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No, I don’t mean the kind of bookmaking that involves gambling! This post discusses techniques you can use to make or assemble your own ebooks that can be read on your Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle or other eBook reader you might own. You might be wondering why someone would want to do this. After all, there are many ebooks available for sale or downloadable from libraries (provided you have a Sony Reader) and many web sites that provide free ebooks for download or reading online.

But there are a number of reasons to do this. One is the cost factor. Recently I assembled a programming text for a somewhat obscure computer programming language. This book is a late model text that retails for about US$65. How ever, the author maintains a website for the book where he allows readers to read or download the chapters. His purpose in doing so, he states, is that he hopes the book will serve as a useful introduction to those who are curious, but who are not curious enough to shell out big bucks for a dead-tree book. Hey! It works for me. I’m not monetarily profiting from reading it, and I consider it a very useful introduction. He does go on to remind us that the book is available for purchase. Anyway, this book is over 500 pages long, and I am well into it reading it using my Sony eBook Reader. I won’t disclose the book for legal reasons. But so far as I know, Amazon nor any place else sells a digital version of this book. That’s a good reason in itself.

And another reason is that some of these free ebooks available from places like Project Gutenberg may be freely available, but not in a format that your reader understands. While another reason is that there are many, many books available online as web pages. For example, http://www.freetechbooks.com/, http://2020ok.com/index.html, http://www.baen.com/library/ or a whole list of them found here: http://www.freeonlinereading.com/links.htm plus many more. These online books might already be in the correct format or they might be hypertexts, and as such, some digital readers won’t understand them in that format. Many places do provide formats for most every kind of reader. So it just depends on where you go. There are probably a lot more reasons too. But I’ll keep this short.

So, to start I’ll list the tools that I use to assemble these ebooks:

1. Internet Explorer (recent versions preferred)
2. Microsoft Word (however, a compatible alternative might work)
3. A PDF virtual printer (Word 2007 and Word 2010 have these as part of their feature set. If you use an alternative for Word then this is probably required.)
4. PDF editing tools – optional (The one I use only edits  meta data properties such as the title and author and is freeware.)

And now to describe the process. This process calls for Internet Explorer because it has a “Save As…” format that most (any?) other browsers do not. But if there are some that do, then those  may work as well. The “Web Archive, single file (*.mht)” format defaults when you perform a “Save As…” in Internet Explorer versions 7 and 8. In version 6, as I recall, you must change from the default format of as a web page, complete to this *.mht format. It may be possible to install a plug in for other browsers also to add this functionality or to download a stand alone program. I’ll leave it to you to explore those possibilities.

So, what’s the big deal with the *.mht format anyway? Firstly, it’s a archive format. It creates a single file, but the contents can be many files. Think of it as a Zip file, but without the compression, and you’ll get the idea. This is important with web pages because web pages can contain other parts, such as images, that are normally stored separately from the file or directory on the web server that contains the text and formatting of the document. With this file format, those images are all in the same file as the text, formatting and layout, and this makes the job of constructing the ebook a lot simpler.

This file format has a rich history, by the way, and I have extensively used it in the past at my places of employment for other reasons such a software technique called round tripping. This versatile file format is a pure text file, but can encode binary data, such as pictures, and as such, it is easy to edit and alter files with this format with tools that have no awareness of or have limited utility toward binary formatted files. This is the case, for example, with many Unix utilities or programming languages that don’t manipulate binary data very well. This format is well documented. I have read several of the RFC’s on it, but you don’t need to understand anything more about it other than it works. However, the Microsoft Office binary file formats are not very well understood by most and typically require a great deal of effort to modify without specific applications. Internet Explorer does not save as any of those binary formats.

Incidentally, many of us use this file format on a daily basis. This format is the MIME encoded format that email uses. Have you ever dragged an email out of Windows Live Mail (the desktop version - not the web based one) onto your desktop or into a folder? It creates a file named with the subject of the email and a file extension of *.eml. (Note: You have to have file extensions set to show in order to see them!) This format *.eml is the same MIME format as the *.mht files. If you do this, and then open the file with a text editor, (using “Open With” or “Send to” for example) you can see the internal structure, the guts – so to speak, of an email. There is no binary data in there. You can see the text of the email, but you’ll likely see a bunch of other stuff that looks interesting, but you may not understand it. This stuff textually encodes the binary data and the structure of the document – in this case as an email. And it’s all text. This is key. Because of this, it satisfies a “lowest common denominator” scenario allowing emails to be sent over multiple diverse systems and remain intact. But it also allows emails to have attachments. And those are encoded within the single file.

What else is important about this format? The next big reason is that the Microsoft Office suite of applications understands and can edit this *.mht file format. And because it does, we can easily get multiple web pages saved in this format into a single Word document - complete with all the pictures, diagrams and images. And it retains the original formatting and layout. If you try this with another application instead of Word, you may or may not be able to do this. Let us know your results.

So far, we have explained why we’re using Internet Explorer and Word. Now we’ll cover the PDF part next. PDF files are a binary format that is, for the most part, a universally understood document encoding. Most people have Adobe Reader installed on their computer and can open these files and read them. Also, most eBook readers can load them and display them.

My personal eBook reader is a Sony variety. And while all eBook readers have their pros and cons, I chose this one for several reasons. One reason is because I can load documents – ebooks – directly from my PC to the reader. Many ebook readers can do this, but as was recently discovered, Amazon can remotely remove items from your Kindle device without your consent as was done, ironically, in a “big brother” fashion with the “Nineteen Eighty-Four”ebook by George Orwell. This doesn’t happen on my device because it does not have the wireless WhisperNet connection. One final reason I chose Sony is that Sony is the only reader on the market that can display a digitally encrypted PDF documents. And my online library, OverDrive, lends just such ebooks. This allows a digital return date on borrows which makes the ebook unavailable after the loan period expires. This satisfies publishers and authors who would otherwise not allow libraries to lend digital ebooks by only allow a certain number to be checked out at a given time. The Kindle and all other brands currently are not able to achieve this. Oh, then there was the cost.

