Dustin Mihalik's Blog

Moved Sites

mihalik — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 00:48:00 GMT

I've moved all of my posting to a blog hosted on my domain dmihalik.com. Please visit that site for updated posts or subscribe to the RSS feed for dmihalik.com.

More Mac Mini home theater stuff

mihalik — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 04:47:00 GMT

There's been a lot of talk on various sites along the lines of my previous Mac Mini post. Most of them come to the same conclusion, both the hardware and software are lacking, but with a little extra money and a little extra work, you can probably create a pretty nice little HTPC system. Here's some good sites that have some more information:

Mac HTPC - Site that just started and discusses all things HTPC on the Mac.
Mac Media Center - Forum created so people can work on a Media Center application for the Mac
MythTV on OSX - Apparently MythTV has already been ported to OS X. I looked at MythTV a while back, it looked pretty slick.

Since my MCE is up and running stable, I don't see myself switching to a Mac Mini for my home theater any time soon, but it would be a fun project to play with...

Crossposted from dmihalik.com

Best Press Release Ever.

mihalik — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 07:20:00 GMT

I’ve never been a fan of G4 (cable gaming station). I guess that’s probably because I’m not a 14 year old male, which seems to be their target audience. I especially don’t like them since they bought TechTV and canceled most of the TechTV shows I enjoyed and apparently got rid of all the competent people that TechTV had.

So reading through their press release for two new really lame shows, Jessie found the following line: "Our audience interacts with digital girls as much as real girls and we're tapping into that fantasy." I really like the “our audience are losers” stance the station is taking.

Crossposted from dmihalik.com

Upgrading to Media Center

mihalik — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 08:49:00 GMT

I upgraded (or downgraded as some might consider) my Media Portal HTPC to XP Media Center Edition about two weeks ago. I've really enjoyed using Media Portal, but I'm gonna try Media Center out for a while. I was using the MCE skin for Media Portal, and was using my Logitech 680 remote using Media Portal's support for MCE remotes, so I figured that I could try out the software I was trying so hard to imitate.

I think MCE's UI is a lot more polished. You give up a few things when you create a skinnable UI like Media Portal has. The other thing that I really like is the ability to configure the app with the remote. Sometimes I want to watch a movie on a new fileshare. Before, I'd have to remote desktop in and map a drive and add it to a configuration. Now I just get a list of all the file shares on my network and select it.

I've been very happy with it so far. I was a bit frustrated after two days of attempting to get some directshow filters working for some odd movie formats, but now everything seems to be working great and I've not had to remote desktop in to the machine to fix anything. Usually, I like tweaking on my computers, but with this HTPC project, I've gotten to the point where I just want it to reliably work without any weekly tweaking. I'm not quite sure what's wrong with me, I guess I'm getting lazy in my old age.

Crossposted from dmihalik.com

Mac Mini - Almost the perfect Home Theater component

mihalik — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 08:12:00 GMT

Apple announced the Mac Mini today at Macworld. This is the exact form factor I've been looking for to use as a home theater PC. It's small, it's quiet, and it looks cool. Oh, and at $500 it's not that expensive (considering most of the nice HTPC cases I've been looking at are around $200 for an empty case). I know that Apple is not (yet) looking to compete in this market, but I hope they do soon because there are just a couple things that keep me from buying one to stick in my entertainment center.

1 – There's no built-in RCA or S-video. I wish I had an HDTV that took DVI, but I don't. And I'm sure most people don't. Apple does sell a little adapter, but it would be nice if it was built-in.

2 – The only sound output is a mini plug. No coaxial or optical audio here. Once again, there's an adapter to solve this.

3 – No good 10foot experience software. I've not done extensive research, so I'm not positive on this. There are plenty of options for Windows (Media Center Edition, Media Portal, Meedio, etc), so I would not be surprised if there was something for OS X that I could not find.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure one of these will probably be arriving our house in the next 6 months (like to wait until Tiger is released), but it won't be showing up to go into the entertainment center (so sad).

