I’m a bit late to the game here, but after reformatting my computer to officially upgrade to Windows 7, and installing OpenOffice because I don’t want to deal with Office 2007 licensing, I realized how much I prefer the ribbon interface.

I looked around briefly to see if there was a “skin” or something similar for OO since it’s open source nature lends itself to that sort of thing. Alas, nothing to be found but rumors of Sun Microsystems working on a ribbon interface of their own.

Which was an enlightening discovery since reading the comments and reviews revealed almost universal rancor towards the ribbon interface – an attitude I fail to understand or agree with.

To me, the ribbon interface represents a logical solution to a big problem (especially with word-processors), namely feature-creep. There does not need to be a button for every function since there are so many. I don’t need four different visible buttons for left, center, right and justify. Of course I don’t believe the ribbon interface is necessarily appropriate for every suite and program available to the PC, but there is something to be said for a design standard.

So I guess for anyone reading this I’d like to hear your thoughts.

I recently decided to tackle a problem that has plagued me from the beginning in XBMC.

Some time ago, I changed the naming convention of my files to something that was cleaner and more logical to me. The format used to be like this example:

Burn Notice/Season 1/Burn Notice – 101 – Pilot.avi

I noted that having the name of the show was completely unnecessary, as was the season since I could infer from the number that it is season 1 episode 1.  So I spent some time renaming and moving things around to something more like this:

Burn Notice/101 – Pilot.avi

Much cleaner, no fluff.

The problem at first was that for some reason, this broke XBMC’s scraper’s fragile little mind, and thus it could not scrape episodes anymore. So I did some research and found that advancedsettings.xml offered a solution, which I mentioned in a previous post.

What I failed to mention in that post was that there was a single catch. One show I have is called “The 4400” which was tragically cancelled before its fifth and potentially last season. When I added the folder to the library, it would recognize the show title and apply a general synopsis I could view of the entire show, but the episodes contained within that folder refused to be scanned into the library database. I’ve suffered this for ages. Every time I reinstalled or upgraded or created a new instance of XBMC for PC or my Mac Mini, I copied over my custom advancedsettings.xml file to each.

As it turns out, the scraper problem has been fixed for ages, and my own solution was preventing it from working. Today I installed XBMC on my beloved laptop for the first time as an experiment, and I intentionally left the advancedsettings.xml file out. Sure enough, The 4400 scanned in immediately as well as all the episodes, synopses and screenshots.

So that’s that. I removed the “tvshowmatching” tag from the xml file and left my other customizations in place, as now the default setup works for me.

My wife Janine has always loved photography, and I’ve encouraged her buy purchasing some very decent cameras over the years. Most recently, the Sony alpha a100 DSLR with 10 Megapixels.

Next I should mention we have two kids and we travel. Not tons of travel, just more than some and less than others. Janine recently told me she takes an average of 3000 pictures a month, which amounts to about 100 pictures a day, and that means a little over one picture every 10 minutes she’s awake. Suffice it to say there are a lot of photos taken, especially of the kids.

The digital age has brought us many wonders. Computers, the internet, and of course GPS. Somewhere along the line, people wanted to know where their photos had been taken – myself included. This is likely old hat to many of you reading this but I personally know of many who have no idea what GeoTagging or Geocaching or even GPS is. And my own experience GeoTagging photos wasn’t always easy so I thought I’d try my hand at explaining and providing a list of useful devices and software.

GeoTagging involves writing geospatial coordinates to the digital picture’s EXIF data – the same data that your computer uses to see what the exposure setting, f-stop, zoom, camera model etc are. These tags are interpreted by certain programs such as iLife 09 or Picasa which can render a map displaying all the pinpoints representing the locations these photos were taken (see my earlier iLife 09 Review).

Cameras

A few cameras available today have GeoTagging functions. Fortunately some of these cameras are incredibly mainstream such as the Blackberry Curve or the iPhone, though the image quality of these are nothing compared to higher end cameras.

In 2008, many manufacturers promised to release GPS enabled cameras, but with the advent of certain simpler, lower powered solutions they seem to be dragging their feet a bit. Most at this point seem to take advantage of proprietary add-ons unique to each manufacturer, and generally only for the professional models such as DSLRs.

Devices

Third party devices are popping up which can either be used separately with software or integrated directly by way of SD cards or hot-shoe attachments.

