I keep seeing screenshots of what the next version of Windows will look like. Windows Vista is ultra sleek with some added features.
I searched far and wide for wallpapers and themes that would make my Windows XP screen look like Vista.
The answer was the Universal Vista Inspirat Brico Pack.
Installing this is not for the faint of heart though. If you have another program such as other transformation packs which change some system files, you should make sure those are totally uninstalled. Do a save with the System Restore functionality as well in case something goes awry. After I installed I had no problems whatsoever but some people reported some issues with certain images or functionality missing.
The Vista Inspirat Pack consists of modified icons and a new themed appearance. It also includes the program ObjectDock which provides a MacOS type Program icon selector across the top of your screen.
So far it is really nice and if you are saavy enough to revert back in case something goes wrong, I highly suggest this Vista like theme for XP if that’s what you’re looking for.
Pandora is a streaming web radio station which is powered by the Music Genome Project.
This is not your ordinary music station though. First, you type in an artist or song of which you would like to hear similar music. Pandora then comes up with similar songs based on melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics and more.
It dives deep into the core of the song, unlike other services which just base your likes and dislikes on how other people rated a song.
It is a great service if you are looking to find similar music to what you enjoy and you’re sick of what’s on the radio. It’s not always perfect, but you can also guide it to never play a song again or play similar songs to what it suggests.
From one of Pandora’s emails:
“We’ve found that telling Pandora ‘I like it’ to no more than 3-5 songs, then listening for a while is a great start. When Pandora plays a song you don’t like, give it a ‘thumbs down’. We’ll never play that song again, and we’ll steer the station toward the sound you told us you like.”
Enjoy Pandora.
In the latest issue of Popular Science there is an article about a new robotic pet that will be coming out in Fall 2006. It is called the Ugobe Pleo and it looks incredible.
The robot has 38 sensors, 14 motors and 8 processors.
Unlike the $2000 Sony Aibo dog, this has nice fluid motion and will only cost $200. Incredible. From the demo, it looks like it lives up to the hype.
You can find the website here: Ugobe Pleo
A demo of it can be found here:
Ugobe Pleo Demo
Funny video featuring Bill Gates and Napoleon Dynamite. It was made for the last Comdex I believe. As you’ll see, it was never meant to leak out but someone used a home video camera to tape it. The quality isn’t bad though.
Check it out at YouTube:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YktZkyx4wtM
A couple of months ago I got my Playstation Portable (PSP). The PSP can play music and movies which is great and all, but the movies must be a certain type of movie file in order to play. I finally found a free and user friendly program to convert almost every media type to the .mp4 files it plays.
The program is called SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer). It is very easy to use. You just drop in whatever file you want converted and then select an output container, which is just whatever file type you want. You can convert to and from mpg, divx, windows media, and my favorite, PSP among others.
Audio files work as well. You can convert those .wma files to .mp3 so that they work more universally.
After trying many other free encoding softwares, I have finally found a winner. It is highly recommended if you need to convert audio or video files to other formats.
