Well, maybe.

We’ve just bought a Gateway PC with the Windows Media Center OS and all I can say is wow. The dual core machine is extremely fast. I especially like the ability to record TV shows for later playback. With the Xbox Extender, we can even watch content stored on the PC on our flat panel TV. The quality is very good.

We’ve downloaded a number of movies from MovieLink and CinemaNow. I can’t say how much I relish the idea of not making trips to Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.

So what’s the downside to all of this? First the number of movies available for download is limited. This is really hard to understand. So there will be the occasional trip to the video store after all. Damn, I hate those late fees.

Second, the quality of the digital TV really drives home how lousy the quality of the cable service is. Bottom line, I can’t wait for IPTV—digital TV pumped over the Internet. IPTV offers the possibility of extremely high quality video with almost unlimited choices in channels. AT&T has started to roll it out in select markets. I can’t wait until we get it in our area.  

[Via Cool Tools]

Smart Power Strip:

This is so simple. You plug your PC into the main socket, and then plug your printer, scanner, monitor etc into the other sockets. When you turn off your computer, the smart unit shuts the power off to the other sockets. Saves power from constantly-on transformers, saves the environment, and saves lives from electrical fires caused by overheated DC adaptors. Also works for AV equipment.

-- Bruce Richardson

Smart Strip Power Strip
$31
Available from
Amazon

OneClick Power Strip
Available in the UK from
OneClick

My electric bills are killing me, and now I can finally figure out exactly why.

The Kill-A-Watt plugs into a wall outlet and will measure the actual electricity usage of any appliance. I've been wanting one of these things for years, to the point of seriously considering manufacturing one myself. I'm glad someone has finally done it for me. It looks like my computer costs me something like $216 a year to run. Trouble is, I have five of them. Something's gotta go.

Street price for this device is about $30. I should save that much in the first month.

An additional idea that I thought of would be combining these units with that cheesy home-network technology that communicates via your home's electrical system. (Or use WiFi) That way several wall units could communicate with a PC and give you a running total of your energy consumption. The system could automatically retrieve your electrical rates from the Internet and even give you a running total in dollars of what you're spending.

-- Curt Nelson

Kill-A-Watt
$28
Available from
Amazon

Manufactured by
P3 International

FolderShare finished replicating all 3.5 gigs of my photos to my mother's computer. The transfer took some 20 hours over eight days. I suspect the through put was in the 40 kbs range. It's really great to have a duplicate of the photos at another location. I might do the same with my music, which is considerably larger. I'm not afraid of loosing the loosing the music as much as the time it would take to rip several hundred CDs on a new hard drive.  

The Audible software on my Smart Phone stopped working last week when I upgraded to the new release of the Audible software. I kept getting an error message that the phone hadn't been activated for Audible use.

It took about 45 minutes to get tech support Saturday. The support person was really good. He recommended that I uninstall the new Audible software and revert to the previous version, which now is identified as the Windows 98/ME version. It worked like a charm.

I really like audio book service. Right now I'm listening to Library of Congress Series on the Digital Future: Collection. The talk by Dave Weinberg on the demise of taxonomy was excellent.

Microsoft Research has just released a program to help people manager their e-mail inbox. SNARF is an amazing program, it figures out who the most important people are in your world, and flags new e-mail from them. I've just started to use it, and it really does have an uncanny ability understand my inbox. That's no small feat considering I have some 5,000 e-mail stored on my computer.

 Rob Knies at MS Research writes:

SNARF, a complement to e-mail programs such as Outlook, filters and sorts e-mail based on the type of message and the user’s history with an e-mail correspondent. The result: a collection of alternative views of your e-mail that can help you make sense of the deluge.

Too Many E-Mails? SNARF Them Up!

SNARF was developed by A.J. Brush and Marc Smith of the Community Technologies Group at MSR. Marc spoke to my group last week. He's a  really bright, funny guy who loves what he's doing.

How many times did we hear Katrina victims say the first things they tried to recover after the flood waters receded were the family photos and then the home computer? 

My digital family photos are real important to me. I pretty sure I would go back into a burning house to fetch either one of the two computers in which I store my digital pictures. Well, actually I keep them replicated on my Tablet PC and occasionally do back them up on DVDs.

Even so, one can't be too careful.

Last night I started replicating my photos on my mom's computer using FolderShare, a file replication program developed by a small company Microsoft recently bought. My mom lives about 130 miles away in southern British Columbia.

Apparently FolderShare will become an MSN-Windows service. I already use FolderShare to replicate photos and music between my own computers. It's a very small, fast replication program that seems to co-exist with firewalls nicely. As I write this posting from the Crossroads Mall, my Tablet is downloading a CBC radio program from my server back at home, about three miles away. The server automatically recorded the program this morning. The transfer rate is about 40 kilobits per second, an upload limitation of the Comcast network. It transfers at about 500 kbs when the computers are behind the same firewall.

I expect FolderShare will take several weeks to transfer all 9 gigs of photos (my mom only uses the computer about an hour a day). Even so, slow is better than nothing.

Best of all, FolderShare is free. The interface is hard to understand, but once you get it set up, it works like a charm in the background. Now I have to get it working on my mother-in-law's computer so that she gets our latest photos and radio programs that I've recorded on my server. That shouldn't take to long to fix.

With hard drives going so cheaply, FolderShare makes it easy for families to do distributed storage.

Here's an internal posting I made at Microsoft about two years ago. I still believe that messaging is one of the most powerful tools that we have at our disposal. Here's why:

Just wanted to share how Microsoft technology can truly change people’s lives.

In my family, online chatting is more than fun and games, it proved to be a tool for my son to get an A in French.

A year ago, my 13-year-old son, Stephen, was struggling with French. Last year, he just barely passed. He really didn’t look forward to continuing with the subject this year in grade 7.

He needed help, and the best person to help him is my mother, a retired French teacher. Unfortunately, she lives in Vancouver, B.C. It wouldn’t be easy getting the two of them together several times a week during the school year.

My mom, who is 86, bought a new Dell computer with Web camera last summer. She already had broadband through her local cable company.

I suggested that she try tutoring Stephen through MSN Messenger using the audio and video features. A fellow Microsoft employee had told me what a great tool it is to keep family members connected and relevant in each other lives. From experience, I knew Messenger’s audio and video work capabilities worked well. The text chat feature would allow them to interactively go over written work.

The system worked better than I could have imagined. They started to go online every other night for sessions ranging from a few minutes to an hour. Within a few sessions, Stephen really started to do better in his French homework and gained confidence.

His grades improve and within two months he won the student of the month award for his French work. He nailed down an A in French in his last report card.

My mom has had a rough year health wise, and I think it’s done her wonders to spend time online with her only grandchild.

The technology in itself didn’t solve the problem. Stephen had to be willing to do the work and make the effort to go online – something that doesn’t come easy for a 13-year-old boy who would rather be playing Halo. My mom hasn’t lost her touch as a teacher even though she retired some 30 years ago.

But the technology paved the way to bring together a grandson who really needed his grandmother’s help. I’d say that’s really cool.