It’s the small things that are special. I was buying a roll of mixed fruit Mentos today and noticed that the wrappers are different. They’ve changed the end-foil color to bright pink, and changed a few other elements of the package imaging. They’re now called “fruit” instead of “mixed fruit,” which the old rolls said.
Same great mentos… now with a new look!
Just like you could drive a racecar through New York, You can now fly an airplane over several cities around the word. Googles, the Google Maps Flight Sim is a little Flash app that puts you in a little green and yellow plane where you can fly all over Google Maps satellite pictures of the world.
Have you ever dreamed of signing karaoke with the entire internet? Well guess what, your dreams have come true with the beta release of SingShot. Plug in your computer mic, fire up your browser and in a slick flash interface you can hear other people’s renditions of (somewhat) popular songs, or sing your own. You can rate people’s singing and the system will even give you points on how well you’ve done. For their beta, you can get in for a free 2 week trial for signing (listening is always free). It looks like down the road a ways, they’ll be charging a monthly fee to record your own songs. So if you’ve got people coming over this weekend and nothing to do, why not sing for the internet?
For Jess’ graduation, I told her I’d put together an entertainment PC for her so she could Tivo (that’s a verb now) shows, organize music, watch DVD’s etc. She graduated back in May and I’ve been putting off buying the pieces until just last week when Intel dropped their processor prices. Everything showed up via UPS last Friday so I starting putting the pieces together. At this point, the computer itself is functional, but the entertainment portion still needs a good deal of tweaking. I plan on updating my progress on the software side of things as they progress. I thought I’d start with laying out the hardware that went into this baby.
The Guts:
The guts are your pretty standard PC parts. I went with an Intel Pentium D 940 dual core processor. That processor was pretty much determined for me by the case that I chose (more about that later). Ram is 1Gb (512Mb x 2) DDR2 SDRAM (nothing special there). I grabbed a Maxtor 200Gb hard drive and an IO Magic DVD+-R DL burner at Staples earlier in the summer for a pretty good deal with rebates. Nothing too out of the ordinary there… just your everyday computer components.
Capture Card:
For the capture card, I went with the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 l.p. card since the Hauppauge cards are usually the most recommended TV tuner/capture cards out there. I needed the low profile (l.p.) version of the card specifically for the case (again more about that later) that I chose.
Input:
For this computer to be functional in a living room setting, I needed to find a keyboard/mouse that was wireless and wasn’t too intrusive sitting on a coffee table. I did a lot of digging and found there aren’t a whole lot of options out there for HTPC keyboard/mouse combos. I ended up going with the Microsoft Remote Keyboard/Mouse for Windows Media Center Edition. I’m not planning on running Windows MCE, but really liked the layout of this keyboard. My favorite part (and the hardest thing to find in a keyboard) is the built in mouse button in the upper right. So, this is the only thing you need sitting in front of the TV. There is no need for a wireless keyboard and a mouse. I read some reviews about the mouse button being difficult to use, but wasn’t too worried since if things worked the way they were supposed to work there wouldn’t be too much need for mouse control. I’ll admit once I got it up and running it was a little awkward at first, but after a few days I’ve got it down. I did need to download the MCE Rollup 2 to get this working in XP Pro.
The Case:
The case is the thing that makes this computer. I’ve been scouring reviews and HTPC sites all summer trying to find a nice case for this computer. There are a lot of companies out there that make HTPC cases. Some are nice, and some are just huge (definitely not something I’d want in my entertainment center)! I knew going into this that wanting a small case, might lead to sacrifices in other areas of the computer. The case I ended up going with wasn’t just a case, but a full bare bones system with a lot of bells and whistles. I chose the Aopen EPC945-m8 which turned out to be a really nice rig, though a bit of a bear to set up. The thing about the EPC945-m8 that sold me was the size and look. It really looks like it belongs in your entertainment center. It has a lot of nice features built in as well. 
It comes with the IR port built in (no ugly USB ports to deal with) and includes an MCE remote control. It’s got on-case controls, along with an up-front display. There is a built-in flash card reader. Also the motherboard has a good number of built-in extras as well. It’s got surround sound audio with several optical out ports (in addition to your typical mini-plug ports). It includes several options for video as well with Intel cards. These aren’t your high end gaming cards, but I have a desktop for gaming and really wasn’t planning on playing games on this machine. The included cards provide standard vga out along with a DVI port, composite RGB ports, and an s-video port. That pretty much covered everything I needed for now.
