Wow. By following a link in my referral logs I found this great-looking list of Media Center Edition add-ons, courtesy of BenN. It’s much better than the list I linked to earlier this week from The Green Button, because each link goes directly to the page that hosts the add-on instead of making me click through a forum post first.
And Ben, you’re definitely on my radar now. I’m eager to see the major addition to the site you’ve got in store!
Last month, I wrote about Sen. Rick Santorum’s bill to prevent the National Weather Service from freely sharing information it collects with the public. The beneficiary in this scheme would be private companies like AccuWeather, which just happens to be based in Santorum’s home state.
Today comes news that the timing of the bill was, shall we say, interesting:
Two days before Sen. Rick Santorum introduced a bill that critics say would restrict the National Weather Service, his political action committee received a $2,000 donation from the chief executive of AccuWeather Inc., a leading provider of weather data.
Asked about the connection, the Senator replied: “I don’t think there’s any coincidence between the two.”
A refreshing, although almost certainly accidental, bit of truth-telling.
Earlier today I tried to play a DVD on my Media Center PC and received an odd error message. When I looked in the My Computer window, I found that the icon for my CD/DVD drive had gone missing. In Device Manager, the entry for the NEC ND-3800 DVD-RW drive had a yellow exclamation point next to it, indicating a possible driver problem.
I ran through the usual troubleshooting steps with no success, so I turned to Google, where I ran across this handy-dandy “Restore CD/DVD Drives to Explorer” registry fix at Doug Knox’s Windows Tweaks and Tips site. Worked like a charm.
Doug’s site is filled with great stuff like this. He has helped a whole lot of people through the years, I’m sure. Including me. So thanks, Doug!
The Your Tech Weblog (whose author really needs to provide some bio information) recently served up this mini-rant, which I found courtesy of Ernest Miller at Corante:
My current tech pet peeve: gadget power adapters that aren’t properly labeled.
An iRiver AC adapter, for instance, should read “iRiver” somewhere on its surface so it’s more easily associated with an iRiver music player. For tech journalists or geeks with multiple gadgets, this is a potentially nightmarish situation.
PalmOne, for shame; Sony-Ericsson, kudos; etc.
I understand how this happens. Cost-conscious hardware makers buy generic power supplies from low-cost providers. If they have the same power supplies custom made, including the company name and logo, the price goes up. A company that is struggling to be profitable or to avoid losses is going to be tempted to shave 50 cents off the cost of every device as a way to keep its bottom line under control.
The rest of this item contains a solution to this problem, a piece of troubleshooting advice that can help you match a generic power supply to its device, and a bonus tip that might help you reduce the number of power supplies you have to deal with.
Solution: Add your own labels to power supplies. When I get a new device that includes its own AC adapter, I slap a small sticker on it and use a Sharpie to write the device name. (The small labels for file folders usually work well for this purpose.) Update: The PC Doctor notes that the adapter block can get hot and cause the adhesive on the label to give up; he recommends attaching the sticker to the power cord instead.
Troubleshooting advice: Every AC adapter has to be labeled with some key information, which can help you sort out which device it goes with. You may need a bright light and a magnifying glass to read this information, but it’s there. Look for the following data points:
Update: The PC Doctor recommends checking the polarity of the output jack as well. He has a good diagram here.
Armed with that information, I can check the technical specifications section of the manual for my device (Look it up online if you can’t find the printed manual) and find out what its input power requirements are. Those requirements, not surprisingly, should be a perfect match for the output of the power supply. When you find a generic power supply whose power output specs match your device’s input requirements, with a plug that is compatible with the jack on the device, you’ve got a winner. Slap a label on it.
Caution: Don’t assume that any AC-to-DC power converter with a matching plug will work in your portable device. Plugging in a mismatched converter is the surest way I know of to destroy a valuable device.
Bonus Tip: Don’t carry around multiple power supplies if you don’t need them. My wife’s Creative Zen Micro and my Audiovox SMT5600 Smartphone have custom power adapters that carry the company’s logo. But each one has absolutely identical power output specs (5V at 1000mA) and identical USB connectors. I can plug the music player into the phone’s power supply, or vice-versa.
Likewise, the adapters for my iRiver music player and my Creative Labs portable speakers are functionally identical. So, on my recent trip to Europe I carried only two power supplies for these four devices. After the music player was fully charged, I unplugged it and plugged in the phone. That simple step cut the hassle of carrying adapters (and constantly plugging/unplugging them) in half.
You know the rules: Shuffle your entire music collection, click Play, and report the first 20 tracks, no matter what [*]. This week’s list is formatted as artist, song title, and album (in italics):
[*] My one exception is to limit each artist to one track per list. If the same artist appears a second time, I skip over that track. Graham Parker’s superb “Soul Shoes” and an extra track each from Willie & Lobo and Bob Dylan would have made this list otherwise.
