Cool Video: How to Carve a Turkey

I know, carving a turkey has nothing at all to do with technology. Yet considering that in the States, Thanksgiving is coming right up, here's something you might find useful: A great video to show you the right way to carve a turkey

Keep Track of Hurricane Ike With Live TV Feeds

The Internet just can't be beat for getting the latest information about a disaster. In this case, it's Hurricane Ike pounding Texas.

VueToo has put together the National Weather Situation page -- and it's a terrific resource for anyone concerned about Hurricane Ike.

The page is divided into six windows with assorted weather and satellite maps, as well as a live feed from a KHOU, a Houston station. Click any window and a new tab pops open with an enlarged image.

If you have the time, fiddle with the special interests in the left frame -- South Florida Traffic Cams, say, or National News.

Maroonspoon (image below) has a page with six live TV feeds. Not all are live at all times, so refresh the page every so often. All the feeds are live, so the first thing to do when you land on the page is to click on each feed's white square.

More Hurricane Resources
If you have friends or relatives in the path of the storm, I have a few more spots for you to visit.

• National Weather Service's Nation Hurricane Center
• Weather Underground: Hurricane Ike
• Fox News Tampa Bay
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Twistervideos has a dozen links to technical issues about the hurricane, including sea surface temps, storm surge forecasts, and Ike hurricane models.


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Have Movies on Your PC? Play Them On Your TV

You have movies on your PC? Me, too, and I'm using MediaGate's nifty multi-media hi-def player to wirelessly -- and effortlessly -- beam them to my TV.

The MediaGate 450HD has lots of cool features and here's the stunner -- it works as advertised. Even if you're a novice, you can get it working without much stress -- start watching movies on your TV -- in about five minutes. The cost isn't outrageous, either. I found one discounting for under $230.

I see lots of electronics and in the last couple of years, I'm finding myself growing persnickety and impatient with devices that don't match up to the marketing exaggerations.

There are two issues with a multi-media player, such as the MediaGate, that claim to let you watch PC-based movies on your living room TV setup. The first is whether you need to be a computing genius to actually make it work correctly; the other is the number of movie formats it can play.

The MediaGate 450HD multi-media player is about the size of an external hard drive.

Today I'll talk about how to connect the MediaGate to your PC and TV; in a second part, I'll tell you about the movies the MediaGate can handle, as well as the few small gripes I had with the device.

Making the TV Connection
The first thing you'll need to do is spend a few minutes connecting the MediaGate to the TV. You have lots of choices: Composite, S-Video, HD components (Y, Pb, Pr at 480p, 720p, or 1080i) or HDMI (480p, 720p, 1080i, or 1080p).

If you don't have a HDTV rig, or you're not a video fanatic (or the vids aren't hi-def), you can get away with the typical connection: Composite with a yellow, white, and red cable.

Audio out is a typical left-right stereo or, if your TV has it, coaxial or optical digital.

The MediaGate has more than a few ways to connect to the outside world.

As you can see from the image above, the MediaGate has four ways for you to stream the movies from your PC onto the TV.

Use a Hard Drive
The easiest is to copy the videos onto an external hard drive and bring it into the room where the MediaGate is connected to your TV. Connect the external drive to the MediaGate's mini-USB 2.0 port, turn it on, fiddle with the remote, and start watching. Yep, it's that easy.

Videos played perfectly, too, without any lag or stutter, despite the external connection; about the only delay is at the start when a video begins loading into the MediaGate's memory.

The second method is straightforward, too. Grab a spare SATA drive (formatted as FAT32 or NTFS), and install it inside the MediaGate. It takes just a few minutes to remove the MediaGate's cover, pop the drive in and connect the cable, and screw the case back on. The process is the same as with an external hard drive: Copy movies from your PC to the MediaGate and connect it to the TV.

Install a hard drive into the MediaGate

Of course, you're probably a step ahead of me -- and you're right. The downside to having an internal drive is schlepping the MediaGate back to the PC every time you want to load more films.

Quick aside: The big advantage, though, of having the flexibility of an internal drive is -- right -- portability. I loaded the MediaGate and took it with me on a trip; I grabbed a composite cable and plugged the puppy into the hotel room's TV. Tell me that's not cool! The MediaGate also did double duty: I copied all the files I might need to work on while away and used the device as an external hard drive.

BTW, with an external or internal hard drive, it's a simple task to use Windows Explorer to drag and drop the videos you want to watch onto the drive.

A Wired -- or Wi-Fi -- Connection
Many of you have a network at home; some of you might even have a small network server as part of the system. (I have a Maxtor Shared Storage 1TB that acts as a spot to store all my backups and my collection of videos.) If you have Cat5 networking cable running from your router or PC to the location of the TV, just connect it to the LAN port on the MediaGate.