As I put this together, I took a lot of photos that are available in a Flickr set with notes associated for more information. The problems I ran into were mainly due to the small size of this case. It’s not easy to stuff so much hardware into such a little space. It all fit, but there were some pretty tight areas. The drive cage that holds the optical drive on top and the hard drive on the bottom 
was a bit difficult to get together. The cables (power and data) have to be stretched just right to make them reach the ports on the drives. It didn’t help matters that I had a bad hard drive to start things out and had to do an exchange to get one that worked. The included processor fan is another added bonus. It’s a heatpipe quiet fan system that is actually very quiet. You really don’t hear the thing at all. The only time I notice any real noise coming out of it is when the DVD drive is spinning and a little bit when the hd clicks. One other little issue has popped up has to do with how the machine handles video out. I started with it plugged into a standard computer monitor with the VGA port to get everything installed. Once the OS was on there, I moved it to the living room to hook it to a TV to make sure I could view it on the TV. It didn’t work at first, but all of a sudden I started getting a signal using the S-video out. Seeing that everything worked, I wanted to move it back to the monitor (since it’s a lot easier to see) to finish tweaking software etc. I couldn’t get it to move back to the VGA out. I found a little hidden entry in the FAQ that said you have to hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to swap between the video ports (which wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the somewhat lacking documentation included with the case). Outside of a few difficulties due to the case size and routing stuff around the inside, and the video out thing (which works fine now) I’m very happy with this thing.
Check out my HTPC Flickr Set for more images and information.
Software:
For the software that runs on this baby I’m still playing around with a lot of stuff. I’m planning on going with Meedio which was recently purchased by Yahoo to control the HTPC portion. I’ve got Sage TV for the Tivo-like functionality, and probably some other odds and ends to be figured out later. There is still a lot of fine tuning to do with the software before this thing is ready to roll. I’ll post again down the road a bit when I’m able to get all that worked out.
Here is my contribution to the web 2.0 redesign satire series.
Mentos (evidence of their brilliance) has put together a contest for Mentos Geyser videos at www.mentosgeyser.com. These videos are pretty much taking over the internet. Just do a search for Mentos on Youtube or Google Video, and you’ll see what I mean. Or take a look at my post from a little while back about that really impressive Mentos fountain. The contest doesn’t officially start until July 31st so the details are still a little sketchy, but prizes include: 1000 iTunes song downloads and a year supply of Mentos. I do wonder how much a “year’s supply” actually is. A year’s supply of Mentos for me is probably a little bit more than your average person. I tried this experiment quite a while back before there were a million and one videos of it on the internet (it also works with pixie stix). I’m going to have to think of some cool way of doing it again for this contest.
As I was looking at some videos for this post, I ran across this interview with a Mentos marketing guy regarding the recent spike in Mentos geyser videos.
Last.fm, which I blogged about a while back has launched an updated version of their site (code named Operation Depth Charge). They’ve added some cool new features and totally overhauled their player. I use Last.fm all the time (mainly for listening to internet radio at work) and love the new features. If you’ve not checked out the site yet, do it NOW. Add me as a friend (my username is scottfi). It’s a great system for discovering new music based on what you already listen to. I discover cool new artists every day.
It has an “R” instead of an “ER,” so you know it’s got to be a new Flickr tool. Preloadr is a simple photo editing tool that works hand in hand with Flickr. It’s totally web-based, and lets you do a number of simple edits and manipulations to photos you’ve uploaded to Flickr. It includes all the standard rotation, flipping, resizing and cropping tools, in addition to a number of filters and advanced features. You can also add text and titles to images.
Filters included:
If you’re on a computer where there is no image manipulation software, Preloadr is a handy site to have around.
A new Mentos flavor has recently been discovered. Mentos Ambassador Moore brought me a roll of Strawberry Yogurt flavored Mentos that he found in France. It’s always nice to be presented with a flavor I’ve never heard of before. Plus it’s good for my Mentos Ambassadors working their way up the chain. You’re well on your way to Mentos Ambassador General, M.A. Moore! Your official Mentos Ambassador Card is on its way.
I can’t really say what these taste like since I only have one roll. Normally if I’ve only got one roll, I like to keep it in my Mentos archive. If I’ve got more than one I’ll usually break into the second one to see how the flavor rates. I’m sure they’re great though, since I’ve never had a Mentos wasn’t!
Back when MTV used to play actual music videos this site has 1500 videos from the 80’s. I just spent way too long digging through this site. How many of these do you remember?
This page is 9 quadrillion (yes, that’s a real number!) pixels by 9 quadrillion pixels. At 77 pixels per inch, the page is 1.844 billion miles per side…. BIG! This ginormous page was put together to show just how big the universe is.
P.S. It only displays correctly in Firefox.
