I bought my shiny green limited edition Xbox when it came out, put a modchip inside and replaced the hard drive with a 120 Gigabyte drive. The first application that I put onto it was XBMC, the Xbox Media Center, which functions as my main entertainment hub ever since. I usually drop movies on it once every while and replace old ones because the hard drive has limited space but it gives me the pleasure of viewing movies that I download or rip on my LCD television and not my computer. I never really liked watching movies on the computer either.

That Xbox Media Center is apparently going cross plattform and a early alpha release is available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. The funny thing is that you can download all three releases but not the Xbox release from the website because of legal reasons. I still think that Microsoft should hire those guys and make the XBMC the default media application of the Xbox.

It is clearly aimed at media PCs that are used in the living room but it can also be started from any computer that runs a supported operating system. Users who know XBMC from their Xbox will feel familiar with the interface because it looks pretty much alike, only that the gamepad navigation was replaced with mouse navigation.

continue reading "Xbox Media Center Cross Platform Alpha"

Most people I know use YouTube to watch a few videos online. While YouTube definitely has the best collection of videos on the Internet, the quality of most of their videos leaves a lot to be desired. Then again, you can’t really blame them since they’re catering to a wide range of internet connections.

The problem is that it can be very frustrating for a broadband viewer. If you do have the bandwidth to spare and want high definition (HD) video, then Veetle is for you. It’s a Silicon Valley based firm who’s USP is to let the average viewer watch and broadcast HD quality video.

Veetle works a lot like popular video-sharing site Veoh. Before you can watch a video, you have to download and install the VeetleTV software on your computer. After that, you can watch the videos in your browser itself. VeetleTV works on Windows, Linux, and Mac so there are no OS compatibility problems here.

continue reading "Watch High Definition Videos with Veetle"

Am I alone in thinking these new shock horror reports about Radioheads’ online music experiment are completely ridiculous?

PaidContent today picked up on a story by Big Champaign, a company which monitors file sharing activity. Mashable then joined in with an article entitled “Free wasn’t cheap enough for Radiohead fans” and All things Digital even put up a story about it.

Mashable had this to say on the subject:

“Free isn’t cheap enough for us, apparently. When a band like Radiohead comes out with an album, puts it up on a website for us, and gets more press coverage than just about any album release in recent memory, and says “Hey, pay us for it if you want to,“  we still feel the need to “steal it” off Bittorrent.”

I have no intention of going into the ethics of downloading music, I just found this such a completely pointless report. He continues with this:

continue reading "Completely Ridiculous Radiohead Music Experiment"

Tokyoflash is a well known Japanese company that is producing lots of “I need to read the manual to read the time” watches on their website which surprisingly - for a Japanese company - offers an English section for its international visitors.

The prices for the watches start by roughly 8900 Yen which is about 80 US Dollars to more than 99000 Yen which would be more than 900 US Dollars. Most watches on the other hand are sold for $80-160 which is quite reasonable in my opinion.

It definitely takes some time to get accustomed to this new way of reading the time especially if you purchase one of the crazy blinking models that do not resemble a watch at all. Take a look at a few models to get a feeling for what they have on offer:

continue reading "Do You Want A Watch That Catches Attention?"

A website should not be able to read the the history of websites that a user visited previously. An ingenious CSS hack and some spicy Javascript is however enough to use a trial and error method to find out if a user has been to specific websites.

Some webmasters use this method to display the social bookmarking and news batches of websites that their visitors have been through which is very effective in gaining popularity on those websites.

Others came up with a script that is using this method to estimate if the visitor is male or female. The Javascript makes use of the Quantcast Top 10K websites and the male:female ratio that they provide plus a neat algorithm to compute the percentages for male and female likeliness.

continue reading "Male or Female? Your Browser’s History Might Tell"