of your RSS feeds in Google Reader, you really need to check out this Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox -- actually created by a Google engineer!  It gives you another link alongside Inbox, Drafts, etc. for your feeds.  It's a great fit, and he claims a way to see how it works without actually upgrading core GMail code.  If it's popular enough, it may become a first class feature.  Give it a try -- it really works well!...

So my sons, Damian (12) and Gabriel (9) decided to build a twin catapult today.  Gabriel saw a similar project in the back of the monthly Lego magazine so they sat down to give it a try.  They did a great job, and then programmed the NXT brick to operate.  They went with a sound sensor wait block to activate one catapult, then another sound to activate the second catapult.  Finally, a third sound resets the two catapults and loops.  If the button is pressed at the end of the loop, it plays a tone and exits.  Straight-forward, and it works! ...

If you haven't heard of Chumby yet, you probably will soon.  The name may be a bit questionable, but if cute's their goal, I guess they got it!  The device has the following characteristics: 266 Mhz CPU32 MB SDRAM64 MB Flash RAM320 x 240, 3 ½” screen2W Speakers2 USB portsWi-fiAmbient light sensorPressure sensor (screen and case)It's essentially a touchscreen-enabled Flash player, but the coolest thing is that it is the ultimate hacker tool.  You know that at it's low price ($150, and no monthly fees!) people would be clammoring to get Linux on it to open it up.  As it turns...

So as promised, I'm finally posting some information about Mindstorms NXT.  Quick impression: it's really cool!  We've built several robots already and come up with a few of our own.  My Bluetooth adapter wasn't compatible with the Lego software, but I have a new one that works now.  Much better!  USB works fine for data transfer, but we are constantly disconnecting and reconnecting it in order to properly test it.  I'm pleasantly surprised that they even bothered to include Bluetooth in it.  I could understand an add-on module, but not built-in.  My boys (9 and 11) figured out the building...

I ordered a new 20" LCD monitor and I couldn't be happier!  My 19" CRT has been porrly rendering color and flickering.  If I can tell bad color (I'm red-green color blind) you know it's bad!Buy.com has the ViewSonic VG2021M for $199, plus I have $25 coupon for their site.  With no shipping, it's a steal!  I couldn't even find 17" LCD on their site for a better price.  It's got 1400x1050 resolution, 8ms refresh, built-in speakers, and DVI input.  It looks like they may have just sold out.  Maybe they'll get a few back in though.  I can't wait...

We use Subversion for source control for contract projects and on the desktop, I use TortoiseSVN.  It's a great program with a really full feature set, but I've never been able to run it completely stably.  It just drives me nuts.  In Windows Explorer, 4 out of 5 times, explorer.exe hangs on right-click.  It seems to be any right-click on files or folders.  I've read about how recursively scanning subfolders (assuming that the folder is a Subversion checkout) can slow things down, but this is 100% locked up.  As in, mouse won't move, music stops playing.  Hung.The weird thing, is...

Wow.  Do a search for speech to text and you'll be amazed at how many results you get.  For text to speech!  Speech synthesis programs are a dime a dozen, and are incredibly easy to write using the Speech API.  Doing good conversion of speech (as in audio) to text (as in written) is difficult.  Using the Speech API again, you'll get dismal results, at best.Enter CastingWords.com.  For .42/minute or .75/minute (depending on providing a link or uploading a file), you get high-quality transcription work within a day or two.  I submitted about sixty minutes of audio (in MP3 format)...

No, I'm not trying to get away!  I was working in C# last night and learned some new things related to string escaping.  We all know about \n (carriage return) and \t (tab), but did you know about the @ (at) sign?If you place the "at" in front of a string, you can use backslashes without doubling them.  As an example, if you wanted to reference a file path in code, you would typically need:string path = "c:\\Path\\OtherPath\\File.ext";This is tedious, so MS decided to allow you to avoid that.  Instead you can use:string path = @"C:\Path\OtherPath\File.ext";Pretty nice looking.  Really, it's...