Crossposted from dmihalik.com

Guess I should go back to elementary school

mihalik — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 11:35:00 GMT

I've been reading David Alan's “Getting Things Done” (more on that some other post) lately and I've made a frightening discovery: I've forgotten how to read.

It's probably been a year since I sat down to really read an actual book (though I've been listening to some pretty good ones thanks to Audible). Usually, I'm just skimming web pages, magazine articles, or reference books. Years of skimming pages for the one small bit of information has made my brain lazy; it does not want to concentrate on page after page of text. It just wants to find the one sentence that will solve my problem and ignore all the rest.

So, reading “Getting Things Done” is helping me twofold. First, I'm learning how to get things done (though I've got a long way to go). Second, as my eyes wander to the bottom of a page to figure out what the point is, I can whip them back into shape and actually learn how to read, again.

Spurl

mihalik — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 08:31:00 GMT

I've been using Spurl for a few weeks now. It's an online bookmark manager/community bookmark site. I know some people who use http://del.icio.us/ (Spurl can add your spurled bookmarks to del.icio.us if you want), but I like it more that del.icio.us because of the browser integration and some other features. If you've got a huge list of bookmarks you are trying to keep on multiple computers, it's worth checking out.

Handbook for the sellout

mihalik — Sun, 18 Jul 2004 23:35:00 GMT

I learned on Friday that two of my favorite programs have been purchased by much larger companies Picassa, a photo indexing program, was purchased by Google. Lookout, a plugin for Outlook that indexes and searches email, was purchased by Microsoft. Both of these programs are great pieces of software and I'm sure they'll both get better with a little more money dedicated to them.

The only thing that I find somewhat ironic is the current state of both of these projects. Lookout was a free plugin, but now that it is owned by Microsoft, it is no longer available for download and from the FAQ, it seems like it'll be a while before a new version will be available. On the other hand, Picassa used to cost $30 and have a 30 day trial. Now that Google owns them, It's available for free and Google is advertising it on their main page.

Google is making a great product available to anyone and Microsoft is making a great product unavailable to everyone.

Crossposted from dmihalik.com

WinHEC Longhorn Build

mihalik — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 09:42:00 GMT

According to Neowin, a new build of Longhorn will be released at WinHEC next week, build 4074. There are only a few screenshots on Neowin, so there's no way to tell if it contains some of the features that 4051 was missing. I'm hoping that this build will become available on MSDN in the next few weeks and that it will play nice with the recent Whidbey release.

OneNote SP1 - now with an API

mihalik — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 19:55:00 GMT

Microsoft has a preview of OneNote SP1 available. It's got a lot of new features, including better Tablet PC support and better integration with Office. Sounds like Microsoft has really been listening to user feedback to make OneNote better. If you like OneNote as much as I do, download it and check it out.

The most important new feature (to me at least) is tucked at the bottom of the features page “Simple application programming interface (API) for extending OneNote”. I know numerous people have come up with things they would like to use OneNote for (blogging), and it sounds like some of them might be possible now. I plan on playing with the API a little tonight to see what it's all about.

Outlook 2003 Notes Connector

mihalik — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 05:26:00 GMT

If you've been stuck using Outlook XP so you could use the Outlook Notes Connector or if you've been using R5(blech) or R6, today is a very happy day. MS has released the Notes Connector for Outlook 2003. All the goodness of Outlook 2003 but connected to a Domino server. Couple this with the Trillian Sametime Plugin, and you can lead an almost normal life, even if your corporate environment is “Blue”.

Longhorn Feature: Bluetooth

mihalik — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 05:27:00 GMT

I often say bad things about WindowsXP's lack of built-in Bluetooth support. I know there are plenty of articles that state that Bluetooth is dead, but with support on the PocketPC, it seems like there should be some support in XP. Bluetooth support on the PocketPC is much better than on XP.

