Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"I've now had my hands on Windows 7 beta 1 build 6.1.7000.0.081212-1400 (the build that is widely expected to be made available to beta testers by Microsoft early in January) and have had some time to compose my thoughts and feelings about this latest release."

Over on ZDNet there's a short review of the Windows 7 build that's expected to be widely available for public beta. It sounds like Microsoft has a great product on their hands. I'm looking forward to the beta and have a machine I'm ready to install it on, when the time comes. I'll just need to make sure and be careful when using Windows Media Player 12.

"Several reports from users testing the latest leaked build of Windows 7 indicate a potential data corruption issue using Microsoft's Windows Media Player 12. Windows 7 beta 1 build 7000 leaked over the Christmas holidays and a Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed that there is a bug which affects the leaked build. Approximately 2-3 seconds will get shaved off the beginning of MP3s if you have set your Windows Media Player 12 settings to retrieve information from the internet and update files. The default configuration for WMP12 sets this if you use the "express" option during setup."

I've beta tested a lot of software over the years, including Windows operating systems, and I'd never have hesitated to use it to play back my media. Sure, you don't use the beta OS for mission-critical stuff, but I'd certainly test out the media player...but now I'm sure going to be cautious about Windows 7 until they fix this bug! Apparently the problem is triggered if the header is more than 16 KB in size on the MP3...and since I embed high-res album art in all my MP3s, the headers are definitely bigger than 16 KB. As always, when testing beta software, assume that things are going to go wrong.

"Need to keep your hard drive from being crapped up? Are you a power-downloader with no organizational skills? Do you want to see exactly where the space on your hard drive is going and have your computer automatically shuffle and sort new files around? You're in luck. We've assembled a batch of freeware utilities that are, without a doubt, the most essential file management tools you'll want to have on your PC. We use them to automate mundane tasks like file moving and deletion, and better still, to determine exactly where all the wasted space on our drives are going. We would kill to have these feature integrated into Windows Explorer, but no dice thus far. But we can't complain much, because we've saved so much time with these small utilities that we can't ever think about going back to a life without them."

This article covers Auto Delete, SysExporter, SpaceMonger, WinDirStat, WinDirStat, and Download Mover. Any other essential tools we should know about? Post in the comments.

"2008 has been an eventful year to say the least - it is difficult to sum up the thousands of stories in just a handful of photographs. That said, I will try to do what I've done with other photo narratives here, and tell a story of 2008 in photographs. It's not the story of 2008, it's certainly not all stories, but as a collection it does show a good portion of what life has been like over the past 12 months. This is a multi-entry story, 120 photographs over three days."

Those are just two photo I selected from amonst the 120 amazing photographs that were selected to encompass some of what happened in 2008 around the world. Sadly, many of the photos encompass some of the violence that we see around the world - let's hope 2009 is a year where more peace, and less violence, will be the norm. Enjoy the photos! Be sure to check out part two and part three after looking at part one.

On December 31st, 2008, Polaroid stopped making film for their instant cameras. It's the end of an era, and while I hold no particular fondness for Polaroid images my self, I can understand why some people feel particularly attached to it. Photojojo (an awesome email newsletter by the way!) had a write up about this historic date a couple of weeks ago, but what I really wanted to share was Poladroid (pictured below).

Poladroid is free software, currently in beta for both Macs and PCs, and it does one thing: it turns your photos into Polaroid-eque images. Check it out and tell me what you think!

"When I started my Carbonite subscription nearly two years ago, at least one FAQ on Carbonite's website said that free-trial users would not get automatic back-ups of video files but that paid subscribers would get automatic back-ups of video files. This wording persisted all the way through my extending my Carbonite subscription on December 28, 2008, for another two years beyond the end of the expiring subscription. After I paid Carbonite another $89.95 for the subscription renewal, I discovered to my shock that MANY of my hundreds of video files had NOT been backed up, including video files dating back to 1999!"

I wrote an article back in August 2008 where I talked about why I switched from Carbonite to Mozy [Affiliate] for online backup purposes. My main reason for leaving Carbonite was that their service would not back up my EXE files and ISO files. Read my article for more details. What shocked me today was reading the blog post I quoted above where Kirk Mahoney confirms that Carbonite will not back up any video files unless, I think, those video files are in a folder with nothing else and you tell Carbonite to back up my folder. My read on this is that if you have video files mixed in with your photos - which most people would do, vacation photos and videos - Carbonite will back up the photos but ignore the videos.