I did.  I needed 50 or so.  I got 2,000.  For one dollar.  Yeah!Every so often, I need a collection of names and addresses for testing or demo purposes.  Microsoft has an internal list of ficticious names (all taken from employees who apparently sign some paper), but no addresses.  Intel has no such list whatsoever.  I Googled "fake name generator" on a whim, and my first hit was www.fakenamegenerator.com.  This site offers names of eleven nationalities, and even generates maiden names, birthdates, credit card numbers, addresses and phone numbers!  Addresses can be in one of 18 countries.  You can change...

Renaming a lot of files can be a real pain.  A post on Greg Duncan's blog reminded me of my favorite, simple called Flexible Renamer.  It hasn't been updated in awhile, and the rest of the site's Japanese, but it works really well, and has functions for images, music, and other files, with support regular expressions.  All operations are real-time previewed before the renaming operation takes place, and several renaming templates are included.  It's definitely worth a look if you ever try to rename files enmasse:http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA014830/english/FlexRena

If you have a blog, sign up, upload an image, and link to it in an entry.  Then, link to your blog entry here.This photo is from Fourth of July fireworks in Coralville, Iowa.  A nice time was had by all!

Everyone in the know seems up in arms about the shelving of Microsoft WinFS.  I'm pretty upset about it too.  I've been playing with it off and on since the first build I got my hands on.  It's slick.  Very slick.  This "productizing" thing is annoying.  Do they really mean "profitizing?"  Plenty of people think that this is the case.  According to the original post on the WinFS blog, parts of it will be canibalized for SQL Server and ADO.NET.  The idea of less structured data in SQL Server is certainly important and needs to be there, but this is hardly a replacement for WinFS.  Adding features to...

Well, I got my invitation.  I have one album online right now: http://picasaweb.google.com/ariankulp.  It's nice so far, but hardly a Flickr-killer at this point.  I don't see tagging yet (though labels or keywords from Picasa might filter through).  I tried creating an album in Picasa, added some photos, then uploaded them.  From the web site I added captions, then downloaded them back to Picasa.  I thought/hoped that the new captions would import, but leaving the rest of the album alone.  It looks like it had no effect on the local version.  I'll keep messing with it.  It's a simple, elegant...

Wow!  What a cool idea (if it works).  Google has a new add-on to Firefox that makes it completely location-less.  When Firefox starts up it synchronizes your bookmarks, cookies, history, etc.  This has the potential to make your browser experience much more seamless.  I hate rebuilding machines all the time, and something like this could make a big difference at least within the browser.  I am currently using GBookmarks which is a great extension for viewing Google Bookmarks directly from a Firefox menu.  Before that extension came out I didn't see much in using the service since who wants to...

You may have noticed some changes to my blog recently.  Not much on the surface, but a lot taken in whole.  I upgraded my back-end database from Access to SQL Server (finally!) and upgraded my blog software itself (also finally!).  I've been on .Text .95 from the start and I've always liked it, but it's lacking in some ways.  The biggest problem is that it isn't supported.  No active development community means you are on your own!  I mad a few small changes to mine, but I didn't have the energy to do much more.Phil Haack got this project going...

I've been running Vista for a few builds now, most recently getting updated to Beta 2.  It's fairly common for me to need to mount ISO images of CD's/DVD's.  My favorite, Daemon Tools hasn't worked in recent builds so I was forced to look elsewhere.  It turns out that elby Virtual CloneDrive is free, and works great in Vista.  It's possible that Daemon Tools now works in Beta 2, but their last release that promised Vista support never installed properly so I felt a bit let down.  If you need to mount an ISO in Vista, give it a try! Update...

Home computer tip #1 -- of many more I'm sure... ;-)Everyone knows that frequent backups are important, but most people don't do them. Software such as Acronis True Image Backup makes it easy to make frequent (even constant) backups, but not everyone can afford it. If you can (around $40 on Amazon.com), you should! If not, at least drag your documents folder to your CD/DVD burning program weekly or so and make some discs. It's a pain to rebuild a computer, but mostly, it's just that -- a pain. If you lose your...