If the gods are working in your favor, the network will recognize the MediaGate (as it would another PC or a shared printer), and you're good to go. If not, you'll need to spend time fiddling; it took me about 15 minutes getting the DHCP setting right. It wasn't a big deal.

Crawling under the house to lay the line, however, might not be one of your skills. So the next method might be best for you: Beam the movies with MediaGate's 54Mbps 802.11g skills.

If you already have a wireless setup and know how to connect new devices, facing MediaGate's setup screen will be a snap. If not, and your knowledge of wireless is minimal, there's no way around having to spend time reading through the manual. My wireless talents aren't strong, yet I had the MediaGate working in about 20 minutes.

In my next installment, I'll give you the lowdown on the file formats the MediaGate supports and the two things it needs to improve. In the meantime, I'm turning on the MediaGate and watching a few flicks.

E-mail Tip: Eliminate Annoying Winmail.dat Files

A friend asked me about a weird e-mail attachment he constantly receives from one his friends. "The file's unreadable," he said, "I can't find a program that can view, decode, or convert the thing." He said the file's always the same -- winmail.dat.

Who's Dat?
My friend isusing Eudora, an ancient e-mail tool and is receiving e-mail from someone using Outlook.

Quick aside: Don't even consider switching to Eudora; it's no longer being sold or even upgraded. There's a new version in the works, but don't hold your breath. More about that in another blog.

The winmail.dat file is generated from Outlook (or Microsoft Exchange) and it's loaded with Rich Text Format (RTF) formatting code -- italics, bold, and font info. So the file appears as an attachment, but it is useless to my buddy.

The Fix is In
If you're in the same boat -- or the Outlook user -- it's easy enough to turn off the option to send Rich Text Formatted e-mail messages. In Outlook 2003, choose Tools, Options, select the Mail Format tab, Internet Format, and from the pull-down, choose "Convert to Plain Text Format". Click OK, OK to save the change.

Get rid of Winmail.dat files

It may also make sense to stop using Word as the e-mail editor. Do that from Tools, Options, Mail Format tab, and de-select "Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to edit e-mail messages."

Have an Outlook tip -- or hassle? Send it to me at inbox.

A Video Enhancement Tool That Will Knock Your Socks Off

Is there a distracting traffic sign in the middle of your video, or maybe something in the background that needs to be removed? I spotted a software application that can do that--and more--and I promise, you'll be amazed.

The video I watched was produced by a group of researchers from the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. These guys are in the Graphics and Imaging Laboratory and they have a truly astounding process that lets you combine low resolution still images into high resolution video.

Add, remove, or just plain fix problem videos

The software merges the images and video, and at the same time, fixes the inconsistencies between the two. For instance, they show how, within the video, to remove a traffic sign or touch up a tree.


Get the elephant just the way you want it.

Watch these two videos to see how it works. The first is "Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene." The second is "Interactive Video Cutout." Their main site is here.

You can also read the group's technical white paper, "Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene" here.

I Want a Copy
Pravin Bhat, one of the team's authors of the software project gave me the bad news.

"We are currently busy working on other research projects and don't have the time to put in the engineering effort required to turn our research project into a product [or] usable demo.

"Ideally a product team in the industry would carry the torch from here on. The implementation details of the project have been published in an academic journal, which people can access freely from the project website.

We have also released our source code on the project website. The Blender 3D folks are looking at incorporating it into their next open source release.

"All our work is part of academic research. It is not patented. It's really anyone's for the taking but it will require considerable skill to turn it into an usable product from its current state; the research demo is slow, memory inefficient and not user friendly (there's no UI; everything is controlled with command line tools)."

Okay, so it's not an easy to use program and not even available. But my guess is that some smart entrepreneur could do something--and I'll be the first to buy a copy.

Talkback
Have something to say? You can use Comments below or if you'd prefer, fire an e-mail right into my inbox.

Chrome: Google's Windows Killer

There's big news in Google's recent release of Chrome and it's a perspective you might not have considered.

Google may be pitching Chrome as a super-duper browser, but it's really showing off its shiny, new operating system. Remember, each of Chrome's tabs is a separate window--and while you might see each window displaying a Web page, Google's thinking about applications.

This is a direct attack on Microsoft -- and I think Microsoft is worried. That's because a small kernel on your local system could boot you into directly into Chrome, or a server-based operating system, and you could start working sans Windows.

This isn't what happens right now, but I'll bet it's Google's ultimate plan. That's a good thing, because I'm not wild about Chrome as a browser. Read Chrome? I Really Want To Love Ya for my perspective.