Here are some highlights.

	Eye-Fi – $99.99(http://www.eye.fi/) 4GB SD card with Wi-FI and GPS support 1 year of free Wayport Hotspot access Can upload to various services such as flickr, facebook, picasa, youtube(for video), photobucket and more. Uses Skyhook to establish wifi-assisted gps (at time of writing, this covers 70% of the US and Canada; 70% of populated Germany, France, and UK; While they plan to expand coverage in the west and Asia)
	AMOD AGL3080 – $99.99(http://www.semsons.com/amaggpsdalos.html) Data Logger 128MB USB 2.0 – Doubles as Flash Disk 15 hours with 3 x AAA batteries Fast SiRF III chipset – get a satellite fix in as little as 1 second
	Sony GPSCS3KA $149.99 (SonyStyle) Data Logger Acts as USB GPS interface for any computer with a USB port and GPS software Built-in MemoryStick and SecureDigital ports for automatically matching GPS data to images 15 hours with 2 x AA batteries

Software

There are a number of easy to use programs that offer GeoTagging, such as iLife 09, Picasa, and Aperture. But if you want to match up GPS data from a data logger device such as the AMOD AGL3080, I’ve got a few tips since that’s what I have.

Basically there are two providers: Houdah and GPSBabel, with some crossover.

	HoudahGeo – $30 (http://www.houdah.com/houdahGeo/) OS X 10.4+ Geocodes for Google Earth or Flickr Writes to iPhoto 09 places database Map-based geocoding
	HoudahGPS – Free (http://www.houdah.com/houdahGPS/) Front-end GUI for GPSBabel command-line tool Mac-Only (GPSBabel available for Windows, Mac or Linux and other GUIs are available, but nothing as streamlined and simple as HoudahGPS)

Conclusion

I personally use HoudahGeo paired with my AMOD AGL3080. If I could choose now, I’d probably go with the Sony device since all you have to do is turn it on, take your pictures and then just plug in your card when you’re done – the device will write all the appropriate EXIF data to the image files. The AMOD has a few extra steps to it, but it logs files with the same format as the Sony does, so when you import the data into HoudahGPS, you must specify the Sony data format.

If anyone wants a full demonstration of HoudahGeo or HoudahGPS or any cool tricks you can do with them and Google Earth, please comment and say so. I might even write one anyway.

On the off chance that you computer savvy users have not heard of PortableApps.com, I thought I’d bring it to your attention.

Basically all of the best open-source applications have been shrunk down and configured in a way that doesn’t involve embedding itself in your system registry. Apps include Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice3.0, ClamWin (antivirus), InfraRecorder (cd authoring), Pidgin (chat), Notepad++ (pretty much my favourite text editor) and more.

I used to keep everything on my laptop and generally I do, but since I can’t always bring my laptop with me and I have this nasty habit of needing to be connected all of the time, I carry around my trusty USB key so I can even check my email from several accounts using Thunderbird.

The programs offered even include a portable PHP and MySQL server, which can come in handy for when you need to work offline and don’t already have a local environment.

Many of these programs are useful to me both as a programmer and a mobile tech. The program names will be more familiar to linux users due to the open source nature and the wide availability of mainstream products. Pidgin, for example is a chat program that can interface with MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC, AIM, and even Google Talk. It doesn’t support any of the extra features such as video or voice chat, but it does a great job where it needs to.

I came across a great post today, highlighting software that sadly I can’t experiment with because I only have a single Mac – a Mini.

For those of you with multiple Macs, this software may be for you.

And as an added bonus, the post is from a ColdFusion developer not far from here over in Vancouver.

Check out the post http://mallinson.ca/post/12/

I wanted to give props to the guys who developed and maintained a great little program called HandBrake. I’ve used it on a number of occasions to transcode big MKVs to smaller AVIs that my modded Xbox finds easier to handle.

Every other program I’ve tried is either a trial version, difficult to use, or both. With HandBrake it’s as easy as picking the source video, picking the destination location, picking the encoder you want to use, and then “Start”. There are a number of configured presets along the sidebar for standard outputs which cover iPod, QuickTime, PS3, Xbox 360 and more.

As with any encoding program I’ve found there’s a bit of trial and error involved – some devices are pretty picky about what codecs they use, and even about the customizations of said codec. So depending on what you’re transcoding for, your mileage may vary. But I’ve never found a better program for it.