If you are looking for system memory (and general rule: you should be!), you can do little better than ordering through Memory-Up.com . I ordered some memory from them about a year ago and recently discovered that it had gone bad (severely affecting system stability!). I went online searching for good prices, coincidentally arrived at their site again, and saw magic words: "Lifetime Warranty." Wow! I assumed it wouldn't apply to me due to my propensity to buy cheaper memory, but I was wrong. I applied for an RMA, they send me the...

So I got this flippin' sweet new (old) PDA called the Viewsonic Viewpad 100 . 800x600 resolution (10" or so), resistive touch screen (any touch, no stylus needed), USB device support(!), CompactFlash, PC Card, infrared, and more. The device is really cool, and went for near $1000 when it came out ($100 for mine...). The problem is its software support. It only runs Windows CE 3.0. Of course no new software has come out for that in a few years. There are actually quite a few applications out there,...

Google has announced that they have purchased Writely.  Great move.  I can actually take credit for sending that as a suggestion to Google a few months ago.  Maybe they didn’t directly act on my suggestion, but the synergy was immediately apparent to me.  Here you’ve got a company that hopes to put all the information in the world online.  Recent leaks from them make it clear that they plan online storage in the near future.  This works nicely.  What’s the point of just storing your data if you need to download it to work with it?

I've been reading about gaming changes in Windows Vista, and I must say it's a good start.  Game ratings have been around for too many years to have no OS integration yet.  If you haven't heard yet, Vista will allow you to restrict user accounts for movie ratings (DVD), music ratings (CD), and game ratings.  The game ratings can use ESRB or other ratings services along with administrator-set preferences to allow or disallow the game to run.  As parents of young kids will know, this is pretty handy!  Especially I hope that this works with my system where all children's...

Google has (out of the blue as far as I can tell) decided to take on the free web hosting services. So cool! Their new feature, Google Pages (pages.google.com) lets you author online or upload your own pages. It works very well as much as I've played with it so far. Just a couple of buttons for WYSIWYG, or a button to switch to HTML view. It's a very templated approach with their browser-based tool, but they are nice templates, and probably fine for most people. The editing is intuitive and powerful enough. ...

The Files and Settings Transfer wizard (F.A.S.T for short) is a common utility used to copy files and application settings from one computer to another. It can even be used as a limited backup tool on a computer. After choosing what to backup, the files are consolidated to one or two big ones which can then be burned to CD, copied to USB flash drive, etc. I got a new laptop yesterday, so the first thing I did was run the wizard on the old laptop, then bring the files to the new laptop. Unfortunately, I was completely out of...

I'm sure that my thousands and thousands of daily readers (*) missed me sorely the past few days, but I'm back online again.  I switched hosting providers and it was not fun getting back on.  I assumed it would be a no-downtime switch from one provider to another, but I was told (after the fact) that there is always a 24-48 hour downtime period when switching.  This makes no sense to me at all, so assume it's their fault.  To make things worse, they also didn't tell me that I had explicitly click one radio button to actually switch the...

Skype sent out a few “limited” invitations for their new beta build.  The biggest new feature is the addition of video to their already first-class communication tool.  I've got to say I'm impressed so far.  I've only made one video call so far, but it was 15 minutes.  The other user was also broadband, but was West coast (I'm in the Midwest).  Latency was acceptable, and audio quality didn't seem to suffer at all with video.  It started nearly instantly and the audio and video seemed to keep in sync pretty well.  I'd like to try a few more calls...

Well, months and months ago I saw a few bloggers mentioning that Web Clips were now showing up above the Inbox in Gmail.  Unfortunately I didn't get it at that point.  I have it now.  Web Clips is just Google's term for RSS items.  If you use the Google personalized home page (their portal-lite), you already have access to Web Clips as snap-ins to the page.  I'm not sure how useful it will be in Gmail with the items just appearing one at a time with little control.  Well, you can cycle them forward and backward, but I'm used to...