So, I chose the Sony eBook Reader, and will describe the process specifically for it. But, the process should be generic enough for other reader devices that have similar features. OK – enough with the disclaimers…

The process is rather simple. I would advise you to install the PDF virtual printer software regardless of what application you use to edit Word documents. You’d be surprised how much you’ll use it for other unanticipated things such as keeping a digital copy of a receipt for an online purchase. When I print them out – I lose them promptly. I PDF them, and I also lose them, but Windows has a wonderful search engine that finds them again fast for me. Anyway, I use the freeware Bullzip virtual printer, but have used others. There are many free choices out there.

This approach provides additional advantages beyond what Word provides as it works with almost any application. For example, if you were to download a purely text document from Project Gutenberg you might be able to load it directly to your device if your device understands text files. I imagine most do. But if not, you could just print it from Notepad, for example, directly to a PDF file on your computer. This new “printout” will be a PDF file. It works with any application that can (or has permission to) print – with the exception of applications capable of opening encrypted PDF’s. So you cannot open an encrypted or protected borrowed library ebook then print it out as a PDF from Adobe Reader or Adobe Digital Editions. That’s bad and illegal. And it won’t work. And if it isn’t encrypted, well, it’s already a PDF! So, you can save any single web page as a PDF just by printing it. But many eBooks come in parts. And combining those parts becomes the issue.

And that is where Word comes in handy. For example, the eBook I described at the beginning of this post about the Lisp programming language actually is thirty-three different web pages. Each one is a different chapter. I suspect that the author intentionally did this to prevent people from just downloading a single file and never buying the book. And that’s why I left out the title of the text. But since both Word and Internet Explorer understand the *.mht file format in common we can use Word to open the web page files we save from Internet Explorer.

We should note at this point that there are many ways to accomplish these various tasks. For example, you could cut and paste the contents of individual web pages into Word. Now, I’ve not had good luck with the formatting doing that, but you might have better luck or wish to manually control all the formatting regardless.

So here’s the process I use:

1. For each web page of the online text – open it in Internet Explorer – this may entail clicking a “Next Page” link or something like that.
2. Save the web page by choosing Tools>”Save As…” and give is a usable name if one does not already appear by default and use the single page web archive format *.mht that has been discussed and save each of them - all in the same directory.
3. When you are done with that, then make a backup copy of that directory as later parts of the process can alter the original files.

You now have the data that your ebook will be built from. One other thing to note about this technique is that if the ebook has a “one web page per page of book” layout, then this process can become tedious. In those cases, if the book is several hundred pages long, another technique can be used to “mirror” the book on your local computer using other software and then stitch it all back into a single document. I plan to discuss that in a later post provided it isn’t a rocket science endeavor.

The next part of the process combines all those *.mht files you’ve already created. And again, be sure you backed up that directory. If you have to start over for some reason you’ll avoid having to resave all the original pages again.  This is very easy to do. In Windows just right click on your folder then select copy. Find where you want to save the backup and right click in a white area and select paste. It’ll backup all the parts of your ebook.

Next open Microsoft Office Word or a compatible alternate. What ever you use, it must be able to create master documents. Using the “Create a master document and subdocuments” process described on this Microsoft Office Online website located here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HP051870021033.aspx

we’ll create a document outline. This will be the master document. The process described by the link above is specifically for the 2003 version of Word, but the same instructions work for 2007. I named each top level of the outline the same as the chapter name. I then added each *.mht file as a subdocument to the outline. You’ll be prompted about editing the original files. If you made a back up, it won’t matter how you answer. I let it update the originals. Otherwise it will create it’s own copies. But this is up to you.

The process to “Create a master document and subdocuments” is straight forward so I won’t detail it. You can alter the original subdocuments in Word at this point. I usually add page numbers in the footer, but you can change the fonts making them bigger or a different typeface. Use your imagination.

Next you’ll probably want to set the document properties. These are things like the title and author. These are inherited into the PDF document you’ll create, and they are used by your eBook reader to organize your ebooks. In Word 2007 these are set using the Office Button> Prepare>Properties. They can be set in the 2003 version as well, but I can’t document that. I don’t have a Word 2003 handy at the moment.

If you forget to set these, then you can use a property editor to fix the resulting PDF file later. I have used the freeware BeCyPDFMetaEdit for this purpose. Most PDF editors that can actually create or edit a PDF will cost you. If you have on, such as Adobe Creator, then you can use it to do a lot of this work instead of using Word. But it is very expensive. BeCyPDFMetaEdit does the job, and it’s freeware, but it doesn’t do much to edit the ebook content. Do that in Word before you make the PDF.

Once you have created your ebook in Word all that is left is to make it into a PDF. Word 2007 originally required you to download an add-in for this. But if you have the most recent service pack, then it’ll already be there. Just click the Office button>Save As>PDF or XPS. Fill in the name you want to give it, make sure you select the PDF format, and click Save. You will now have a PDF file of all those web pages, but all in one PDF file that is easy to read on most any reader device. If you’re using an earlier version of Office, then install the freeware Bullzip PDF virtual printer. The process is the same except that you now “Print” the document to a file location.