This is, in a word, appalling. It was bad enough that Carbonite didn't consider my EXE files worthy of backing up, but for them to treat user video the same way is completely ridiculous. Most people will have more photos than video, but with HD video cameras getting less and less expensive, we're going to see a boom in HD content creation. If Carbonite doesn't want to back up video files, that's fine - but I'll be slowly moving every friend and relative off Carbonite and onto Mozy as the subscription expires. I've kept everyone on Carbonite because it has a more user-friendly software user interface, but I'm sure that they all care more about having all their files backed up than they do about having easy to use software - once I configure the backups for them, it's not like they have to do anything.

Carbonite as a company should be ashamed of themselves for not treating all user data, videos included, as being equally important.

Depending on where you are in the world, it's already 2009, but I've still got a few hours left in 2008 so here I am writing up a quick post. I wanted to wish everyone in the Thoughts Media community a very happy New Year! 2008 ended a bit rocky for most of us, but I hope 2009 will be a great year of prosperity and hapiness for everyone. I want to thank each and every one of you who regularly visit our sites and have made them your technological home on the Web. Your support is deeply appreciated. I also want to thank the great teams of volunteers that make each of these sites tick: your dedication and desire to strive for excellence helps make these sites great. Here's to a great 2009!

We'll all be taking January 1st off to relax and come January 2nd we'll be back to the news as normal.

"According to Sharp executive Mike Troetti, the company will release two Aquos LCD HDTVs with embedded Blu-ray players next month, right after they're unveiled during CES 2009. The TVs will come in 32 inches and 42 inches, and the latter will have 1080p HD resolution and a 120Hz frame-rate processing. Both sizes will feature a multiple slot loading rig for easy transitions between Blu-rays, DVDs and CDs. For the moment, there's no word on whether the TV will be able to play the full suite of Blu-ray disc profiles."

I imagine many of us probably balking at the idea of any television with an integrated DVD or VCR. However, their simplicity made them very popular with a lot of people. Now the same is available but with Blu-ray players! Hooray! I personally don't care for Blu-ray and all the complications that come along with it, but I can definately see the attraction for my friendsthat don't know the difference between a USB and HDMI cable. Like Wired, I have concerns about video quality and long term Blu-ray viability but I think that the simplicity will have these telvisions sell like hotcakes. Any of you tempted?

"The Wind has proven to be popular with many netbook fans and in October of 2008 MSI announced that it had the successor to the Wind U100 netbook in the works. MSI has now made the specifications for the U100's new sibling public. The MSI Wind U115 is the world's first hybrid storage notebook. The machine uses an SSD for the OS to get the benefits of fast booting and data access with an internal HDD to provide more storage space for documents, music, and other data."

Looks like the best of both worlds. However, this assumes that they are using an SSD with an actual speed advantage. I seem to recall reviews showing that the SSD's from some of the netbooks were not geared for performance.

"To meet the backup needs for consumers who feast on a glut of digital content, HP has introduced a pair of new home media servers called the HP MediaSmart ex485 and ex487. The two devices share many of the same features and both use an Intel Celeron 2GHz CPU and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. Other features include HP specific applications that make managing and sharing digital content easier. Bundles software includes HP Media collector to copy and centralize digital files from across the network, media streaming to stream photos and music to network computers, iTunes server to share music libraries, and HP photo view and Photo Publisher services among others."

I've always liked the HP MediaSmart product, but I'm still rocking the (comparatively) power-guzzling home-built frankenbox that I put together for this purpose in 2007. If/when that computer dies, or I outgrow it somehow, I'll definitely switch to the HP MediaSmart - or possibly sooner, who knows. The new models are noticeably different in that they have four times the RAM, and a slightly faster CPU. Celeron is still a dirty word in tech circles, but the newer Celeron CPUs have a surprising amount of kick. So why the hardware upgrade? New software services that are coming to the Windows Home Server in the form of another software update (remember Power Pack 1?). HP's product spec page lists Mac backup support (without an asterix), "media collector", and "remote streaming". I know some of what's coming but due to NDA can't say much more than I'll be happy when these mentioned features arrive, because they'll fix my #1 source of irritation with the current WHS software.