It has been a long time ago since I last reviewed the TVU Player, a popular software that streams TV to your computer, most call it Internet TV. I decided to download the latest version and see what has changed since my last review and I can promise you that some of the changes are really exciting.

The new TVU Player interface hosts more information than the previous one. A remarkable change is the language and topics bar at the top which filters channels by their language or topic. If you only want to view English channels for instance you click the English button and only those are displayed.

The same principle works for topics such as Sports or News. The right pane hosts messages, reviews and the tv guide which is probably the most useful of the three. You can select your timezone and get information about upcoming shows on the tv station that you are watching.

continue reading "TVU Player Internet TV revisited"

The Recent Documents are a comfort function in Office 2007 products such as Word 2007 or Excel 2007 that displays the last 17 documents that you have opened in the applications. You can open that menu when you click on the big - some say huge - Office icon button on the top left corner of the screen.

Some users prefer to remove the Recent Documents altogether for several reasons. Maybe the computer is used by more than one user and the profile is shared - believe me that seems to happen a lot of times in families - or if you borrow someone a computer without creating a new profile for him or, my favorite, if you want to eliminate the chance that someone could see the Recent Documents on your computer at work.

The amount of Recent Documents that are shown can be changed in the Word options (Excel options..). You can access them from the same menu. Click on the big Office button in the upper left corner and select the Word Options button which is located right under Recent Documents.

continue reading "Disable Recent Documents in Word 2007"

When it comes to GTD I’m pretty picky about what I use. I do enjoy the simplicity of online applications like Simple GTD, but if I have a lot of very elaborate projects I need much more power. There are online solutions, but the great ones like Nozbe tend to cost money. While I have no problem with that, my picky nature means that the chances of an app working for me is slim.

Then along came ThnkingRock, an Australia based application that has all the power of the online apps, plus more, for free. It has been developed for Linux, OS X and Windows and is currently in its 2.0 epsilon release.

In short, ThinkingRock implements David Allen’s GTD methodology pretty much as close as any app can come to it and it stays true to it throughout the way. It keeps the stages of GTD distinctly separate and enables you to create advanced reports, print them or save them as pdf, xls, etc.

continue reading "ThinkingRock - Desktop GTD"

I’m currently still using my old Microsoft Xbox as my media center and it’s working fine so far but I do have thoughts about the future. The Xbox will not last forever and the new Xbox 360 cannot be modified to do the same yet. One alternative that I investigated was building a computer for this purpose and I’m almost sure that I would use the Geexbox Linux distribution as the operating system.

The distribution has a size of 8.9 Megabytes and comes with an unbelievable amount of features. It is a self-bootable Linux distribution based on the excellent Mplayer which assures that it can play (almost) any file that you throw at it. It plays MPEG 1/2/4, Real Media, Windows Media, Ogg and Matroska and audio and network streams.

The multimedia files can be loaded and played from various sources such as CD, DVD, HDD, LAN or even Internet. It’s all there, it’s tiny and booting really fast. It should not have problems with most hardware setups. The requirements are 64 Megabytes of RAM, a Pentium class cpu (400+ Mhz recommended) or a Mac G3+ (G4+ recommended), an an ALSA compatible sound card, a VESA 2.0 compliant graphics card and a CD or DVD drive.

continue reading "Geexbox Linux Distribution to play multimedia"

When I first reviewed Miro it was still known as the Democracy Player; a lot has changed since then and I decided to take a second look at Miro. The first question that I was asking myself was how I could classify Miro. Is it a video player, a videocast player, a way to play videos from video portals ? It’s actually all of this although I would not use it for everything that I have just mentioned.

I would classify Miro as a videocast player with extended functionality. If you think Joost or Bablegum now you are wrong because Miro is open plattform while the other two are not. Open Plattform, what’s that again ? Open Plattform means that any video producer can get his videos on Miro and that every viewer can also add videos using urls. Try that with Joost.

Another huge difference is that videos are actually downloaded to your hard drive and placed by default in the My Videos folder if you are using Windows. That means that you can watch them, burn them or send them to a friend without problems. The option to send a email link to a friend also exists in Miro btw.

continue reading "Taking a second look at Miro"