You can now load this document on your reader using whatever means are required to accomplish that task. With my eBook Reader it is simply connecting the reader to the PC with standard USB cable and dragging the new file to the folder on the device where I want it. With a Kindle, they might actually look at what you are doing. I don’t know, but I would expect that they might figure out that the book I just created is one they also sell. In such case, they might prevent it from loading or delete it later. But I am speculating and don’t know that for a fact. There may actually be no such issues. But you need to decide these things before you  purchase an ebook reader. None that I have seen are perfect, and many leave a lot to be desired. And I am not a big fan of Sony, but I made an exception in this case. Also, rumor has it that Apple will be releasing an iPad ebook reader sometime soon. We will have to wait and see.

In conclusion, a few things should be noted. Firstly, most, but not all web pages can be saved as a *.mht file. Ironically, the pages I have the most trouble with are those on Microsoft web properties. For example, the link for master/subdocuments documentation above will not save as a *.mht using this technique. This page uses scripts and has an ActiveX control which cause problems. Other times, a stray character out of the basic code set for the page will intentionally be used, and it’ll trip up the web archive encoding. These issues don’t stop me, but getting around that problem is another story for another post. But you can use another format should you run into this problem. A full “Web page, complete” format is also available, but it isn’t as friendly. Each page will become two parts. One is the basic page sans pictures, images, diagrams, etc., and the other is a folder containing the other parts. If the first method fails this one might work. In any case, I have never run into an online book that would not save as an *.mht format and required this other format. But saving in any format that both Internet Explorer and Word understands is key. It can even be plain text. Also, as I mentioned before, you can cut and paste the different parts into place from Internet Explorer into Word. This will likely require manual tweaking to look right in the end. Secondly, you may be lucky and find the entire book in a single file. If you have an application that can open that file, you can print it out directly to a PDF format file using a virtual PDF printer. Many ebooks are just single plain text files. In those cases, I would open them in Word or even WordPad and change the font to something more readable on your device, and then print out the PDF. Thirdly, there are a good number of ebooks that this process will be arduous to apply against. These eBooks tend to display only a single page of the ebook at a time. These ebooks can be converted using this process, but it is tedious to deal with hundreds or thousands of pages. I am working on a technique to automate this for this type of ebook because, as you probably surmised by now, there are some out there that I want myself. And finally, many ebooks are hypertexts. These ebooks will have embedded links to other pages. This tends to happen mostly with the ebooks in the last category, i.e., the ones that have one page at a time delivery. These links can be modified in Word to allow your reader to go to the correct place in the document, but it requires manual tweaking to do this – at least at this time. I am also working on automating these linkages. In the end, I am hoping that pages like a table of contents will have working links to the correct parts of the document. Currently, you have to set this up by hand, and it is beyond the scope of this post to describe that process.

And one final idea before I close: regardless of where you intend to read the eBook text, if you make it a PDF then it is a portable document. PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It can be read on a PC or a Mac or Linux or maybe your mobile phone or your eBook reader or… These can be emailed or stored in your online storage such as your SkyDrive. I use this technique to share articles from online publications that require you to log in to read them. This technique can also be used to make a document version of an entire (static) website. You are only limited by your imagination. So spread the joy!

Jeff Flynt

If you’ve used Windows Live for any period of time, then you’ve probably discovered that there are some things you can customize on your profile. There isn’t much. But there is one place that Windows Live grants you a great deal of creative control and freedom allowing you to express yourself in a plethora of ways. This is your Windows Live Space. And no matter what your opinions are about Spaces, there are many enthusiast that have created some outstanding works of art using the platform as a canvas to express themselves. Many others use their Spaces as a simple way to share their ideas and opinions by expressing themselves in the written word by maintaining a blog there. Others share photos or may do both. Still others fill there Space with gadgets and lists and all sorts of other eye candy. This is what your Space is for and is one aspect that makes Windows Live unique from many other social networks. As such, this post is about another way of expressing yourself on your Space - not about the merits of Spaces in general or where the data lives or who actually visits your Space or who the intended audience happens to be. 

Spaces are used for many things, but the common thread throughout is that your Windows Live Space is a microcosm of you. It’s not just your words or your photos or your music. It’s also your sense of style, your composition, a collection of the things you find interesting in life and want to share with the world - even if you are the only person who ever sees your Space. It may also contain some things that are only for your personal use. It’s your Space. Do with it whatever you want. It can be as ornate as you like or as simple as just a place for you to simply hang a weather gadget of a some place you find interesting.

So, if your Space is dedicated to a topic or theme or you would just like to share news items you find relevant and newsworthy of your specific interests, your Space is a great place to put a news tracker. This post will describe the process of making one using the new search and decision engine Bing from Microsoft.

Creating a news tracker is very easy. The basics, in a nutshell, are that you need a news feed and a module to display it. So, in this example, Bing will provide the feed, and we will add a feed module on your Space to display it.

Before we start, we need to determine the subject or topic of the track. This can be anything really. If you have a Space dedicated to scuba diving then you could track that or if you are into politics or comics or whatever that can be tracked too. You can have more than one, and you can change them whenever you want. I’m currently tracking stories on my blog regarding my new favorite gadget, the new Palm Pre smart phone. I chose this subject, but the stories change frequently based on whatever Bing finds relevant for the terms in the news at the moment you view my Space. The subject is static and only changes if I change the subject in the module, but the contents, links to news articles per se, are dynamic and update as frequently as the stories are published. This results in a running stream of focused news, and it’s all limited to just your topic.

We’ll use a news feed as opposed to a search feed because news feeds change frequently and are chronological in order while a search feed tends to always return the same results until Bing finds a new web page to return. Web searches don’t change nearly as frequently. For the purposes of this exercise I will use a subject or topic of “Windows Live” since it’s a relevant subject and I’m interested in following this news topic.

