RobiNZ Personal Blog

Top Gear on YouTube, and it's official!

Top Gear now have an official channel on YouTube, and you can subscribe, and they can (unlike other Beeb stuff) be embedded.

So cool it will require an extension to the cool wall

http://www.youtube.com/topgear

My car gets Wordle'd

It’s the text from this post, made into a world cloud with www.wordle.net found via www.ted.com

Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

Lee LeFever’s latest video is a brilliant explanation of “Online Photo Sharing in Plain English”. Kiwis who use New Zealand's largest ISP Xtra, said to be 500,000, already have a "free" Flickr Pro account as part of the Yahoo!Xtra Bubble offer. Watch the video, get over to Flickr and start sharing!

See more videos like this at www.commoncraft.com

Fiat and Alfa at CES?

Fiat take their little 500 and it’s Blue&Me, Microsoft based, software to Vegas for CES! 

Fiat and Alfa on display in the USA | Fiat New Zealand
The new Fiat 500 and the Alfa Romeo Spider make their USA debut this week (7-10 January 2008) at one of the world’s largest and most important exhibitions, but its not the Detroit International Motor Show, rather the Italians have gone to Las Vegas to take part in the 31st Consumer Electronics Show, the world’s largest electronics show with 2,700 exhibitors and 140,000 visitors walking through 1.8 million square metres of the newest and most advanced technology.

Want to share a screen capture? Try Jing!

If you want to grab a screen-capture and share it via Email, Blog or Instant Messaging try Jing!

RobiNZ CAD Blog: Share a screen capture in a Jing
The Jing Project is an experiment from TechSmith, the screen capture/recording people, who are best known for SnagIt & Camtasia. It offers a little of each product in a slick, easy to use, form for both Windows (XP/Vista) & Mac OS X users.
Jing aims to make grabbing a screen capture easy and sharing it a snap, or should I say a Jing!

Tags: Jing

XtraMSN have a new Homepage + it has RSS Feeds

XtraMSN have a new look home-page. That’s not big news but they now offer RSS feeds which is a nice way to keep up to date with the content. I’m not sure if these arrived with the updated home-page or it’s the first time I noticed them. Either way it means the new home-page is more user friendly!

RSS is a great addition and nicely set up as you can choose “Channel feeds”, like “Sport”, or specific topic feeds like “Motorsport”. When one of New Zealand’s most visited sites offers RSS perhaps it’s a sign that RSS is moving from geekville to the mass market…

XtraMSN: RSS Feed Overview
XtraMSN offers the latest news across New Zealand and around the world, the hottest entertainment gossip, travel advice and lifestyle tips. Now you can choose what content you're interested in and we'll deliver it to you instead!

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a free, time-saving way of getting the latest news and updates from XtraMSN…

now with

Tags: XtraMSN, RSS

Pat Metheny Group "The Way Up" Live DVD due in October

I found the following item at CDJapan and thought you might be interested in it… 

IT’S THE DVD OF THE CONCERT OF THE BEST PAT METHENY GROUP RECORDING EVER RELEASED* 

c h a n d r a s u t r a: Pat Metheny Group The Way Up Tour Review
“Even James Joyce, music lover that he was, couldn't help me come up with the adjectives to describe the experience of seeing Pat Metheny Group, on tour”

Pat Metheny Group – "The Way Up" Live DVD
Release Date:2006/10/18
http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=VABG-1216

Running Time: 90mins, NTSC Format, Layers: single-sided/dual-layered,

Aspect Ratio(s): 16:9LB, Regional Encoding: 2, Color, Encoding: MPEG-2, Subtitles: Japanese ,

Audio Track : DTS 5.1ch &  Dolby Digital 5.1ch

 

* Until the next one

 

Track & more details at the Pat Metheny Group MySpace Blog

Flight Simulator X

Flight Simulator X hits the web as the build up to the launch begins.

Flight Simulator X
Microsoft® Flight Simulator X is the culmination of nearly 25 years of the landmark Flight Simulator franchise—the most significant addition to date…

Some Flight Simulator related blogs..

