Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

A while back I started toying with playing back DVR-MS files from Media Center on Server 2003. For no particular reason really. Just thought it might be fun. I didn't bother going all the way through it since I didn't really see the point. Plus I was able to do it just fine with GraphEdit on Server if I really wanted. At any rate Jon (not TReKiE) decided that he wanted to be able to watch the files in Media Player on Server so with a little help from myself and Mark Salloway he's got a working Server install playing back his recordings. Here's the basic details:

"First, copy the following 3 files from the \Windows\System32 folder on your Windows XP machine to the \Windows\System32 folder on your Windows Server 2003 machine:
encdec.dll 6.05.2600.2180 sbe.dll 6.05.2600.2180 sbeio.dll 9.00.00.3165

Now run the following two commands from Start -> Run...:
regsvr32 encdec.dll regsvr32 sbe.dll

Next, load Windows Media Player (or any other media player, I presume), a .dvr-ms file, and enjoy!
Note: Like a regular Windows XP Home/Pro machine, in order to play .dvr-ms files, you will need a DVD decoder installed."

Here's a link to the actual posting from Jon.

Found this cool filter for Adobe Audition/CoolEdit which lets one open up Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) files in Audition for editing and conversion. The filter can be downloaded from vuplayer.com free of charge. It's been working great and because of Audition's batch processing it's really easy to bulk convert files to WMA for later streaming. Really sweet.

The Register say that IE7 breaks the Yahoo and Google toolbar. I personally haven't seen that as I use Google's toolbar on my second machine here, not sure about Yahoo since I've never found a benefit from any of its features. Looks like Scoble has posted about this as well. Things seem to be working just fine as seen in this screenshot, even so it's a beta, these things are sort of expected. Despite The Register's claims the only thing that seems to be nuked is their article.

UPDATE: Emailed Andrew Orlowski with a link to my blog and the simple question "did you actually verify this before posting?" here's the response:

"Yes, it's broken on many installations. It works on more. If you paste your story into an email replay it might even get read. a"

So I'm not sure what he's actually trying to say. Your guess is as good as mine?

Installed the IE7 beta. Loving my tabs and such. Tested out everything I could including FlashBang to make sure it would work with IE7. Did want to post about this nice FLAC filter for Adobe Audition but noticed the rich text editor that's used by dasBlog 1.7 isn't IE7 ready. It should just work but my guess is that it's not recognizing the browser right. Suppose it's time to play and fix. There's no way I'm giving up tabs now :).

UPDATE: Did just notice this, which has a bit more info. Looks like it should be a simple fix/update.

Be sure to visit all the options under "Configuration" in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 16 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.

 

Sean refers to a News.com (press) (cough) blog (cough) about how Microsoft is apparently not happy about the entire "podcasting" naming and thinks "blogcasting" is so much better. Obviously because Microsoft just totally hates the iPod and how the term podcasting conjures up images of white headphones etc. Get real, white headphones aren't just for the iPod anymore. Look at the PSP and Creative products. Almost any product that can get away with white headphones will try to.

This is yet another example of the press just faffing about and not doing a good job of reporting facts without the opinion. There's another post from the gents at The Inquirer. What's wrong with it you ask? Well loads, but that's nothing new since this is coming from The Inquirer. But then there's this:

"You also need MS Media Center Edition 2006 (MCE 2006)."

Who ever said anything about MCE 2006? I've not heard of such a thing and couldn't say either way if that's what it would actually be called. Point is, Microsoft hasn't made any official announcements as far as I'm aware so obviously a better way of putting it would've been. "You'd also need an update to the OS in order for you to take advantage of these new features."

I'm glad Sean points to what's considered a trusted News source such as News.com. Because it just shows that so many times these sources just aren't as good as they could or should be.

Kerry Skarbakka has some excellent photos in his latest portfolio. "The Struggle to Right Oneself" has some great shots, not sure how many of them are done with Photoshop or if they're all 100% reality. It's a shame he's not posted some tips on his production process. Definitely a cool project though.

Looking back at the past 3 weeks when I've not been taking anything to help enable sleep it seems as if my body is naturally going to this 4-6 hours asleep then 6-8 hours awake mode. To be perfectly honest I really don't think I've got a problem with that entire sort of schedule except for the fact that it totally doesn't coalesce with the entire job thing. At this point I've still got another 7 weeks left of the pass out pills if I continue taking them only on the weekend. Hopefully I'll axe them sooner rather than later. I seem to be settling on the idea of waking up at around 6AM and getting tired right after dinner still barely getting sleep but still settling nicely at work. Then on the weekends taking a pill and sleeping for 12 hours straight to catch up and stay in the routine. Yawn.

I don't normally link to The Register but definitely feel the need to link to this one. Apparently Dell are turning off some of their web based forums specifically the Customer Care forums. Forget the reasoning, this is just plain stupid. Dell forums are probably the only reason why I've continued to buy Dell products. Often times information regarding weird quirks, quick fixes, updates, etc can be found really quickly. Whereas trying to call for the same information is useless. If it weren't for their ridiculously cheap LCD's I think I could just drop them altogether from this point forward. Hopefully Dell will bring them all back online else dealing with Dell systems will soon become a major pain.

Helpful find while searching for I Zimbra. In an effort to find out if there was some meaning to the words to I Zimbra I discovered this list of songs with nonsense-words.

GADJI BERI BIMBA CLANDRIDI
LAULI LONNI CADORI GADJAM
A BIM BERI GLASSALA GLANDRIDE
E GLASSALA TUFFM I ZIMBRA

BIM BLASSA GALASSASA ZIMBRABIM
BLASSA GLALLASSASA ZIMBRABIM

A BIM BERI GLASSALA GRANDRID
E GLASSALA TUFFM I ZIMBRA

GADJI BERI BIMBA GLANDRIDI
LAULI LONNI CADORA GADJAM
A BIM BERI GLASSASA GLANDRID
E GLASSALA TUFFM I ZIMBRA

Talking Heads - I Zimbra

Got that stuck in my head after watching A Digital Picture of Britain from BBC4. Knew I had it in my collection of music and just couldn't pin it. Ended up searching for "he's in the lyrics" and obviously wasn't even close, really couldn't make it out even after removing the guy talking about the photographers. Stupid thing is that I copied a couple of the songs from the Sand in the Vaseline discs onto my Zen Micro and just totally skipped over this song. Luckily in the search I was able to replace this song with Atom Heart Mother which I figure will take a bit longer to get out of my head.