So, we’ll start by creating the feed using Bing. Begin by opening Bing. The Bing homepage has a place for you to enter your search terms for a basic web search. You can also use advanced options to limit searches to particular sites, countries or languages. And if you’re adept at using a search engine and know advanced syntax, you can do all sorts of creative things to define your search.

So, we will enter “Windows Live” in the search box. Often times, you’re told to not include the quotes, but in this case the quotes are actually part of the search syntax. So KEEP the quotes! The quotes force the search to not only look for news items that contain both words, but that the two words must appear together exactly as they are entered. Without the quotes you’ll may get false hits about Windows 7 or other topics containing either one or both words in any order. Even using the advanced search operator of “AND” will not enforce the order. So, if you’re looking for things that are a phrase, then use quotes.

In our case, a web search (as opposed to a news search) of Windows Live or “Windows Live” will return a lot of relevant items about the subject. There are so many that the search engine determines that the most relevant results are those with the terms on the page appearing exactly as they’re entered for the search, both words together in that order. News searches, however, retrieve results from a much smaller pool and will result in news stories with subjects that are off topic , if you don’t use the quotes. So, again, use the quotes to force what you want. This will force the search to use an “AND” operator for the terms an enforce the order and proximity of the search terms.

Now, after you entered the search terms, click the “News” link on the left to perform the search. The resulting page is a “News” search of this topic.

But this page isn’t any good for our purposes. We actually need the feed for this page. This is easy to get, and there are a couple ways to do it. Since there is a feed associated with the results page, your browser might have a feed button your can use. Internet Explorer has such a button in the upper right area of the browser. On Bing, it’ll show as the web slice icon because you can also save the results as a web slice to your favorites bar and see your updates on demand, but you won’t be sharing them there. So, if you open the drop down menu, you’ll see the RSS feed for the page:

You don’t actually need to subscribe to the feed for this to work. You just need to copy the feed URL. Select the entire feed URL and right click it and copy. Here is what you’ll see in Internet Explorer doing it this way:

If you’re using a browser that doesn’t have a RSS button or just want an easier method, then on the left hand side of the search pane is an area to refine your search. You’ll notice that I have further refined my News Search to include stories from “Sci/Tech sources.”

Now,  the method that’s a little easier, and will work in all browsers, is to right click on the RSS link in the panel on the left hand side and select the option to copy the link URL by selecting “Copy Shortcut” or “Copy Link Location.”

If that doesn’t make sense to you, then just go ahead and click the link. The page that opens should show the news feed allowing you to subscribe to the it. But we don’t need to actually do that. We just need the URL of this page. So, again, select the URL and copy it.

So now we have a copy of the RSS feed URL in hand we can proceed to the next step of adding a feed module to our Space and configuring it for this feed.

Remember, we will need the URL you just copied. So don’t copy anything else or you’ll lose it. If you do, just go back and copy it again or you could paste it into a notepad document or a Sticky Notes so you can easily get it back later.

OK, for the next step, we need to go to our Space. You should already know how to do that, so I won’t detail that out. Make sure you’re logged in as yourself because we are going to edit the Space.

You should see “Customize” over on the top right hand side of your of your Space. Click it to open the drop down menu. Then click on “Add modules” and wait for the page to open in Customize mode.

Once it opens in Customize mode, you should see the “Modules” menu open. It’s a scrollable menu. So, scroll it down to the the “Feeds” entry. We’re going to add a new feeds module to the page.

Click the “Add” across from the heading “Feed”. This will place a new module towards the top of your Space. We will move it later so don’t worry about the placement for now.

Click “Close tab” at the bottom of the menu and then click the “Save” button in the yellow Customize band. You’ve just added a feed module.

But the module has no idea of what the feed is yet. We’ll enter that information next. Your Space should have returned to it’s normal appearance and not be in Customize mode any longer.

There should be a new “Feed” module toward the top of your Space, and we are now ready to set it up.  Your new module will have an “Edit” link in it. Click it to open up the Feed parameters page. It’ll be preconfigured with a “Feed name:” of “Feed”. Change that to something you like representing the topic or subject of your news track. I changed mine to “Windows Live in the news…” Now, hopefully you still have that URL you copied earlier. If you don’t, then you’ll have to get it again. I make a habit of pasting these types of things into a Notepad session for easy retrieval later.

The “Feed web address:” should have “Http://” in there. Click in this field at the end. Then delete all that by repeatedly clicking the backspace. Once it’s cleared out paste the URL into this field.

The “Show this many items:” is preset to just one. Change that to what you would like. I set it to the maximum of ten.  I wish there were more, but I suppose there has to be a limit. So, why not 100? I know the feeds on Windows Live don’t return more than 20 or so, but really, we could use more both on Spaces and on the http://my.live.com page where I believe the limit is just five. Anyway…

Then click “Save” and you’ve just added and configured your new news feed for your news tracker. The new module is probably not placed where you want it. So, you’ll have to click the “Customize” button at the top again and select “Rearrange or hide modules” to fix this.

When the “Customize” mode page opens you’ll be able to drag the module to the final position you want. Once you’re done moving it click “Save” to save and exit the “Customize” mode and you’re done!

Now, when a visitor clicks one of the articles in the tracker, it’ll open the story in a new browser window where they can read it. I noticed in this example that the very first item “Windows Live – Softpedia” actually is opening a dead page. This is neither Bing’s fault nor mine. Softpedia has published something then possibly retracted it. I don’t know. It looks like it was an article on Messenger. But not to worry. Eventually, as the feed updates over time, this link will go away all by itself.