      My work definitely has its perks when I get to work with cutting-edge stuff, often not even released yet.  Up until now though, it's been strictly software.  For a recent project I've gotten the opportunity to work with two fingerprint-enabled devices: The LaCie USB 2.0 40GB 2.5“ Safe Mobile hard drive (~$140), and the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader (~$40).  Both work pretty well and are fun to play with.       The Microsoft unit is a dedicated fingerprint reader for Windows and web site authentication.  Unfortunately that's about it.  There's no easy way to use the fingerprint for other applications.  On the other hand,...

This is the coolest thing I've stumbled across in awhile.  A student at Stanford figured out a way to capture light in a camera differently than other cameras, and he can actually focus the image after taking the picture!  This is so much like science fiction!  Just imagine in a movie: “Focus on that person in the corner“ “But sir, it's totally blurry!“ “Just do it!“ An now, he can!  Just amazing.  The video clips linked from each image shows just how cool it really is.  It just looks like someone performing focus prior to taking a picture, except that it's done later.  This...

The title refers to a great article on Wired.  I feel this way exactly.  If technology is so great, why do people work so much and feel that they get so little done?  Everyone just gets more impatient as they get used to certain things being instant.  Other things take way too long, are hard to learn, rarely work right, and require changing the way we do things to conform to the computer.  We have such a long way to go for technology to get out of the way and let us live.  It should augment what we do, make...

Well, I guess I've made the switch from Virtual PC.  I've really enjoyed my time with VPC, but VMWare seems to have smoked it!  The ability to run VM's tabbed or stand-along windows is pretty cool.  Even better is the ability to keep hierarchical snapshots and linked clones.  That one feature would bring VPC back into the running probably.  I also like how VMWare lets you expose just about any device to the VM.  VPC does not support USB, or much else really.  It's a lowest common denominator approach to virtualization.  VMWare supports common disk controller, video, network, and sound...

If you're focused on avoiding spam, you should check out SpamGourmet.com.  You specify a root email address and a forwarding address and you're set! For instance: Register JohnSmith@spamgourmet.com forwarded to JohnSmith@yahoo.com Visit dishonestspammer.com and register with dishonestspammer.johnsmith@spamgourmet.com That's it!  Messages with your root will either create a new suffix automatically (dishonestspammer in this case), or check your limits on an existing one. By default, three messages will be delivered, but you can change the number across the board or per alias, and even designate a domain that can send you messages for a given suffix.  This is great if you visit cnn.com and...

I've been getting into hardware virtualization lately.  If you've never had a chance to play with it, it can take some serious head warping to really grok it.  The idea of virtual machines isn't completely foreign as anyone into video game system emulation knows.  Of course, as the word implies, video game emulation is about faking the chips so software thinks it's running on a different box.  With virtualization, the processor, video card, sound card, and other devices are real, but partitioned so different environments can use them at the same time.  It's pretty wild the first time you see...

Yay!  Google has added an RSS reader to their product lineup.  With multiple computers it can be a pain to keep a feed list in sync, so I've always wanted a good online solution (as with everything else).  I know that there are other solutions out there, but I like keeping the services unified as much as possible.  Google works pretty well overall.  I have some complaints about Google Mail and Google Groups, but I like most of the features.  They get better and better over time, and are very useable even in current beta status. If you have a lot...

I preordered a book on Amazon a few weeks ago, and it finally shipped this week.  I went to check the delivery status, and was shocked to see that apparently delivery is going to take about two months!  I'm not quite sure how it can possibly take that long, but I guess if they just leave the package laying around, then every so often send it on to the next point they can do it.  Maybe if I'm lucky I'll get it before December!     Update: The order arrived on Monday (10/3).  So much for their estimate!