Quicken 2006 Review

Devon has produced a nice review of Quicken 2006 comparing it with his previous experience with Microsoft Money. I started with Quicken (3?) when contracting and still use it for both business and personal finances. I can’t imagine life without it and once you get over the bump starting, setting up accounts and payments etc, it becomes painless to use & maintain. I can’t comment on MS Money as have never tried it.

Although it’s great software I do have one major problem with Quicken. With just the click of a button it tells me I can’t rush out & get the new DSLR, Car or Tablet/Convertible PC and other things on the current wish-list…

Sometimes it would be better not to know!

Devin Reams | Review: Quicken 2006 | devinreams.com
I decided to get somewhat ambitious, as you may have noticed, and went through all my finances…

Fiat + Microsoft = Blue&Me?

Fiat and Microsoft launch Blue&Me. A Windows Mobile based in-car communications & entertainment system.

Fiat and Microsoft launch Blue&Me System - gizmag Article.

The nice thing about spam

The nice thing about MailWasher is you can view spam before you download it, then blitz off the ISP mail server before downloading the mail you actually want. Why not just delete it without review?

Occasionally the spam filters at my ISP tag emails I actually do want. I use them to mark emails as spam but do a quick visual check before deleting them off the mail server. Besides how else would I know that:

• A Royal Bank of Canada account I don’t have:
• Has been the target of identity theft and in order to safeguard your account, we require that you confirm or update your identity….
• I have been approved to claim:
• A total sum of £1,500,000 (one million five hundred thousand great british pounds sterling) in cash from a total cash prize of £10,500,000 shared amongst the first seven (7) lucky winners in this category of the NATIONAL LOTTERYonline Sweepstakes International.
• And missed the:
• “No-charge dating place filled that has a bunch of sex-addicts, No flowers, no walks on the beach, just get together for some action :)

Thanks, but no thanks. The nice thing about spam is watching MailWasher delete it before I get it

AIBO: Can a dog tell the difference?

On a similar theme…

AIBO/Dog Attack Movie
Experiment: Can a dog tell the difference?

Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris is an offshoot of the successful Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo. Both laboratories were created by Sony to perform basic research in computer science and related fields.

 Via comment on jkOnTheRun

ClipTray - Welcome Back!

I’ve just rediscovered a long lost utility.  I used ClipTray in the past but, for some reason, didn’t reload when moving to a new PC. I don't know why but just remembered it as was doing lots of copy/paste while formatting a document. I found it again and in the time I was away its got better.

ClipTray is a “clipboard accelerator” that runs in the system tray gathering up the items you copy/paste. So what you say, the windows clipboard does that for one clip and some Office applications remember multiple clips?

ClipTray has many more features and works with any application. Once items are copied you can:

• Paste the last item copied with Control+V as normal.
• Or fly-out the ClipTray system tray history menu:
• Pick any object previously copied object to be pasted with Control+V.
• See format indicated by the application icon.
• See a tool-tip preview with text or image and other information like clipboard status (Current/not), source application exe, size (pixels or characters)
• For Text Clips you can also:
• Reformat: Upper/Lower/Mixed/Sentence Case, Remove leading/trailing/multiple spaces & Line breaks.
• Email text based Clips (creates new message with text added) but not images
• For web link Clips: Open in same/new browser.
• You  can save clips permanently so you never have to type that email address, link etc again!

These are the features I like but there are more. One is the price which is great: its Freeware! 

If you do a lot of editing its a great time saver and now runs in my system tray nearly all the time. The only thing I've found is it can occasionally interfere with export of large MindManager Map exports to Office applications as this involves multiple automated copy/pastes. I just close ClipTray while doing these. Other than that, if you do lots of document editing, I recommend you give it a try!

ClipTray: Put the clipboard in your system tray!

