Microsoft Outlook 2007 has some useful calendaring features for people with several calendars. One feature allows you to view calendars side-by-side. There are also times when I need to overlay or even merge multiple Outlook calendars.
Continue Reading June 30th, 2008
There are some pretty cool new applications out there that I would like to try. The only problem is that I have some problems trusting them. Xoopit and Skyfire are two examples of this.
Xoopit is an extension to Gmail that lets you easily access and share your photos, videos and files that are in your Gmail account. The problem with this is that you have to give them your gmail username and password, in order for them to index the data.
Skyfire is a Windows Mobile web browser. This browser is supposed to deliver a PC based browsing experience that is supposed to be really fase. The problem that I have with this is in their implementation. Essentially the Skyfire browser is a VNC or RDP client. When you enter a web address in the “browser”, it gets sent to their servers which fetch the html and renders web page, and then sends the rendered page to the “browser”. When people enter a secure https url, they have the expectation that their data will be encrypted between their browser and the server on the other end. With Skyfire, the connection is encrypted between Skyfire’s severs and the destination server. I don’t know how the connection is encrypted between the “browser” and Skyfire’s severs.
I am sure that both Xoopit and Skyfire are not going to do anything malicious with my data, but what if their servers are broken in too. For mail, I already am trusting Google with my data, adding another third party, adds another potential point of failure.
Continue Reading June 23rd, 2008
I saw this post that mentioned feedly. This looks like a interesting Firefox chrome application. feedly presents you a start page that summarizes your content from Google Reader. feedly also integrates with various social network sites to allow you to share content that you read.
I don’t know if I will use feedly regularly for reading content, as Google Reader already has a good summary view. I do like, and will continue to use, the interface that feedly offers for subscribing to feeds. On one page, you can subscribe to and tag new feeds. Since feedly relys on Google Reader as the backend, all feeds subscribed to in feedly are actually subscribed to in Google Reader.
I am interested in what they do with the social aspect of feedly. It seems that feedly could enable other ways of sharing content, or discovering new content.
Continue Reading June 23rd, 2008
As I metioned before, I was looking for something to transcode my videos for playback on our XBox. It looks like TVersity is the best solution.
TVersity is an application that is an UPnP/DNLA server that will share your content with any compatible devices. In addtion to just sharing, it can transcode the content so it is playable on most devices.
The installation was a little tricky on Windows Home Server, as you have to RDP in to the server to install it as you would on a windows computer. Also, you have to configure it to run as a service. Also, I had to configure the Windows Home Server firewall to allow connections to TVserity.
Once it was installed, with the additional codecs, I was able to play most of my videos on my Xbox 360, even our home movies that are encoded in MP4. On the Xbox, the TVersity server appeared along side the builtin UPnP server, so you can use either to play your content.
Unfortunately, every time the TVersity server scans for new content (which it is configured to do daily), the services appears to stop running. I am sure that this bug will be fixed, or I can just reduce the number of directories that need to be scanned to only the videos.
Continue Reading June 23rd, 2008
I have been looking for a solution for streaming and transcoding videos to our Xbox from the Windows Home Server. I found WebGuide, and decided to try it out.
WebGuide is a plugin for Windows Home Server that lets you acess the content from your home server from the web. This is different than the file based access that comes with Windows Home Server. You can view thumbnails of photos. Also, you can stream music and video files from the server. WebGuide relies on external transcoders to make your content playable.
I installed WebGuide and the recommend other applications. The integration with Windows Home Server web pages is really nice. It appears as a link on the main page, and it can use the main Windows Home Server authentication.
Viewing photos worked very well. WebGuide exposes the folder structure as albums, and then shows thumbnails as you enter the “albums”. You can also view various sizes of the photos. For music, it looks like it can deliver m3u files for playback in media players, or can play in the flash player. I wasn’t able to get music or video to play with Firefox running on my laptop running Ubuntu. I don’t know if this was because the transcoders weren’t configured correctly or if the mplayer or flash plugins couldn’t handle the streams.
I decided to uninstall WebGuide, as it doesn’t offer a solution to playback the content on my Xbox and I don’t really need another solution for playing my content from the web.
Continue Reading June 23rd, 2008
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