I assumed since I had not heard anything about Bluetooth support on Longhorn, that it was not there. I was actually thinking of writing a blog entry about what it was missing. I decided I should test it out before I started pointing fingers. I'm glad I did. As soon as I plugged in my Bluetooth adaptor, Longhorn recognized it and allowed me to connect to my phone and PocketPC.

There seems to only be support for doing dialup and serial connections right now, but hopefully sending files, sharing contacts, and other useful services will be available in later versions. Yet another feature I did not expect to see, but I am very happy it's there.

Now I just need to dig into the API's and see if they are any better than the Bluetooth API's on XP. Fingers crossed for a managed Bluetooth API.

Longhorn feature of the night

mihalik — Tue, 11 Nov 2003 04:55:00 GMT

I've found quite a few new features in Longhorn that I did not see at the PDC that are not really development related, but are still worth mentioning. I figured I'd post a few as I came across them. This one is the solution to the problem of applications trying to take over as the default file handler for a file type.

It seems that Longhorn will ask when a program changes the default type and allows you to select if you wish to use the new program or continue using the current program. The fact that any application can choose to be the default handler for a file type was a major frustration in previous versions. Here's a screenshot of the dialog I got when Firebird tried to handle jpg images.

Longhorn RSS Sidebar

mihalik — Wed, 05 Nov 2003 04:49:00 GMT

After installing Longhorn, I was very disapointed with the number of sidebar tiles it included. As much as I need 1/8th of my screen taken up by a clock and a quick launch bar, I've kept it off until tonight. Tonight I went looking for some sample sidebar tiles before I started working on my own. There are a few samples in the Longhorn SDK, including the tile RSS viewer tile that was running during the PDC Keynote on Monday.

I've been doing all my development in Notepad since my packet of “the goods” was missing the Whidbey DVD (really need to email someone about that), but I've gotten a little bit done with the aid of these samples.

Hello World
French Flashcard
Contact Lookup
RSS Reader

One more tip: be very careful when testing your sidebar tiles. Since they run inside explorer.exe, a crash in the sidebar tile can cause explorer to crash. And since the sidebar starts with explorer and does not keep tabs on what crashed last, it's pretty easy to get stuck where explorer crashes everytime it starts.

Longhorn: First impressions

mihalik — Mon, 03 Nov 2003 03:59:00 GMT

I installed Longhorn on my home dev box this weekend. Since I only played with it on the lab computers, I did not see much of the install and setup. Since the major thing that I had drilled into my head at the PDC was that Microsoft want's my opinion, I thought i would post my first impressions.

The install was very nice. When I put in the DVD, I got a very nice GUI installer rather than the text-based ones from 2000 & XP. UI on the installer was very clean, and it gave me fairly accurate guesses on how long it was going to be working. It hardly gave me any options on how to set things up, though. This is somewhat good, somewhat bad. Most of the time I just take the defaults, but there are some things (like timezone) that need to be changed and I hate looking through the control panel to figure out how to change them. This could just be because it's such an early build.

I'm pretty sure the sidebar will be very useful in the futre, but in this version, there are no useful tiles (as much as I love the huge clock...), and it's just a waste of screen space.

The memory leaks are very bad. Woke up this morning to a machine that was using 1.5gb of memory. Killing explorer every now and then seems to keep it down. Not a major problem for such early software, but it makes it diffucult to use for too long. Also, File IO and networking seem really slow. Once again, not major because it's so early, but it's somewhat annoying

WinFS seems pretty good, but I've not figured out a whole lot about how to use it. I was hoping it could just scan my drives and figure out where things were. I guess that's not (currently) the case, so I dropped some stuff into my default store and it seemed to work fine.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with the new stuff I've seen. Once I get Widbey installed (more on that later), I'll start playing with some more of the new Avalon stuff and posting what I think abou the new API's.