On Thursday, Google released their long-rumored Checkout service. This new service allows shoppers with a Google Checkout account to pay for merchandise at a long list of retailers. This isn’t quite the PayPal killer (at least at this time) that it was rumored to be. It’s more of a shopping cart system that can be added to your merchant site so you don’t have to directly deal with credit card processing. It’s probably most similar to what Amazon does now when a merchant sells their merchandise through them. A buy has the confidence that the business is legit because Amazon is behind it, and they don’t need to register a login at 100 different places since their one and only Google account has all the credit card information built right in. So in that sense, as a buyer, I think this is a good thing. Hopefully they eventually move this service into the PayPal online wallet/bank account type arena as well. Lord knows PayPal needs the competition, since they’re really one of the only games in town when it comes to buying items in online auctions. Like every new Google venture, it’ll be interesting to see where this one goes.
Not 99, not 100, but 101 FREE Games on the internet. These are the cruddy flash games you see everywhere (there have got to be WAY more than 101 of those). Computer Gaming World has put together a pretty extensive list of actual decent games to download free from the net. So, if you were just saying to yourself, “Self, we need to find something to do this weekend… I wish we had a new game or two to play!” worry no more, 101 free games list to the rescue!
For the 50th anniversary of the Twinkie last year, Hostess released a cookbook full of recipes using Twinkies. It includes some weird stuff like a Twinkie Burrito and Twinkie Lasagna (some of the recipes are available here).
I think Perfetti Van Melle (the brilliant company behind Mentos) need to get their act together and make a Mentos cookbook. Maybe when I retire I’ll write one. Anybody have any ideas for Mentos recipes?
Last week Google came out with a new service called Picasa Web Albums. It is the online photo album for Picasa users that has been rumored to be coming out for some time now. It is still in “Test,” which is odd since everything else google puts out there is in “beta,” so there are probably some features that are still coming. Digital Inspiration does a nice job comparing the new service to flickr (and how if falls short) in several key areas. But again, more features could still be on their way.
I got a test account with the new Web Albums and it gives you a new beta version of the Picasa application to download with some nice new features. The about screen shows this as version 2.5. So, while the web albums may be lacking, the new features that they’ve put into Picasa are actually pretty useful.
The first new item that jumps out right away are the new buttons along the bottom, where an appropriately named “web album” button has been added for your to upload your photos to the web. This button prompts you for your web album login/pass and then asks you for an album name, or allows you to put the photos in an existing web album. You’ve also got options to resize the photos for the upload, which is something you’d probably want to do based on the size limits in place for web albums.
Another nice organization feature is in the upper left corner of the program where they’ve added a couple new buttons and categories. First, you can organize your image folders and collections much easier by moving through them, or by clicking the new button to create a new one. There has also been and addition to the top of the album and thubmnail columns. There are now two new categories called Screensaver and Starred Photos. The Screensaver category will add any photos in that category to a screensaver that shows up in the Windows display properties. You can chose what photos you want to rotate through the screensaver. The other new category is the Starred Photos. Starring photos has always been an option in Picasa. You can add a star to the photos that you like the best or want to set apart from the others. In this new version, you can easily view all the photos that you’ve marked with a star in one place instead of digging through hundreds of thumbnails trying to find the ones you’ve marked.
The new Picasa also has a few new menu items added. Under the Tools menu, there are a few new items. The first is an option called “configure buttons” that lets you add, remove and rearrange buttons in the bottom menu. Right now there aren’t any buttons that don’t display by default. I hoping that down the road Google might open up this area for other developers to create buttons that will allow Picasa to be plugged into other applications. Another new menu under tools is the “Geotag” option. It pulls up Google Earth with a little cross-hair letting you find and mark where the photo was taken. Right now it seems to be a bit limited, but I can see this taking off more down the road as Picasa Web Albums become more widespread. Similar to 
what you used to be able to do with Flickr, you’d be able to see all photos geotagged in the area you’re viewing in Google Earth. The last new item in the Tools menu is the “Experimental” menu, which includes several options. Publish via FTP, should actually be called “Export as html page” since that’s what comes up when you select that option. At least in this version of the software (from what I can find) it doesn’t really do anything via FTP. Show Duplicate Files finds duplicate photos you have in your collection. Search for, brings up a list of colors and finds all the photos that have a large portion of the color selected in them. The last item in experimental is upload to google video, which again does what you’d expect it to do.
I’m sure I missed some of the new features in the special beta version of Picasa, but the ones that I noticed were definite improvements. There are a lot of little things that just seem to work smoother too. I’ve been using Picasa for organizing my photos about a year now (after Adobe Album corrupted its database one too many times) and like the direction things seem to be moving. It’s definitely my photo program of choice and will continue to be.