The techniques shown in this post can be applied to many other things. I  am using it to publish my recent twitter comments, and my recent blog posts, but I have used it in the past to show items in my Friendfeed feed, my Netflix feed, and updates from the Windows Live Taskforce.

Now, before someone points this out, I would like to say that the ability to do this is not limited to Bing nor to Spaces. This is one of the really nice things about feeds. You can so some really creative things with them. Some examples might be to add a feed to a friends blog on your Space instead of just a cross link. This allows your visitor to see what’s on your friend’s blog has posted without leaving your blog, and should they see something interesting, they can click it and go read it. Or you can try adding a FaceBook feed or one for digg stories. Some of you will laugh, but you can even add an RSS feed of your local weather. And we know, with the weather, there is always something to talk about.

Anyway, we used to have ready access to http://my.live.com where we could add all kinds of personal feeds. We can still add them there, but that’s a personal page and isn’t shared. So, if the feed is just something for you to track, you could also add it there. Unfortunately, that page has not been updated to the Wave 3 motif and, while still there, one could wonder for how long. I would like it if this page was updated and put back into the Windows Live fold. It has a lot of features I miss and that Windows Live needs. As it stands, if you don’t know about it, then you would never use it. There are no direct access links to it.

In closing I would like to mention that some people are not fond of feeds. But, I think, the primary issues they have with it are mostly that of being on the source end rather than the sink end of the feed. That is to say, they want to consume the feeds, but they don’t want to provide them. The idea is that with feeds you don’t actually need to go to the Space and see the work that was put into it.  But in this case, the module feed provides only a link and nothing more. Unfortunately, there isn’t even a description available as with most feeds. Clicking it will take you directly to the destination. And if that is your blog, then it’ll be your post. Another argument is that no one seems to know exactly how feeds affect your Space statistics. But feeds are not going away any time soon. And since they’re here we should use them and not turn them off. They provide a valuable service.

-Jeff

I decided to go ahead and respond to the Clubhouse Challenge: Show Off Your Windows 7 Desktop thinking it would be rather easy. But, because mine is a little different, it wasn’t just a simple screen capture. I ended up installing a demo of Camtasia which, I am happy to report, worked well on Windows 7. Camtasia is software that lets you make a movie of your computer screen as a screen recorder. And, if you’re not a member of the Clubhouse, you can apply at that link above.

One of the features that I dearly miss from Vista Ultimate is Dreamscene, and fortunately, almost as soon as Windows 7 was in beta, someone figured out how to add it to Windows 7 manually. I guess I’m not the only one who misses it! Dreamscene runs in both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the desktops, but at this point in time all we can actually test it on is Windows 7 Ultimate RC1. So, I don’t know if it’ll work in any other versions once Windows 7 is launched on October 22, 2009. In fact, I can’t be certain it’ll even work in any future version of Windows 7 at all, whatever they end up calling it. But we do know that it was strictly a Vista Ultimate feature, and as such, many users have never seen it.

It’s an interesting thought to wonder if one could add it to any version of Vista, such as the Home Premium version, using the same techniques presented below. It basically involves just a couple files being in the correct place and running a registry update. Some daring sole will try this. I cannot. I only have Vista Ultimate which already has Dreamscene.

Anyway, installing it in the 32 bit desktop is a little easier than the 64 bit apparently. I don’t have a 32 bit version handy, but the 64 bit version was a snap. I had no difficulty installing the 64 bit setup myself, and I think anyone could do this easily. If you would like to try it out (at your own risk of course) the instructions can be found here:

How to enable Dreamscene or Video Wallpaper in Windows 7

Officially Dreamscene has been removed, and it appears that it won’t be supported in Windows 7. What a shame! Maybe they’ll revive the old Windows Plus! Packs and sell it in one.

I first saw Dreamscene at the Vista launch event here in Phoenix several years ago. For what one might consider a minor eye candy feature, the crowd loved it. Dreamscene was one of the added bonuses that helped me to decide to go with the Ultimate Edition, but there were many other reasons as well.  Unfortunately, it took Microsoft about a year to make good on the promise when it finally showed up as an Ultimate Extra; I impatiently waited.  I expect the delay was because of CPU demand problems and other issues. But when I got it, I always used it on both my laptop and desktop. I did this without fail.

So, it’s fitting that I show my Windows 7 desktop with the very same Dreamscene demo’d at the launch event. But because it’s Dreamscene, which is basically a movie itself, I  will, of course, have to make a movie of the screen. 

My Windows 7 Desktop

<<There should be a video above, but it’s missing click image below where you can watch it full screen>>

Jeff's Windows 7 Screen 

I switch the theme regularly so this is only one of the Dreamscene desktops that I use. One other that I wanted to demo, one I made myself from someone else's clip, and really like, is also of a waterfall that fills the entire screen. But, because of the rendering in smaller resolution a lot of the detail is lost, and it doesn’t look so excellent.

But the first one is good, and it really has special significance as the first Dreamscene I ever saw. I actually figured out which waterfall this was when I first started using it. Microsoft doesn’t tell you. But it’s been so long that I have forgotten. Oh well – maybe I can bing it.

Here is a static image of that other desktop I regularly use. This is the one that loses something when Camtasia makes a movie out of it. But you can visualize, right?

I’ve made the movie and image about as large as they’ll go. The small size makes seeing the details difficult, and I apologize for that. I’ll put some close ups of the task bar here. It may be wrong of me, but I use the terms “taskbar button” and “taskbar icon” sort of interchangeably. Old habits… In Windows 7 I think of it as an icon when it has no running instances and as a button when it does. Why? Well, because it looks like a button when it’s running. Anyway, don’t be confused. In this discussion they are the same thing. But I think icon is the correct term.