The Interface is easy, as you can see. There are a number of sub-options available such as Audio – obviously for customizing the audio codec and bitrates. Then Chapters for setting chapter points in the video and advanced for some settings that I generally don’t touch – for experts only.

I find that transcoding widescreen video can be especially testy – again, depending on what you intend to play it with. The aspect ratio can get a bit flaky based on whether you pick a strict or loose aspect ratio setting. It’s an easy solution though – just clip a short piece of what you’re trying to transcode and let it process that, then test the results. Or just let it get far enough into transcoding to have a few seconds to examine. Computers tend to automatically correct and adjust aspect ratios, so you’re best off testing on a DVD player if that’s what you planned. Same goes for XBMC – it won’t encoding mistakes.

What’s even better is that it is available for both PC and Mac, so don’t let the screenshots mislead you. I just happen to only have it installed on my Mini so that’s where I took the screenshots.

In my entire memory, there is no more pesky or nightmarish an un-install process as with the MS Office Activation Assistant.

For the uninitiated among you, the Office Activation Assistant (OAA) is a tool that pc and laptop manufacturers preinstall on your computer at the factory. Here’s a blurb from the Microsoft website:

The Microsoft Office Activation Assistant is a tool that allows customers who have the 2007 Microsoft Office system preinstalled on a new PC to:

Buy a product key; or

Get a key to activate a 60-day trial version of Office Professional 2007.

Now I’m all for helpful tools to make things simpler, but this is not one of them. This may very be the worst tool ever created. This functionality could easily have been a plugin built in to the MS Office suite itself, and in the case of my mom’s laptop which I worked on all day yesterday, it proved once again to be the bane of my existence.

In a previous post, I sent away my mom’s laptop to HP with various hardware-related problems. Yesterday I got it back, and to HP’s credit, it worked. I’m very satisfied that they got it working and did it free as an extended warranty due to a manufacturing error. However, I decided to start her off again with a clean slate, so I ran the recovery partition and reset everything to factory defaults.

I knew somewhat what was coming – I’d dealt with it before many times, but it never gets any less frustrating. In the same post I mentioned earlier, I noted the “crapware” installed by many manufacturers. HP is one of the worst offenders in this regard, along with a “Factory Default” image that is flawed.

What it’s supposed to do is work alongside a preinstalled Office 2007. The laptop in question had Office 2007 Home and Student Edition. What’s supposed to happen is you open OAA and it detects the version installed and automatically grants you a trial or (once you buy one) a retail license. Problem is, this absolutely untouched Pavilion dv2310ca image is broken: OAA doesn’t recognize Office install, and doesn’t state what it’s looking for. What’s worse, you can’t uninstall OAA until you’ve used it to activate Office.

I discovered there were two viable solutions, but neither one are ideal.

A good Samaritan named “richi” over at techarena had some tips that I remember being more useful last time, but this time didn’t work well for me, but that’s not to say it won’t work for someone.

1.
Use "Regedit" to nagivate to
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{65DA2EC9-0642-47E9-AAE2-B5267AA14D75}
or search HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall for "Activation Assitant".
To use Regedit, use Windows-Start-> Run and type in "Regedit"
HKLM is an abbreviation to HiveKeyLocalMachine, which appears as "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" within the registry editor.
2.
Change Values for Keys "NoRepair", "NoModify", "NoRemove" from "1" to "0"
as there is no Key "UninstallString", only a value vor "InstallSource"

I tried this and when I attempted to uninstall, it said I needed to have MS Office installed and activated first. It offends me that someone would be held hostage by a stupid tool to buy a program that a consumer my not want. That being said, I do want Office 2007, but not while held at gunpoint. So I obviously had to uninstall Office 2007 since it wasn’t recognized by OAA. Then I installed my personal retail Office 2007 copy, and tried that. Keep in mind the install of Office is a rather time consuming process. Once it was installed, I ran OAA again. This time it seemed to recognize the Office install since it automatically opened up Word for me, but then it just sat there and did nothing.

The techarena link above also indicates that another way to remove OAA is to download a trial version of home and student (a ~300 MB file), use OAA to get a trial key, apply the key, and then uninstall the Assistant followed by the unwanted Office install, so that I can reinstall the version of Office I do want. This ended up being the solution that worked, and I knew it would, but I wanted to do everything in my power to find a simpler solution.