I mean it.  Well, at least I should say I love them when they just do what they should do.  That's just so rare though.  Buy a new device, enjoy it for awhile, then get ready for the downhill drop-off.  My Nikon CoolPix 5700 stop being able to sense when the flash was up so I had to sent it authorized repair.  Much more than I wanted to pay.  Now the lens it locked in the extended position.  Something happened on my trip to LA for the PDC.  No idea what it could be.  I took pictures that evening, and...

Yet another late update! I installed Windows Media Center about a week and a half ago and I am just loving it. The machine is a 1.0 GHz Pentium III with 768 MB RAM, about 100GB HD space, a GeForce FX 5200 for primary display card, and Avermedia 1500 MCE TV tuner card. The setup works really slick. I think I can see the 1.0GHz in some of the visual effects, but the TV viewing/recording works like a charm. I plan on writing a plugin or two for it as soon as I have a...

I have done an awful job of updating things lately. I setup a machine with Windows Vista last week and haven't mentioned it yet. It's very nice looking and seems to perform fairly well on my hardware. Unfortunately it doesn't support my sound card, so multimedia is a bit stunted. I plan on using it for a few hours here and there for productivity (switching back to a real machine if necessary so I don't hinder my work!). I'll blog about experiences (hopefully with some pictures too) when I have a chance.

While looking for 17" LCD monitors today I came across a questionable deal on Buy.com. Sure the $30 discount for using your Buy.com Visa card is nice, but even at $1,104,941.99 it doesn't seem like much of a deal! No wonder it's only #29,463 in their sales rank!

Well I recently ranted about how much pain blog spam can be. My problem isn't feedback spam as many people report. I tried a CAPTCHA control but it (a) didn't work, and (b) didn't seem necessary. The real issue for me is trackbacks.  Well, in response to a comment by Michael Campbell I installed a tool called ReverseDOS This effectively stalls any network connections trying to send pingbacks. It was a snap to install and it really works! Bottom line, if you are having problems with blog spam -- install ReverseDOS!

This isn't news anymore (came out in June), but I'm not sure how many people know about it. Microsoft release an unsupported plugin for Windows to view Canon and Nikon RAW images directly in Windows Explorer. You get thumbnailing and double-click view functionality without opening Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or the proprietary vendor viewers. I've been using it since it came out and I'm very pleased with it. It's no help for editing, but if you are tired of seeing generic icons in Windows Explorer thumbnail view when you have RAW images mixed with JPEG's in...

Well it's about time! Microsoft has finally released a tool for synchronizing folders between computers. This can be used to keep folders on a laptop and a desktop in sync. It's an unsupported PowerToy at this point, but it could well be functionality to be merged into Longhorn/Vista if it's well-received. It's definitely a product that has been needed for awhile. I used Groove for file sync and I just hated it. Groove was a pretty industrial strength network application and overkill for most people (not to mention absolutely horrible resource utilization). I...

Well July was an interesting month for the Kulp's. I attended a church music conference in central PA, visited relatives in Pittsburgh, and spent a week in Mexico (Cancun). I plan on writing a little bit on each of these things soon. I took over 700 pictures between the trips and some of them are even good! I'll be posting some this week. I did no email during any of the travel, so it was a pretty disconnected month. I did have some work days in-between trips though so I didn't get too far...

Just call me the Googleblogger! It seems like a good percentage of my posts mention Google. I just think they are such a cool company though. Up until now I've been content with the built-in search bar for Firefox. Hit CTRL+K and you get popped up there, CTRL+UP/DOWN cycles between search engines (which you can add to!). It works pretty well, but there were a few things from the Google IE Toolbar that I missed. Spell check Up (go up one portion of the URL -- more useful than you'd think) Form Autofill Each of these options are pretty...

In response to a post asking about why I went with an external USB storage device, I've decided to respond as a new post. The device I bought lets you take any regular internal hard drive and mount it as a USB drive, then remove it whenever.  The advantage is that you can store gobs of data and have easy access to it from any computer.  Just like a USB key on steroids.  With USB 2.0 you should have speeds close to internal, though as it turns out I have a driver issue limiting my speed right now (ARGH). As for why I...

