Cool Tech Reviews

digital501 has a great review of the TiVo and Windows Media Center PCs with the objective of helping the end user choose which one is right for their needs:

There are two basic ways to enter the world of the Personal Video Recorder (PVR): through a dedicated hardware unit, like a TiVo or ReplayTV, or through a software-based PVR that runs on your home computer, like Windows: Media Center Edition (WMCE) or MythTV. In this article I will compare the most popular form of each platform, TiVo and WMCE, to help you figure out which one would be best for you.
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To summarize, WMCE currently has more features than TiVo, though TiVo is catching up. WMCE requires a large cost up front, but no monthly fee, while TiVo is a lower (or no) cost up front (for basic models) but has a monthly service fee. MCPCs can also be used as home computers. Finally, TiVo is much easier to install.

Hit the link for the full details. Thomas Hawk adds to the review with details on HDTV:

Media Center can record HDTV, but only through over the air transmissions, TiVo Series 2 cannot record HDTV at all.

On the other hand, the DirecTV TiVo can not only record satellite premium HDTV (which MCE cannot) but it has four tuners (two HD, two standard def). This is the unit that I personally own and watch most of my TV on at the present time. Be careful with this unit though in the longer run as DirecTV very well could stop supporting it someday or force a trade in as they have recently begun a move from MPEG2 to MPEG4. The DirecTV HDTV TiVo supports the outgoing MPEG2.

Both Series 3 TiVo and CableLabs approved Vista Home Premium machines will record HDTV coming up later this year. Comparing a Series 3 CableCARD enabled TiVo with a Vista Home Premium CableCARD enabled PC will make for a very exciting comparison when the time is right.

More by following that link as well, including a pointer to Hawk’s earlier comparison of Media Center with the DirecTV HDTV.

Shelley Solheim at InfoWorld:

Search engine AskJeeves.com has rebranded itself as Ask.com, ditched its namesake butler icon and added several new search tools in an effort to woo more users, Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of Ask Jeeves’ parent company IAC/InterActiveCorp announced Monday.

“It needed not be any radical change, we just needed to drop some baggage,” Diller said in his keynote address Monday at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo in New York.

In addition to losing what Diller referred to as the “fat butler,” Ask.com streamlined its Web site with a new “non-cluttered” look and added a right-hand sidebar for searching different sources — such as images, weather, dictionaries, and local sources — that Ask.com officials say enables “search on speed dial.”

That seems a little harsh - Jeeves was about the only reason to head over to AskJeeves, although admittedly not a big reason for me or most others:

According to the latest data compiled by comScore Networks, Ask Jeeves only gets about 6.5 percent of total search queries. Google was the most used search engine in the U.S. in November, followed by Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN and America Online.

We’ll see if dumping the “fat butler” makes any difference, but I expect it’s one more descent on the downward spiral for Ask.com.

(Via Thomas Hawk) There are all kinds of utilities to vary your Windows wallpaper, but how about one based on the Internet photo storage site, Flickr? John Conners is the author and has the details:

I wanted a way to periodically change the wallpaper on my computer at set intervals and couldn’t find any decent software to do it, so I wrote my own. It’s simple, powerful and once you’ve told it what to do, it sits quietly in the system tray going about its business.

It can draw the wallpaper from pictures on your own computer or:

You can use Flickr (almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world) - you can choose to select pictures by person, tags, sets or just plain random and there are a host of options to narrow down the pictures and increase the quality of those chosen. You never know what you’re going to get next!

Follow the link for more details and the download.

theTechSage explains two ways to get the Standard Edition of Microsoft’s premier development product, Visual Studio 2005, for free or very cheap. The “very cheap” is for students only, but the “free” is a great offer from Microsoft where you attend 3 Microsoft® ASP.NET 2.0 Webcasts (either live or on-demand) and get:

- Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Standard Edition (Not for Resale)
- Five chapters of Programming ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference, by Dino Esposito
- A 30-day hosting account to try out your custom Web applications
- Microsoft Developer Security DVD with how-tos, white papers, tools, webcasts, and code samples that demonstrate how to write more secure code
- A 50% discount on a Microsoft Certified Professional Exam so you can add your new skills to your resume
- A voucher that allows you to buy Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition with an MSDN® Professional Subscription at renewal pricing (a $400 savings)

Altogether, this complimentary package has an estimated value of $400.

The choice of webcasts look both interesting and useful . If you have any interest in Microsoft development tools, it’s a dynamite offer.

Is it nostalgia for the 90’s or am I caught in a time warp? Google has resuscitated the “build yourself a free home page service” concept with a spiffy AJAX Page Creator and mercifully without the annoying ads that were the hallmark of such services in the past. Chris Sherman has the details at SearchEngineWatch:

Google Page Creator is a web based application that uses a basic what-you-see is what-you-get style of interface, designed to allow anyone to create and publish web pages, regardless of skill or knowledge level.
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Google Page Creator is a web-based application that runs on any computer or operating system. To use it, you must have a Google account and a Gmail address. Pages that you create are stored on Google servers using a URL convention of gmailname.googlepages.com.

Each user is provided with 100 megabytes of free storage space, and while there is a limit on the amount of bandwidth a site is allowed, Rosenstein says he doubts most people will ever reach the limit. The limit is primarily in place to foil the efforts of spammers, he said.

There are few restrictions on the type of content Google will allow users to publish, though Rosenstein said there won’t be any mechanisms for ecommerce or interactivity.
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Pages hosted on Google Pages are ordinary web pages, and will be included in Google’s (and presumably other search engines) web index, though they won’t be given any special treatment in ranking.

Despite their best intentions, I think they are going to have a problem with various forms of abuse. However, a bigger question is, why? Google already has the free Blogger service for would-be webloggers, so the suspicion is that it’s market positioning against the wildly popular MySpace. If so, they are going to need more than a few generalized web site templates to play the interactive user community game.

As for the other players, Yahoo and Lycos still have those golden oldies, GeoCities and Tripod, complete with the annoying ads. The real question is if or how the big names are planning to compete with MySpace.

Coolz0r:

MonkeyBongo is about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen for mobile content. They have six tools available for free to help you customize your phone. The best of those six apps is without any doubt the ‘OneClickRingtones’

That particular application is claimed to convert anything from your MP3 collection into a ringtone. Visit MonkeyBongo for more details on that and the other five applications, but being a skeptic, my question is how they are getting paid. The press release claims:

“We are moving toward creating an online mobile community,” states Mark Cave, “So, we decided to start by creating what we consider the best set of ringtone tools in the world.”

Seems to be a good start.