Month: January 2006

I just tried registering for the site and I don’t get it. It won’t let me register and tells me that I need a valid email address even when I’m giving it one. Thought I’d check it out due to all the buzz but it doesn’t seem to be working.

Looking For Interested People – Moderation & Wiki Patrick Melton over at Remotely Cool says he’s looking for new moderators for his Media Center site. He also just informed me via email this morning that the RSS feed of the past 50 posts is available for subscription — very cool.

The F-Stop Blues: Easily Add Digital Audio to Your Media Center PC Tim Coyle blogs on a nifty little USB adapter that allows you to get an s/pdif digital out from your PC. Not sure on the sound quality but I’ve found in general that optical out makes a huge difference.

Technorati Weblog: Blog That Chart! Interesting new charting and graphing fucntionality from Technorati that allows you to see how many people have been blogging a search term in the last 7, 30, 90, 180 and 360 days. Cool.

Thanks, Steve!

eHomeUpgrade | Party Games for Windows Media Center Edition Sean Alexander and I talked a little bit about this concept at lunch at CES and it’s a good one. Trivial Pursuit, Monopoloy, etc. all should be playable via a Media Center PC or XBox 360 extender.

Last week I reported on a company Heffco possibly being erroneously connected with my reporting on PriceRitePhoto based on a report by the New York BBB.

I have received the following email back from Tony Barbera, Manager of the Information and Investigations Divsion of the BBB New York:

“Just letting you know our reports on PriceRitePhoto and PricesRite have been re-released and are listed as separate entities. Take a look, and let me know if you have any questions.”

PricesRite is still associated with Let’s Go Digital and ultimately also A. Heffco Technologies with a fairly negative BBB rating, but it is no longer associated per the BBB New York with PriceRitePhoto, the outfit that I had my run in with. It sounds like while distancing the companies, the BBB still is not willing to change the overall rating of Let’s Go Digital and that the unrelated complaints against them are still standing.

PriceRitePhoto is now listed as an affilate of C&A; Marketing, with a “Howard Baker” as it’s president. Interesting and suprisingly to me they only have three complaints filed with the BBB against them.

I received the following email from Gabe Heffez of Heffco, on the matter at hand: “Thank you for your help with the BBB. Although they still don’t have our information 100% correct, they have removed associations with priceritephoto and company. We will continue to write them and fax them the correct information so they can get it completely right. Thank you for the quick response and corrections on your side.”

and then a second email:

“Funny, I just checked again and it looks like we inherited all of their customer disputes. I checked their page and looks like they are a pretty clean cut company. The BBB has got to get their act together. We will continue to work on it.”

BetaNews | MS Testing Media Center TV Streaming: “Microsoft is currently testing a Slingbox-like add-on that would allow Windows Media Center users to watch programming on their PCs from anywhere using mobile devices and laptops, BetaNews has learned.

The feature uses a software application rather than a set-top box, as Slingbox utilizes to control a TiVo, cable or satellite box remotely. The resulting stream would play through Windows Media Player.

A demo viewed by BetaNews last week indicates that the service would even work over slower mobile data connections, such as EDGE.”

Ummm, isn’t this kind of already called Orb? And isn’t it hard to beat the price free?

WSJ.com – Digging Out the News: An interesting article on Digg from the Wall Street Journal.

“Digg also hopes to use some recent funding to expand its coverage. In October, the company received $2.8 million from Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and others. Besides buying servers and adding to its staff, Digg hopes to use the funding to broaden its appeal to a more mainstream crowd by adding new categories like business, sports and politics. Mr. Adelson said he hopes the expansion will boost the company’s revenue, which comes entirely from text advertisements. He said the site is profitable, but declined to disclose financial information.

Digg users, for their part, tend to be enthusiastic evangelists. ‘Before Digg, I was checking Slashdot multiple times a day,’ said Mike Rushton, a network administrator for a Web-hosting company in Burlington, Mass. Mr. Rushton said he now relies on Digg for most of his news, refreshing the site several times a day to make sure he doesn’t miss anything. He rarely reads mainstream news sites; he said he figures if a story is important enough, Digg will have it.”

Also stay tuned for more goodiness coming from Digg. Per Kevin in the comments on the WSJ story, “We’re very honored to be in the WSJ. Thanks to all of you for helping make digg what it is today. New features coming in the next day or two!”

One thing I’d like to see improved in Vista in Media Center would be for the ability to maintain a television audio track while using “My Pictures.” At present DirecTV is offering a number of satellite radio broadcasts. The picture screen of course is blank but the music plays. It would be great to be able to keep the audio stream but let “my pictures” overlay on this audio. At present I’m doing this by using my DirecTV TiVo as the input on my home theater but switching my video input to MCE where I’ve got my photos going, but then I miss the nice titles and album art as the songs come up. Now that MSFT and DirecTV are working together, it would be great to tie the music channels in with album art, song titles, etc.