Well we've certainly seen some movement in the mapping space in recent months. MSN announces that their Virtual Earch is nearing completion, Google is updaing their acquired Keyhole package as Google Earth, and in the background NASA release version 1.3.1.1 of their open source WorldWind package on May 26th. How to keep up! It's the coolest thing, and for once you don't need to be an uber-geek to get the most out of it. This is something I can show my wife -- even my mother! -- and get an "ooohhh!" out of her. That's...

Well I got everything up and running with no issues. It's a nice setup overall, though it seems like it may not be running at full speed capability. I thought perhaps my BIOS needed updating to take full advantage of USB 2.0 but Windows sees it as 2.0 so probably that's not the case. It's not that it's slow, but if I run Virtual PC off of it, startup time is slow as to be unuseable. USB 2.0 speeds are supposedly sufficient (as testified by friends) so that makes it seem like a problem on my...

I decided I needed an external hard drive enclosure. Keeping files in sync between my desktop and laptop is a pain. I own Groove but I hate it (I should write a post on that at some point...). I don't know many options for easy syncing between network machines, but it shouldn't be such a pain. Regardless, it's nice to just have the files separate from the machines. I'll keep my Virtual PC images on there, my documents, and a/v work I'm in the middle of. I ordered a 200GB (or was it 250GB?)...

I need to just add a Google category! I must admit, I'm almost always enamoured by their offerings, and generally a bit surprised as well. Tonight, an entry in their blog mentioned that they have now released the Google Web Accelerator, into their typical beta status. I went to the page and expected to be disappointed. I figured that, like the Google Toolbar, it would only be available to IE users. Since I'm mostly on Firefox now I'd be left out. How pleasantly surprised I was to see an installed for IE and Firefox!...

So I'm browsing for new technology items and I come across this link about the Zigbee protocol. This has me interested. Yet another variant of 802.x, this time 802.15.4. It's another standard like Bluetooth and the soon-to-be-released Ultra WideBand (supposed to be USB unplugged). Of course, that just makes it yet another wireless standard. Its claim to fame is inexpensive hardware, low power consumption, low data-rate, and security. They claim incredibly long battery life -- up to 1000 days! This is mostly due to the ability of the devices to sleep most of...

I discovered a cool feature on A9.com the other day. For those people that haven't seen A9 yet, it's Amazon's search engine. Many of the results come from Google, but it has a decent interface and ties results together nicely. You can have image and web search results (and other types) visible at the same time and show/hide them easily. Recently they entered the Yellow Pages arena (business phone listings for those outside of the USA). They added two interesting twists though. You can actually view pictures of listings in several major cities, and...

It looks like neat things are on the horizon for Skype! I've been an (informal) evangelist of them for awhile now and recently got a USB box to connect a regular cordless phone into my PC (thanks, Patrick!). Calls to real phones are 2-3c/minute, and to other computers running Skype are free. The quality is just amazing and NAT/firewall traversal is unreal. Phones like this being able to work between networks will be incredible. I'm not sure if agreements like this are the best in general though. Why not cell/VoIP phones, rather than cell/Skype?...

Well it looks like Google has done it again. Their new Maps feature (still in beta) is a formidable opponent to the other online map offerings. I'm primarily familiar with MSN Maps and Mapquest so I can't comment on all of them, but Google is the best I've seen so far. It has such an uncluttered interface. No ads to be seen at this point. Of course, still being beta might just mean that the ads aren't ready yet, but for now it sure is nice! I always like how MSN Maps did an instant zoom...

I've been a user of Google's Gmail email service (http://gmail.google.com) for eight or nine months now and I've really been enjoying it. They still have a ways to go as far as I'm concerned compared to "complete portfolio" services through companies like Yahoo. I like Yahoo's briefcase and photo features, along with scheduling and notepad. Google has their excellent Picasa product but no online counterpart. They need some way of at least organizing pictures that arrive as attachments even if they don't turn it into a full-fledged gallery product. I tried to search messages the...