So if you are anything like me you will be a little sick of seeing the same Microsoft blue everywhere you look. Don’t despair I just worked out how to change the appearance (i.e. Skin) of Outlook 2007. It is actually very easy but not obvious – probably why I only discovered it today.
Now you can choose a nice black theme to match your Vista Transformation Pack or Nasa Night Launch theme for Firefox. That rocks!
Outlook Skin Screenshot Black
The full release in now available. If you get it today you’ll contribute to Mozilla’s World Record attempt if that sort of thing appeals to you.
I have installed it and apart from some plugins not being available all is well. A bug I’ve had since 2.x is still apparent which I was hoping would be fixed – an issue with my bookmarks toolbar which extends off the side of the screen. The bug is that the little double drop down arrow (the one that reveals the bookmarks that wouldn’t fit in the bar) still isn’t visible until I have clicked one of my bookmarks. It’s probably because my Stumble bar shares the line. Oh well the awesomeness of the awesome bar makes up for that!
linkage: download firefox 3.0
Another nice photo viewer based around spherical image walls or ‘planets’ I guess. Check it out anyway.
linkage: tag galaxy
Cooliris (already known for their webpage preview when you hover over a link) have a plugin available for you browser called Piclens. After installing, with a single click you will be able to transform your flickr or youtube browsing to a beautifully rendered fullscreen photo wall.
Before
After
update July 2008: WordPress does not currently support the Piclens plugin – however you can still leverage it simply by hosting your pics somewhere like Flickr
It’s is actually pretty simple to get Piclens working on your blog. Simply host all your photos on Flickr (or similar piclens supported website). That way the little piclens play button is just visible and working.
So instead of uploading your picture directly to wordpress – upload them to Flickr (there is a good Batch Uploading tool if you upload photos all the time).
Once on Flickr browse to your photo
Right Click – Copy Address (firefox anyway – Internet Explorer may be a little different). Make sure you have the correct picture size selected ie Not the thumbnail
In WordPress create new post
Insert Image
Paste the URL you just copied from Flickr
Add a description
Add a Caption if you want
Insert Image into Post
Thats it! When you publish your post you’ll now see the Piclens icon for any/all pics you have hosted on Flickr.
linkage: download piclens plugin
Succeeding in staying a step behind Google’s platform Android, but releasing an SDK anyway, Apple will be opening up their phones for developers to generate apps for them free of charge. They have decided to take on Blackberry and friends by moving to the corporate market with support for Exchange and ActiveSynch and Cisco providing IPSec secure VPN tunneling over WPA2 Wifi encryption (That’s all good news if you were wondering).
I don’t know if we’ll see Outlook/LiveMail apps but it’s a possibility I guess
linkage: via apple.com, download SDK (you’ll need apple ID)
Looking for a FPS game where you won’t be shot in the face repeatedly by a swearing ultra skilled 15 year old boy who plays the game for 8 hours a day? We’ll the forthcoming release of Battlefield Heroes from EA Digital Illusions might just be your thing. It promises FUN! Remember that from the days of the C64? And it’s FREE.
Free to download AND free to play. I wonder what their scheme for making $ is then? We all know EA aren’t Altruists. I guess they will have purchasable upgrades or something of the kind. Anyway it looks like it could amuse me for 15 minutes. Due out summer 2008
Now this looks interesting. The sooner we can loose the keyboard and mouse the better. Speech control has never really taken off so maybe we should skip that and go neural? With the demo at GDC (Game Developers Conference) of the Epoc headset by Emotiv (planned for late 2008 release) thought controlled PC may be closer than we’d suspected.
linkage: via kotaku.com
Version 0.4 (developer edition) of Mozilla’s new integrated media browser is out so I decided to take it for a spin through my music collection to see how it is coming along.
The immediately obvious likeness to firefox means that the interface and options are intuitive, but also means that it can easily become a memory hog. I observed it around hovering close to 200 MB’s at times and this was very noticeable in sluggish performance overall. If you can get over the performance of a slug, the application gives hope of a nice integrated media player and web browser which suits me fine – as these are my primary apps on my media centric workstation.