IE Spell Check

If you do a lot of typing into web forms and your spelling or typing are not the greatest try ieSpell. Its a Spell Checker for Internet Explorer that will catch any typo's before you hit the submit button. This is a great tool for blogging and saves the copy/paste to Word just for spell checking. Its easy to use; just type your entry and click on the spell-check button in the browser tool-bar. The spell check presents a dialog much like your normal word processor with the ability to add words to a custom dictionary. There is also a link to look up the word in an on-line dictionary. ieSpell is free for personal use only. All other use requires a commercial license. Thanks to Chris Yanchar for telling me about it.
Get it from http://www.iespell.com

TypePad

TypePad makes it to the Cool Software Category simply because it enables me to create this site, easily. I've had no problems and rapid response to a few suggestions or queries I've sent to TypePad support.
If you've thought about blogging and found it all too complicated the answer is simple, try TypePad .

Air New Zealand 7E7 for Flight Simulator 2004

Air New Zealand have ordered some 7E7's but you can fly one now!
Thanks to Jon & Peter at ARNZ Aircraft Repaints New Zealand there is a nice Air New Zealand repaint of Robert Versluys's GMAX 7E7-800 for FS2004. Seen here its flying over, or parked in, Dean Baunton's Auckland Scenery available from the same site. This scenery was built for FS2002 but works ok in FS2004 although you see some strange taxi manoeuvres at NZAA as the airport was moved slightly between the two Flightsim versions!
Get it from ARNZ Aircraft Repaints New Zealand Website

A Bandit to the rescue?

Blogs are great, but there are so many of them how can you read them all? With a bit of help you can.
I had heard about "Aggregators" but never bothered finding out about them, or trying one, until today...

Whats an Aggregator?
News aggregators are desktop or Web applications that are used to retrieve and display RSS feeds from various news sources.

Whats an RSS feed?
RSS stands for 'Rich Site Summary', 'RDF Site Summary' or 'Really Simple Syndication' depending on who you ask. An RSS feed is an XML formatted document with a summary of the site and its content used for syndicating content from online sources. You see the RSS feed on news sites and blogs usually in the form of a small orange "XML icon" or a text link like the "Syndicate this site (XML)" link seen on Typepad Blogs. The actual RSS feed XML for this blog looks like this:

How can an Aggregator help?
The Aggregator looks at the RSS feeds you specify and returns any new or changed content from those sites. In a few seconds it's scanned many sites and returned only what is new.
You can then scan and read only the posts you choose either in the aggregator or at the relevant site. This allows many sites to be reviewed very quickly.

There are two main types of aggregators, local or web based. I decided I wanted a locally installed one and after a little searching found RSS Bandit: a .NET RSS desktop feed aggregator. RSS Bandit first implementation was started by Dare Obasanjo and documented in the MSDN article: Building a Desktop News Aggregator. It is now an Open Source project and is hosted at Sourceforge.net.

From my experience so far its a great piece of software that allows simple setup, reading and browser viewing of RSS feeds in a familiar and easy to learn interface. It comes with some feeds preset and you can add others by right clicking on a sites RSS icon/link and choosing "Subscribe in Default Aggregator".
As an example of how it works this is the RSS feed from this Blog seen in RSS Bandit.

You can also see "CAD FORUM" blog has 9 new messages and selecting it would display these. Selecting Search Folder>Unread Items would display all unread items from all blogs. At the time I did this I had 72 active feeds. RSS Bandit scans these in a few seconds and displays all new unread posts filtered in the "Unread" folder. Two feeds show errors where I had put in an incorrect address. RSS Bandit found these and it also can validate an RSS feed for errors in formatting & structure.

You can download RSS Bandit from the RSS Bandit Homepage

92% Junk

Out of 19,763 emails sent to me in the past several months 18,272 were spam (92%). Do I get a lot of spam or not many legitimate emails?
Well, I get hardly any spam as I have Mailwasher. It lets me delete junk mail at the server before downloading. Its great software and in addition to the time saving there is great satisfaction blitzing all that junk mail before it even gets to you.
However, I do wonder how much better the internet would be without all that junk flowing around.

BlogJet Test

This is done with Blogjet that promises wysiwyg publishing for Blogs.

Shaan Hurley found it and mentioned on his blog in the article  Blogjet Rocks

I'm trying it for 30 days to see if I like it, so far I do!

It makes these things much easier:

• Positioning and sizing images and text in a post
• Text Colour and Format.
• Add Bullets!

You can also try it by downloading from the Blogjet Website.

UPDATE: See this post