I failed.

And yes it is Vista, but ultimately it not Microsoft’s fault. Yes they wrote a stupid tool. But who installed it? The manufacturer (in this case HP). Who created a faulty factory image? The manufacturer. If they’d just set up the image properly and tested it, the tool might have worked properly out of the box.

The sad thing is with all the stigma attached to Vista (which I completely believe to be a great operating system flawed only by Apple-fuelled propaganda), people will blame the OS for the problems. Vista’s acceptance has greatly been hindered by manufacturers crippling their own systems with bloated crap preinstalled on it. Case in point I just spent all day yesterday uninstalling tools, such as ones telling me to buy AOL or Verizon – one of which I’m amazed people still use, and the other not even available in Canada (keep in mind this laptop was specifically designed for Canada hence the “ca” part of dv2310ca).

I entreat all manufacturers to stop loading your systems with junk. Nobody wants it. And Microsoft should discourage crapware that makes its OS look bad.

Could somebody please explain to me the purpose of the Google Toolbar? Or any toolbar for that matter? I mean I’ve been in this business for a while and the only advantage I can see is saving “Google Favourites”, and being able to search Google from anywhere… which I can do anyway.

But it seems like every program I download these days has some sort of toolbar wrapped up inside. I used to confidently install the standard options in most programs, but now I have to pick the "Advanced” install just for my own peace of mind that there are no toolbars hiding in the works. I treat them the same as I would a virus, and I cringe every time I see it on someone’s computer. Perhaps I’m missing something?

I have a hosting package that limits my site to about 100 MB. I could easily get more but at the moment this is just a blog and as such doesn’t require much space. The biggest quota hog seems to be photos and video, which is pretty much consistent for my home network as well (aside from the thousands of gigs set aside for ISOs). My wife does a lot of photography and I tend to encourage her by purchasing expensive DSLRs. Before we had kids she took an insane amount of pictures, so you can imagine that after having a baby boy and girl, that quantity has increased significantly.

Anyway I’ve been meaning to exploit a cheat for a while, but despite being a technophile, I’m slow to adopt new web services. I don’t do Twitter, never had a myspace page, and the only reason I have a Facebook account is because my work associate insisted, even so far as to sign me up himself and send me the login info. So I’ve been aware of Flickr’s existence for quite some time, but I never saw a practical purpose to it until my friend Devin over at dcolumbus.net informed me that it could be used as a photo repository, and that most CMSs like WordPress can pull in photos and display them without anyone even seeing Flickr.

So in the name of science I decided to finally buckle down and experiment.

I signed up with my existing yahoo account (again, one signed for under great duress), and it ran through a wizard which walked me through the process of uploading pictures or video, labelling them etc. Personally I found the workflow a bit onerous – it could probably flow better, although I don’t have any suggestions as to how better to streamline the process. It’s possible I’m just fussy since all I’m looking for is a way to store pictures. I’m not actually looking to use the service in its own right. Not to say that they haven’t put together a great service API to work from to pull in pictures (though it was also a bit clunky to find and a bit ambiguous as to whether I really needed an API key or if what I was attempting was truly bizarre).

The biggest issue I had (which was a relatively small one but only because I know what I’m doing) was finding my Flickr user id, which is apparently in the format of 12345678@N00 which doesn’t match up with my login name or my display name. But after visiting idGettr, I was able to identify my ID right away.

The WordPress plugin “Flickr Gallery” uses the API to access all of my photos – even the private ones – and I can call them into the post using various short tags, displayed via a fancy-looking and oft-used Lightbox.

I must say I am pleased with the results, despite the photo being uploaded from my cell phone and thus mediocre quality. The picture above is my son, in case anyone wonders.

When you’ve been in computers as long as I have, you’re bound to have wiped your computer on average once a year. And if you’re smart about it, you’ll develop a routine and a list of must-have programs. On the media end of things, I’ve used “Vista Codec Package” ever since I first found out about it. Like the website says, “Codecs have always been a pain in the butt”. But the codecs have already been checked here for conflicts, incompatibilities and have been optimized for most systems. The package contains no media player, it simply registers codecs available for your existing media players to use. And like my beloved XBMC, it plays anything – even things that Windows Media Player doesn’t know it can play.

I’d include a picture but there’s no program to look at. But if you get it, all your video and audio needs will be well taken care of.