The slick mozilla look aside, Songbird 0.4 is missing too many of the features I find essential for day to day media playback like auto playlists, and even built-in playlists like “Recently Added”. I have no doubt these will come but at present Songbird falls well short of my expectations for an all encompassing media player. Songbird seems to hover dangerously close to a “Marketable Model” with tight integration to internet provided [sponsored?] content which gives me a bit of a chill being as this is Mozilla and not Apple… times are a changing.
Stil take it for a test drive yourself and see how you like it. I’m going to add it to my watch list – but won’t be making the transition from Media Monkey in the foreseeable future.
linkage: download songbird developer edition
This is a nice way to look at a collection of photos, like a pile of Polaroids on a desktop.
Download v3 of this fantastic flash animated screen saver clock and calendar.
linkage: download via pixebreaker
The media browsers and database collections of most digital DJ mixing systems can be a bit painful to use (e.g. Virtual DJ). I have found that accurately tagging my collection in another program like Media Monkey and then copying the collection over in bulk to the mixing laptop is the best method of managing my collection.
Every incoming file on my computer automatically ends up in a folder called _untested. The _untested folder is further divided into sub folders Completed Torrents, From People, GetRight, and Soul Seek . In each root folder there will be individual files like in the picture below
Whenever I have the time I troll through all the folders and clean them out. All the software gets deleted or moved to the Software Drive (S:), same for the Watching Pleasure (W:). All the music I extract and play next in Media Monkey. I quickly skip through a few tracks to get a feel for genre of the album. I’ll delete the whole album fairly ruthlessly if it sounds at all cheesy or not really my style.
A friend was visiting a few weeks ago and brought in his M-audio Torq Xponent in for me to have a mix on. I enjoyed my self so much over the next 24 hours that I went and got myself one.
I had been having some problems with my existing system a M-Audio external Audiophile sound card and Virtual DJ software. The Audiophile sound card with ASIO drivers crashed way too often to be performance worthy. The pitch would drop and the sound would start distorting, usually as a second track was added to a mix.
The Xponent includes a two channel sound card so I wouldn’t have to worry about using the crappy on board Ac97 sound card for the headphone channelas an added bonus of upgrading.
Having had the system for a couple of weeks now using the included Torq mixing software I have been pretty happy with the results. The Torq software still seems to have a few problems and has crashed a number of times, which is a few times too many. The software is a year on and up to V1.04 so they are addressing problems – but more to resolve. I don’t have 100% confidence to play live with it at this point in time, but I hope that will change by the next version.
I have set up a dedicated 3 GB partition on my mobile desktop, a Clevo D900k, with WinXP SP 2 and all Windoze updates installed. The partition is on a striped RAID array for optimal performance. Base system drivers installed ie. RAID, AMD processor management, as well as WiFi for Windoze updates. All unnecessary Windows components have been uninstalled and I have disabled any service (see this post) that isn’t going to be required. There are a lot that you do not need for DJ’ing and diasbling them can give any computer a performance boost.
click here for the rest of the review
The TED ideas web site has posted a great clip demonstrating Photosynth (and other visualization technologies) and application that composites 3d spacial renderings from the global pool of images tagged with metadata. The example of Notre Dame cathedral is truly boggling. They hyperlink to photos people have taken and posted onto sites like Flickr and position them in a model of real space on top, in front, or beside other identified images. The result is a composite of the real object. The implications are far reaching (unless Microsoft Labs who bought the company that created Photosynth a year ago) fail to deliver on it’s potential.
I think we will see composite software like this ported onto mapping software like Google Earth to model the world (and then the Universe) and forming the basis for a self creating and maintaining VR world. I can’t wait.
linkage: photosynth video demo via ted, try it yourself on microsoft labs
Power Cursor is a new style of web interface that uses tactile modeling to represent force feedback, all without leaving the browser.
linkage: power cursor
It may not be what we were expecting after reading and watching sci-fi all these years. However Jeff Hawkins (of Palm and Treo fame) and the smart brains at Numenta may have developed the precursors, if not the first, true artificial intelligence. Based around Jeff’s HTM (Hierarchical Temporal Memory) model with four essential operations:
linkage: overview of HTM via read write web, download the HTM white paper from numenta
lifehacker