Wow – it’s still to small. If you’re using Windows 7, you can use the magnifier to see what’s in there – if you care… They are the small style icons so I can keep a lot of them on one row. The task bar is two rows high. The icons/buttons move around a lot, anyway, on my system. That’s one of the nice things about Windows 7. Taskbar position is no longer based on the order the application was opened. You can just drag them where you want them. You can also see my taskbar autohides.

Oh, you may have noticed a couple things in the video that don’t translate well. Once or twice in the video I held down the shift key while I right clicked an taskbar button and get this:

This presents the context menu that would appear when you just right clicked (no shifting) on an taskbar button in Vista and prior. If you just right click in Windows 7, you’ll get the jump list. 

Anyway, you should try playing around with the accelerator/modifier keys as they add features you might not otherwise discover. For example, holding the shift key while clicking a taskbar button opens a new instance of the program, and holding the control key down while clicking a taskbar button cycles through all that buttons running instances bringing them to the surface sort of like an alt-tab but just for that application. A cntl-alt-tab opens the alt-tab display but keeps it open after you release the keys. Then you can arrow in any direction with the arrow keys to bring to the surface that particular application. This is handy. This is just like how windows-alt-tab brings up the rolodex view you normally get with windows-tab yet keeps it open after you release the keys. The modifiers with the arrow keys are fun too.

So, there it is. Now I need to figure out how to grab the other extras too! I’m sure someone has done that already.

-Jeff

Like the rest of the throngs, I excitedly installed Windows 7 beta sometime back onto one of my computers when it became available. This required a little planning as I going to put it on a computer that runs Vista, which also has everything I use installed on it. I didn’t want to mess up a production machine, so I elected to do the next best thing. I ran out to Fry’s Electrons and purchased a shiny new terabyte hard drive and used it to install the shiny new operating system. Just doing my part for the economy!

This approach accomplished a couple of things, though. First, Vista, along with all the software I use, is still there and by switching a cable or two, it comes right back as a Vista machine. Second, I can slave the Vista drive and access all my data on it from Windows 7. But my handy work is a little messy. Since this is temporary, and I want to be able to swap back and forth between Vista and Windows 7 at will and did not want to set this up as a dual booting system, I have left the case open, and poor Windows 7 is sitting loose in its packing material on the side.

I didn’t even bother to mount the drive as I only planned on installing the beta and “kicking the tires” a bit. I justified buying that new Windows 7 hard drive because I’m building a new machine, and it needs a hard drive too. So, in effect, the beta is just borrowing this drive before the other machine is ready.

But now I’m using the release candidate, and I’m not wanting to switch back and forth so much. I find myself just staying in Windows 7. I actually did slave the Vista drive to access the data on it, and I’ve also installed a slew of software that I use, and even some I don’t use so much.

I’m hoping to test this theory that Windows 7 is faster than Vista. And as I expected, after installing Live Essentials, Microsoft Office 2007, SQL Server Dev Ed., Visual Studio, TiVo Desktop, AVG and a lot more, I found that a little bit of the snappiness was gone. But I’ve decided that under this load it’s fair to compare to Vista, which was running on pretty much the identical hardware, except of course the hard drive. And I’m happy. So far it still starts and stops faster than Vista, and resuming is about the same. Anyway, this is not a scientific study under identical circumstances, but I really like what I’m seeing.

ISO Like It

One of the new features included with Windows 7 allows you to burn an ISO file to your burner without installing additional software. Now, if your asking what an ISO file is, then you’re probably not going to need this feature. But, in short, an ISO file is an image file of a disk, usually a CD or DVD which can be burnt back to a blank recordable disk to reproduce the original  – including the ability to boot from it, if the original disk was bootable. In previous versions of Windows, you were required to install a separate application for this, such as Nero or Roxio, but there are also numerous freeware apps to chose from as well.

Windows 7 beta and RC were themselves released as ISO files. But, if this is your first install of Windows 7, you’ll need another method to create the disk or bootable device to do the install. There are a lot of free and commercial software products to do this. So, I won’t go into any detail here.

But another interesting feature of ISO files is that, if you have software installed that allows this, they can be directly mounted without having to burn a disk. Windows 7 doesn’t appear to support this functionality directly, but again, third part software does. So, my copy of Office, and Visual Studio, etc., are all ISO files. I really don’t want to make a disk just to do the install. So, I need some of this third party software goodness. For this task, I’ve been using Virtual Clone Drive which allows you to add one or more Virtual drives to your system. And I’m happy to report that it works great with Windows 7 64 bit.

Eating Crow

Now, for my humble apology to Microsoft… I’ve been using Vista since it was in beta, and I was thrilled it included the Close Tray option that closes your CD or DVD tray. I thought it was weird that it didn’t appear right next to Eject, but I was happy that it’s no longer something that Mac’s do and Windows doesn’t. But, to my surprise, Windows 7 didn’t have it at all. And I complained. Damn Mac’s are now better than Windows again! Why did they do that? I truly thought they would fix it so “Eject” and “Close” would be next to each other. But instead – they removed it entirely!

Or so I thought. Foolish me! It was never added by Microsoft, even with Vista! This whole time, it was Virtual Clone Drive! Once I installed Virtual Clone Drive in order to install Office, I immediately noticed “Close Tray” returned. Yay!

So, while I’m happy it’s back, I wish they would just make it “official” in Windows 7! It could be a “new feature!” It’s simple things like this that make me happy. And I would like nothing more than for Windows 7 to be much, much better than a Mac.

The Big Mystery

Also, along my road to discovery, Windows 7 solved a mystery that’s several years old. My machine that now runs Windows 7 for testing was originally an XP machine several years ago. And, just like I’m doing for Windows 7 now, I installed Vista back then – not as an upgrade, but as a clean install on a fresh drive.

