2005 August

If your current DVD burner won’t support dual layer disks or if you still haven’t gone the route of upgrading from CD burning to DVD burning, you might have another option available for high capacity file backup. Instead of backing up to 4.7GB DVD media or the even smaller 800MB and less CD alternative, use […]

When you’re trying to make home movies look compelling, one of the most important components has nothing to do with image motion. It’s the audio track that ties everything together creating a seamless experience, leading the viewer through the story while letting their imagination fill in the gaps. One slick trick for piecing together movie […]

In an amazing promotion to rebrand itself, EchoStar Communications Corporation, owners of DISH Network satellite TV has started a contest which could provide millions of dollars in DISH Network services and products to residents living in a daring city. The campaign invites cities in the US to officially change their name to “Dish.” In return, […]

Sometimes it’s the little things with a simple solution causing the biggest headache. If you use the official DivX codec when playing back DivX AVI video, a little watermark appears at the bottom of the movie for the first few seconds. Normally, this is no big deal, but it’s occasionally known to get in the […]

The iPod offers a great user experience on the hardware side and integrates nicely with iTunes, but there are certain things I don’t like about the way iTunes works on Windows. It’s not that other media player apps don’t have flaws, I simply find certain aspects of iTunes to be clunky. Finding the perfect alternative […]

While there’s a certain simplicity in using Photo Story for creating slideshows, it doesn’t have the same flexibility with transitions and titling found in Windows Movie Maker. Both of these free apps are great for creating slideshows, but burning the finished movie to DVD requires additional software. Sonic offers a $20 plugin for Photo Story, […]

MP3 in 2005 is like the cassette tape in 1990. Everybody has a bunch of them. They still produce good enough sound despite more efficient compression standards. And it’s hard to discount the switching cost of re-acquiring all your favorites in a new format. For a variety of reasons, you may find yourself in the […]

What the heck is a 5-star song anyway? And if a song is bad enough to rate only 1 star, why didn’t you delete it from your hard drive ages ago? My favorite songs are the ones that fit the mood I’m in right now; whenever right now happens to be. Music is an emotional […]

This is only my second post to the Media Center channel. My first one was published after I had purchased my first Plasma TV. This one is to detail the further evolution of my entertainment system.
Call it creative re-use of old hardware, but I found something to do with an old Compaq Evo n400C laptop […]

If you’ve been around the Lockergnome universe for a few years, you may remember the Mississippi swamp tune, Lockergnome in Blue. If you haven’t heard it before, this may be your only chance to download it. My good friend Steve Robinson wrote and recorded that little ditty in all of about 10 minutes sometime during […]

Chris Marlowe of the Hollywood Reporter (via Yahoo! News) writes:
Starting this Thursday on the live edition of the show Big Brother, there will be a
new twist in the game. This will allow fans to text message from their
cellphones or go online to vote for the new America’s Choice feature
that Julie Chen will announce on the […]

Video capture is a massively resource intensive process. Your PC is writing a continuous stream of data from digital video tape to your hard drive. If your system isn’t prepared for this data dump, it starts dropping frames to keep up with the speed of incoming data. Dropped frames translate to sections of video with […]