Software

PlayOn and vmcPlayIt

I have been wanted to be able to cancel our cable service for a while.  The thing that I have been wating for is a good way to get the TV content available on line on our TV, without having to use the a keyboard and mouse.  (And ideally integrated into Windows Media Center)

PlayOn is sotware that implements a DNLA server.  Instead of leting you play local content, you can use PlayOn to play videos from Hulu, Amazon Video On Demand, Netflix, YouTube and CBS.  With just the PlayOn software you can either brows videos on the services, or access your queue.  Playing video worked perfectly on my Xbox 360, with PlayOn installed on my Media Center.

The interface to playing videos is not ideal on the Xbox.  This is not the fault of PlayOn, but the Xbox displays DNLA servers as a hierarchical list of list.  In addition, I don't want to have to switch to my Xbox to watch TV content.  Ideally, I would be able to play this content on the Media Center itself.

vmcPlayIt is a Windows Media Center plugin that brings PlayOn content into Windows Media Center.  This also presents the content in a  Windows Media Center UI.  One other great feature of the combination of vmcPlayIt and PlayOn is that since PlayOn transcodes the flash video to, I believe, MPEG2 the video is playable on Media Center Extenders.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the plugin to work to play video.  I was able to browse the categories, but I was only able to see one video in my Netflix Queue.  The plugin is just in beta now, I will definitely be installing it once they fix these bugs.

[via Entertainment 2.0]

Undercover for iPhone

A while ago I was interested in Undercover for Mac OS X.  This application is supposed to help you recover a stolen computer.  It connects to their service periodiocally.  If your computer is stolen, you contact the service and then the next time your computer connects to the service, it takes and uploads a picture of what ever is in front of the computer and the service logs the location of the ip address.

It looks like they now have an iPhone application. It pretty much has the same functionality (I don't think it takes the photo though).  The problem that I see with this solution is that it requires that the person to launch the Undercover application in order for the information to be logged to their service.  I don't see people launching random applications if they steal an iPhone.  Most likely, they will wipe it, and get a new SIM card.  This will make Undercover pretty much useless.

Also, in my case, I lock my phone.  So there is no way that the Undercover application will be launched for the service to log the iPhone's location.

Ideally, for this functionality, iPhone would allow applications to run in the background.  Then it wouldn't require that the user launches an application.  Alternatively, this could be a service that the cellular provider would provide

VMWare Workstation Unity

I use VMware Workstation everyday.  I run Windows XP in it for running iTunes for my iPhone and for playing XM Radio online.  Today I tried out VMware's Unity.  This makes the Windows XP windows appear along side the Ubuntu windows. Also when Unity is enable, the KDE task switcher also shows the Windows programs.

I am happily surprised about how well VMware's Unity works.

Stopped using Google Friend Connect for comments

I have stopped using Google Friend Connect  for blog comments.  There are several things that Google could add to make this more usuable

1. It should be possible to specify a home page when submitting an anonymous comment
2. It should be possible to configure the wall to not truncate the messages
3. It should be possible for the user to configure the what happens when a user clicks on their urls for their authenticated comment (link to Google Friend Connect profile, or blog)
4. Google should, and maybe already do, process the javascript and index the page using the content of the comments.  There could be a unique comment that someone leaves, and if Google doesn't index it, people will not be able to find the comment.

Seesmic Desktop

Seesmic Desktop is a pretty cool twitter client.  It seems to me to be a cross between Twhirl and TweetDeck.  It has a nice UI and it doesn't use that much screen real estate.

I am running this on my Windows XP virtual machine.  I haven't tried to run it on Ubuntu.