After the install, I noticed in the device manager one device with the big yellow question mark. I had a dreaded unknown device. And for a couple years, I had no idea what it was. I used the disk that came with the Abit motherboard and it installed most everything on it, but the yellow question mark persisted. I eventually learned to ignore it, but I hate that! And along comes Windows 7 beta.

I was so disappointed. Windows 7 beta also had the damned yellow question mark. *sigh*

Then Windows 7 RC came onto the scene. If it doesn’t fix it with this, then I’ll probably just have to resign myself to the fact that I’ve been beaten. So, I installed it. And yet the yellow question mark remained. I tried installing the original Abit motherboard disk, and it doesn’t even want to run. So, I just accepted the unknown device and moved on.

Then, one day,  the Action Center flag appeared in my system tray, or whatever it’s called now in Windows 7. So, I figured it was a security issue or something. It usually tells me to update my virus software or a solution to a program crashing, but to my surprise, it told me I had an unknown device! How clever of it to notice this. But even better, it knew what it was and how to fix it.

I was told I needed to manually download and install the Abit µguru Overdrive software and driver. Happy days! It also provided a link to the download, but it didn’t work. But armed with the knowledge of what I needed, I went hunting. The Abit website was acting strangely, so I searched for it with Live Search. I discovered that Abit has sadly gone out of business. So, now I know why the link failed.

But, to make a long story short, I was able to access the Abit ftp site, which is still operational, and using parts from the link address provided by Windows 7 Action Center, I easily located not only the suggested file but the most recent version of it. And now, all devices are accounted for and fully operational.

Since the new machine I’m building also uses an Abit motherboard, I was able to get all the firmware flashes and all the most recent software for it too. Score two points for Microsoft! Of course, the very next day the Abit web site started working normally again…

Cleaning the Mess

Traveling further down this road to discovery and adventure, I thought I would try out some of the new features of Windows 7. One of these is Libraries. This feature seems simple enough. The idea of being able to reference many folders as a single library could be helpful to some, but I wondered how useful to your regular average Jane Consumer.

Windows 7 comes with several preconfigured libraries. They are for the standard things like documents, music, pictures and videos. The libraries join together the user’s personal documents, music, pictures and videos folders to the equivalent folders of the “Public” user. The Public user was introduce with Vista as a way to easily share files between users, and these default libraries make both places appear as one big, happy folder. This is nice, but where else can it be used?

Well, in my case, since I have slaved my old Vista drive, I have discovered that it also contains all these same folders in parallel but on another drive. And, most of my data is actually on that drive. So, I can add the “Documents” of the Vista drive, as well as the public documents of Vista’s drive, to the Document library on Windows 7. Neat!  And to further exploit the great new feature, I can search my Documents Library and it searches all four folders across two different drives. How sweet it is!

After doing all this, I decided to create a library of my own. In Windows Explorer, an item under Desktop is Libraries. Click on it to open it, and on the right hand side you’ll see all your libraries. You can click the “New library” button near the top to make one for yourself. I did this, and then I named it “My TiVo Recordings.” I then visited the folder that contains “My TiVo Recordings” on the Windows 7 drive. Once you’re at the folder, in Windows Explorer, several buttons appear at the top like a menu. One of these is the “Include in library” button. Clicking it opens a drop down menu of existing libraries or the option to create a new one. Since I just made one for the recordings, I selected it. Then I went to the “E:\” drive – where Vista lives, and I found the TiVo Recordings library over there. And I added it to the same library. Now, there is one place to go to see all the TiVo recordings. I still have to add the external drive. It also has a lot of recordings. The fact of the matter is, I actually have recording spread out all over the place on my home network. I have to hunt them down and add them all.

Next up – I’ll make libraries for all my downloads. Those too are all over the place on different machines. I have, over the years, learned to systematically create the same folder structures on different machines in order to keep track of stuff. Libraries will make this a thing of the past. But once I have it, it’ll be a simple matter to search the library for something good to install.

Making a Mesh of it

A while back I lamented about the planned demise of Microsoft Encarta coming nigh. I’ve been a fan for years, and now I have my niece hooked on the version for kids. So, I installed it on Windows 7. It works great – for now, but eventually, in October (2009), the updates will stop coming. That’ll be a sad day indeed, but the program will still function for those who bought the desktop software version.

Funny thing though, is that the Encarta update function refuses to work on my Vista! So, it would tell me it couldn’t automatically update and provided a link to a place to get the files. It instructed me where to put them, and then the update worked. But in Windows 7, click the button, and it just works.

But, I though to myself that I’d better keep a copy of these update files. Once Microsoft lays Encarta to rest, I’ll be on my own. So, where are those files? Well, because Windows 7 works so well, I didn’t know. Encarta wouldn’t tell me because it had no trouble doing it all for me. But, with a little research, I found the folder.

And I thought to myself, “what a pain this will be. Every time I update Encarta, I’ll have to remember to go get a copy of the new files and keep them in a safe place.” And then I thought of Mesh. Mesh is such a great program. I’ll be very happy when it’s out of beta, but it’s very useful even now. In this case, I just right clicked on the folder that contains the updates and added it to Mesh. Now, that automatically made a copy of my update files in “The Cloud” for me so I didn’t have to back them up manually. But even better, now when I go into Encarta and perform an automatic update, each time the files come down from Microsoft (thank you Windows 7) they go into this folder. And, each time, Mesh sees that stuff changed and performs its magic. It automagically uploads the new update files into “The Mesh Cloud”, and I don’t even have to notice this going on.