Head in the Clouds
The idea is cloud computing, where applications and data reside on servers, and it's taking hold. (See Zoho Adds Google Docs-like File Management and Working with Google Docs, part 1 and part 2.)

I know what you're thinking: Everything online? That's crazy. That's what I used to think, too.

Give Me a Fast Pipe
I remember Microsoft showing off a prerelease version of Windows 95 at a users group I used to manage. The presenter had an intriguing idea: Instead of doing research using Microsoft's CD-based encyclopedia program, Encarta, just reach out to Encarta on the Internet for fresh, dynamic data. Ditto for Word's connection to the Net.

The audience laughed -- so did I -- because few people had broadband; most were still suffering with dialup.

So cloud computing may be pie-in-the-sky right now, but five years down the road, try to visualize everyone having a steady, reliable, and super-fast broadband connection. You might not be laughing.

Worried that you can't work if you're kicked offline? "One important aspect to cloud computing," my buddy Paul Corning, a smart guy, said, "is that Chrome's Gears means you don't have to have continuous broadband access, and you can still work with browser-based applications when the Net's down." That's not new, either. Read Google Gears - Offline Functionality for Web Apps that explains how it works.

Google's OS Announcement
Google all but announced Chrome as an operating system in its recent blog entry, "A fresh take on the browser." In the third paragraph, the writers said:

"We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build." [Emphasis mine.]

I'm not the only one thinking in this direction. My colleague, Heather Havenstein at Computerworld, has a similar analysis in Google's Chrome aims to kill Windows, make Web the OS of choice. [Hat tip to WinPatrol's Bill.]

I encourage you to read Google's 38-page, Doonesbury-like comic that describes Chrome. Fair warning: I ran out of steam every so often -- some of the ideas forced me to do a little thinking. But stay with it -- the ideas and concepts pick up speed. And if you read between the lines you'll see where Google's going.

Talkback
I also want to hear from you -- here, in Comments, or if you'd prefer, fire an e-mail right into my inbox.

Time Wasters: Name The Robot, VERY Realistic Animations, and a Game to Drive You Nuts

• Do you think you're a science fiction aficionado, and know your robots? If you're able to distinguish between a Cylon and, say, The Borg, Name That Robot quiz is for you.
• What happens when a creature sticks its face against glass? It's probably not the sort of thing you've been thinking about, but then again, you don't write a once-a-week Time Wasters blog. Get a load of 50 Animals Squashed Against Glass -- and be glad you don't have to wash the windows.


Honey, get the Windex, willya?

• Use the cursor keys to move the square through the blueprint and get it to the X. "Open Doors," I hear you thinking, "it can't be that hard..." Don't be too sure, especially as you get to higher levels (if you do, that is).


It's just a blueprint -- how hard could it be to get through the doors...

• Emily isn't real -- but she's amazingly life-like. So much so that given the right setup, say, a small screen at an ATM, you might even think you were talking to a real live person. Read about it and watch the video here. Scary, no?
• You ever get annoyed when people sling around acronyms and you haven't a clue? Get a clue with Acronym Finder, a handy site that looks up the pesky shorthands, such as WTF, SOL, HIPAA, and, well, you get the idea.
• In this U.S. Geological Survey video taken in Glacier National Park, a solitary wolf tries playing with a momma bear and her two cubs. The bear, needless to say, ain't in the mood for this kind of nonsense.




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Chrome? I Really Want To Love Ya

Google is smart and oh-so-sly. The company released Chrome, its I'm-gonna-be-in-beta-for-years browser and everyone's writing about it. (I saw eight articles on PC World alone yesterday.) For example, one article said Chrome grabbed a bunch of users in short order (See Chrome Grabs 1 Percent of Market in Under 24 Hours).

I don't know whether to doubt that--or just wonder about it. That's because according to PC World.com's tracking service, 36 percent of all visitors to the site use Firefox, 31 percent use IE 7, 17 percent use IE 6, and the rest are on Safari, Opera, AOL, and Mozilla. Chrome wasn't on the list yet.

I did an informal poll on a private list I moderate and 60 percent of the responders tried Chrome, but went back to their original browser.

Chrome, Google's Wonder Browser
Sure, I know that you've read reviews of Chrome already, and many of you have tried it. If you haven't, or want to compare notes, here are my observations.

The fact that each tab is really a window running a separate process is innovative, smart, and spectacular. It means that each tab is independent, so if one tab is slow loading, or has a scripting problem and jams, there's no adverse impact on the others. Think multithreading. That's important and I'll come back to it in another blog.

