The great thing about Firefox (sorry, one of the great things) is that by being open source other developers can use the code as a starting point to create their own more specialised browsers from. Flock is one very good example and I’ve written about it on gHacks before. Songbird is another, and I have [...]

Categories: Browsing

Windows Media Center really is quite a decent application to use for media management and Microsoft doesn’t get enough credit for the steps it’s taken to establish the PC as the home entertainment hub. One of the lesser known features of WMC is that quite a large number of third party plugins are available, and [...]

Categories: Windows

Martin posted back in December about switching to a tripple-boot, having XP, Vista and Linux on the same machine. I myself installed Ubuntu a while ago and am recently switching near full-time to it. One app I really love is Amarok, one of the media players in the repositories. Amarok is just like any quality [...]

Categories: Linux, Open Source

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.

Categories: Linux, Operating Systems, Software

Thanks to Martin, I was introduced to Orbit Downloader and its nifty little assistant Grab++. It has helped me immensely to save certain files to my hard drive. However, not everyone uses Grab++ so how would you manage to perform the same functions without it? The answer is the Firefox extension DownloadHelper. This was one [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox, Music and Video

I just read an interesting article at Arstechnica by Ken Fisher who was commenting on the termination of Google’s commercial Video service. The termination takes effect in just two days which would not be a big problem if the users who bought or rented videos from the service would still be able to play their purchased videos after that date.

Categories: Music and Video, Music Industry, Online Services

I found a great free software that is able to manage all of my media collections with ease. One of the greatest feature of Data Crow is that it is not only a software for managing DVDs, CDs or books but provides a way to manage all of them. To be precise it is able to manage Software, Movies, Music Albums, Audio CD’s, Books and Images.

Categories: Linux, Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

I’m normally not a friend of codec packs because they tend to install many codecs that are not needed on most systems and could pose compatibility problems with codecs already installed on the system. Windows Vista on the other hand misses some essential codecs that can be quite easily added with the Vista Codec Package which can be customized during installation. That is right, unlike other codec packages you can select to install all or only some of the codecs offered.

Categories: Operating Systems, Windows

Orb is a free software that changes your pc into a streaming server. If the Orb software is running on the pc every other device that has internet such as the Nintendo Wii, a notebook or pda can connect to a website and view any media file that is shared on the streaming server. The setup is really simple. Download the Orb software and install it on the computer that you want to use as the server.

Categories: Cool, Entertainment, Tools