Some anonymous stock tipster using a phony e-mail account wants me to invest in a company whose shares only cost 11¢ each. Such a deal! Oh, wait, there is this disclaimer buried at the end of the e-mail, which ironically entitled “Stellar Stock Report”:
As with many microcap stocks, todays company has additional risk factors worth noting. The company has a going concern opinion from its auditor, a large accumulated deficit, a large negative net worth, nominal revenue in its most recent quarter, has a bank overdraft, has relied on loans from officers, directors and related parties to pay expenses, shares outstanding has been increasing and is dilutive to you, is a defendant in litigation, has two judgements against it, and has had numerous business transactions fail because of a financing that did not occur is and the need to raise capital.
A failure to raise capital could cause the company to go out of business.
The company has pledged all its assets to an officer of the company for funds advanced to the company. Failure to repay the loan could cause the company to lose all its assets and go out of business.
Other than that, though, this is really a great investment!
Chris Lanier at The Green Button has updated his comprehensive list of third party applications and plug-ins for Media Center. This is an excellent resource if you have a Media Center PC.
Brian Krebs at the Washington Post reports:
The Department of Homeland Security today received more lumps for failing to implement programs to protect the nation’s most vital computer systems from attack or disruption. The Government Accountability Office issued a report today concluding that the department’s failure to make meaningful progress on its myriad cyber-security programs was due largely to organizational and staffing problems.
The GAO report has a section entitled “DHS Has 13 Key Cybersecurity Responsibilities.” Things like “Develop a national plan for critical infrastructure protection that includes cybersecurity.” And “Support efforts to reduce cyber threats and vulnerabilities.” And “Integrate cybersecurity with national
security.”
Unfortunately, the auditors say: “DHS has not yet developed national cyber threat and vulnerability assessments or developed and exercised government and government/industry contingency recovery plans for cybersecurity, including a plan for recovering key Internet functions.”
Gee. Maybe the Department of Homeland Security would get better results if they spent more time actually protecting, you know, homeland security instead of busting people trading movies over BitTorrent. Which, by the way, isn’t anywhere on that list of 13 key scybersecurity responsibilities.
Office XP and Office 2003 share a feature that is supposed to reduce clutter but instead increases confusion. I’m referring, of course, to the dreaded personalized menus and toolbars feature.
Using default settings, Office menus and toolbars change dynamically as you use each program. If there isn’t enough room on the screen for all the buttons on a toolbar, the program hides some buttons, making sure to display those you’ve used most recently. In the case of menus, the idea is to reduce clutter by showing you only the choices you’re likely to use instead of overwhelming you with a long menu containing many choices. Here’s what it looks like:
See the chevron – the double arrow at the bottom of the menu? That’s your clue that there are more choices available on this menu than you can see. Click the chevron and the full menu drops down.
In practice, personalized menus are confusing to novices and experts. Why do the choices on the menus keep disappearing? Where is the option that’s supposed to be on the current menu? I recommend you configure Office to show full menus all the time. The good news is that one setting applies to all Office programs, so the fix is quick and easy. Here’s what to do:
You’re done. (For a more complete discussion of the ins and outs of this feature and other aspects of the Office interface, pick up a copy of Special Edition Using Office 2003 or Special Edition Using Office XP and read Chapter 2, “Customizing the Office Interface.”)
What if you find yourself working at someone else’s computer, where you’re reluctant to tamper with their settings? Just double-click a top-level menu choice (File, Edit, and so on) when you use an Office program. This shortcut immediately opens the full menu, just as if you had clicked the chevron.
Marc Orchant passes along a tip from PC Magazine that explains how to edit the registry to add “Send” and “Copy” commands to Windows Explorer and concludes with this comment:
After performing this tweak, you’ll have two new context menu commands: “Move to Folder” and “Copy to Folder”. Apparently this stuff is built into Windows but hidden for some mysterious reason.
Mysterious perhaps, but the reason is explained by no less an authority than Raymond Chen, the author of the original power toy for Windows, Tweak UI, in his February 2004 blog post, “What goes wrong when you add “Copy To” to the context menu”:
The “Copy to Folder” and “Move to Folder” options weren’t designed to be on the context menu. They were only meant to be placed in Explorer’s toolbar. (Right-click a blank space on your toolbar, select Customize, and pick “Move To” or “Copy To” from the list of available buttons.) If you add them to the context menu, you may notice that the “Copy To” and “Move To” dialogs start showing up when you really aren’t expecting them, for example, whenever you double-click an attachment in Outlook.
If you do the customization that Raymond suggests, you end up with toolbar buttons that look like this:
There are other tweaks widely publicized on various tip sites that have unpleasant side-effects as well. In this case, the effects are only annoying. If you want to add the context menus to Explorer, nothing bad will happen, but be prepared for an occasional annoyance!
(Oh, and Marc, how come I’m not in your blogroll?!)
Ed Bott 