Speed--fast-loading pages--is Chrome's best achievement (aside from scaring the pants off of Microsoft, of course). The browser's underlying architecture, and the tab independence, lets most Web sites fly open faster than I've seen since I moved to broadband from dial-up.

Hold the Chrome
The show stopper -- there's more than one, actually -- is that Chrome is brand new and still in development. That means it's missing those cool things built into your favorite browser, the tools you're used to having at your disposal.

I'm a huge fan of Maxthon, a freebie that uses IE's engine, and Chrome doesn't even come close to having Maxthon's features. For instance, Maxthon recognizes mouse gestures that let me zip among tabs or close tabs with a quick flick of the mouse; Chrome won't let me assign a sticky to a tab, send a tab to the desktop, or create groups of Web sites. Even a simple task like dragging and dropping a link onto an existing browser window to open a new tab isn't available in Chrome.

Some of my Firefox buddies have also tried and released Chrome because it's missing features they rely on. For example, Steve W. complained that he can't use tons of task-specific Firefox Plugins such as Shutterfly Uploader, Photosynth, or Garmin Communicator. He'd also miss Web of Trust (WOT) and IE Tab, to name two other add-ins.

But some folks aren't just whining, they're doing something about it. Check out Lifehacker's Andrea Maria Cecil neat roundup of tricks to Enable Chrome's Best Features in Firefox.

Quick aside: If you're a Firefox user, check out our just-released 15 Must-Have Firefox Add-Ons.

Old Favorites Left Out in the Cold
My biggest gripe, though, and the one that stops me cold, is that Chrome ignores my two of my beloved browsing tools: RoboForm and Ad Muncher.

RoboForm sits in my browser storing passwords and logging me into sites automatically. (Read my take on RoboForm in 25 Products We Can't Live Without.) The topper is that while Chrome blocks pop-ups, it doesn't touch banner, Flash, or other irritating ads--and Chrome won't let Ad Muncher do its extraordinary job of ad blocking. Read more about Ad Muncher in 15 Downloads That Will Block Annoying Ads and Pop-Ups.

One more gripe: I can't add links to external tools onto Chrome's toolbar, a trick that even older versions of Maxthon offered. And on a minor note, Chrome wasn't able to import more than about 10 percent of my IE favorites. A buddy had a similar complaint about his Firefox bookmarks.

Catch Up With Chrome
If you just tuned in and want to read lots about Chrome, I've compiled the best on PC World.com:

• Review: Google Chrome Web Browser
• Google's Chrome: 7 Reasons for It and 7 Reasons Against It
• Google Chrome vs. Internet Explorer 8
• Google Chrome Speedy? Not So Fast, Say Some
• "Carpet-bombing" Flaw Discovered in Chrome
• Researcher: Chrome's Isolated Tabs Make It Memory 'Pig'

I have lots more to say about Google's browser--things that may surprise you. Stay tuned.

Using Office 2003? Download These Valuable Office 2007 Converters

I know the hassle: Someone sends you an Office 2007 Word or Excel document. You can't open it because you're old-fashioned (or a cheapskate, like me) and decided to stick with Office 2003.

The fix is a quick download away. Microsoft has a tool that updates your old version of Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003 to let you open, edit, and save Office 2007 file formats (such as .docx).

Download the Compatibility Pack here.

If you have friends who are older than I am and still have ancient Wordstar, Lotus AmiPro (gosh, remember thatprogram?), or even dBASE II files, there's an official Microsoft Office Converter Pack for you, too. [Hat tip to Jeff Hamer.]

Alternate method for converting files

International Space Station Exposed to Computer Virus

You think you have problems? The astronauts on the International Space Station discovered the W32.Gammima.AG worm on one of their notebooks.

W32.Gammima.AG isn't a particularly dangerous virus; according to Symantec, the risk level is low. (Tech details.)

The worm may have found its way on board by way of a Compact Flash card or, according to NASA, it might have been in "the initial software." I guess they're implying the worm was on the notebooks to begin with. I like the Compact Flash card theory best.

Are You Protected?
You'd think the notebooks would have some sort of antivirus program installed (hey, like, AVG is a freebie, guys). But apparently only a few of the notebooks were protected.

After the worm was discovered, Russian astronaut Sergey Volkov "ran digital photo flash cards from stowage through a virus check with the Norton AntiVirus application" (from NASA's logs).

A week later, and in no apparent rush, Volkov downloaded Symantec's NAV updated definition files and loaded the software and updates on all the notebooks. (Logs.) Note to Symantec: Not to worry. I'm fairly certain NASA has an extraterrestrial site license.

Read more on SpaceRef.