When the real Windows 7 becomes available, I will probably start with a freshly formatted drive. I will eventually reinstall Encarta, and the updates will be Meshed back into Encarta’s update folder. A very happy plan!

Throwing the Feed into the Sync

Along this line of thought, and remembering a discussion in the past in one of the Groups, I thought I might try this for my feeds. But, alas, Live Mesh and Live Sync work between folders on different machines. My old Vista drive contains all my regular feeds, of which I was beginning to miss dearly, and my Windows 7 drive had some new ones. But they are mounted to the same machine.

Well, I could just copy and past the feeds, but then, if I ever turn Vista back on, it’ll already be out of sync.

Solution: Microsoft SyncToy v2.0. This handy and free program lets you set up, in a variety of ways, folder pairs. It’s very easy to use, and it works on Windows 7. I used this program to set up a folder pair between the feed store on the old Vista drive with the feed store on the new Windows 7 drive, and the folders where synced in both directions. Now both Vista  and Windows 7 see the same feeds. Further, I can run it at anytime or add it as a task to keep them identical from here on out. The main difference with the SyncToy and Mesh or Sync is that it will work on folders connected to the same machine.

Really Making a Mesh of It

But then, I thought to myself, that, if I could do this, then why not try out my “solution” to the proposed Windows Live equivalent of a Google Reader. Everything else is in the cloud. We have our email, calendars, events, pictures and files, and now, even our favorites, if you run the Windows Live toolbar. So, my idea was along the lines of how favorites are handled. The toolbar syncs them. Why not have the toolbar sync the feeds too? Well, nobody else thought that was a good idea. The feeds, unlike favorites, keep track of read and unread feeds, etc. How could you possibly do that? Never ask me a question like that!

So, of course I thought of Mesh because all I needed was a proof of concept. So, basically, I Meshed to the RSS feed store for IE 8 (but this could probably be done for any feed reader), with the Mesh Live Desktop. I located the feed folder, and I right clicked it, and added it to Mesh and synced it with the Mesh Live Desktop. Simple enough.

Now, I’m going to give the standard warning here. Kids, don’t attempt this at home! This stunt is being performed by a trained monkey. So, with that warning, I am going to be intentionally vague on how I do this. If you want to try it, (at your own risk) you can either figure out how to do it on your own or ask me, but I don’t want someone to blow away all their feeds because they messed up. (I also don’t want 50 million questions from people trying it out just because they can. This is really more of a proof of concept.)

So, then I went to my Vista laptop, and I Meshed its feed folder to both the Windows 7 machine’s feed store and the Mesh Live Desktop feed store. More or less, this worked, and it’s pretty fast. Mesh seems to be a little flakey, and I hope that improves as the official release becomes available. But overall, once you close the feed reader, Mesh detects updated files and syncs them. By syncing to the Mesh Live Desktop you are not required to have both machines online for the sync to occur, and the feed files are not that big. So, it won’t hog a bunch of Mesh space and the syncing is fairly fast. It also remembers which feeds have been read, adds new feeds wherever they are added (provided the machine is in the Mesh), etc. Anyway, this is just a proof of concept, and a suggestion for Microsoft to include in something like a toolbar in the future. I will have to “experiment” with this further to see where it breaks down or fails, but I think it’s a novel way to use Mesh. I will be applying this concept, in a similar fashion for other applications and operations. Hmmm. Can I patent this concept? If I can, you saw it here first! (Well, maybe…)

And while I’m at it, I would like to patent the idea of using Microsoft SyncToy v2.0 to sync with SkyDrive via the Gladinet Cloud Desktop. Oh my, I am dreamin’ now! But seriously, think of the possibilities. If the Softies don’t Mesh SkyDrive, then we can do it for ourselves. Now, how’s that for a patent?

Anyway, I would also vote for an online version of a Microsoft feed reader to rival Google’s as well. But this is probably not something Microsoft is working on. And that’s my motivation for this approach. Only time will tell if it’ll be a good one or not. But so far, it’s pretty slick but not issue free.

Anyway, that concludes my adventures along the road to Windows 7 so far. Stay tuned for the sequel, Further Adventures… But first, I’ll have to undertake them.

-Jeff

Did you know the last few versions of Internet Explorer provided a search box built into the application? In times past, accessing this type of functionality required   going  to a web search page or required the installation of a search toolbar. Some of the better toolbars provide additional useful features beyond searching such as spell checking. Other toolbars lead to grief by including unwanted nasties such as adware or worse, outright malwares, and they tend to resist being uninstalled.  In any event, adding a lot of toolbars clutters the interface and leads to duplicated functionality. They can also cause issues with performance.

So, if your Internet Explorer is current, and if you just want the search box, then you’ve got it already. You don’t need to install additional search toolbars. But, what search engine does the built in one use? Find out by clicking the drop down in  the right hand side of the search box. The default will be clearly marked.  You probably don’t remember, but you set this when you ran your current version of Internet Explorer the first time.

In the image to the left you can see that besides the default search provider, in this case “Live Search”, that there are a number of others.  Click the link toward the bottom of the dropdown list for “Find More Providers…” and the “Add-ons Gallery: Search Providers” page will open in your browser. This is where all the Facebook, Google, Amazon and Wikipedia searches came from in the list, but you’ll see that I have some extra ones that you won’t find on that page. Go through the provided ones and select any you would like to add. It’s a snap to add one of these. Just follow the instructions on that page. The others I show require a little more work. And that’s what this post is about.

Creating your own custom search providers requires no elaborate skills such as programming. Mere mortals can do this. So, let’s start with an example. Most people like movies. I am no exception. So, I find myself spending a lot of time looking up movie information at the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB), and as such, we’ll create our first custom search provider for it.

The first step is to go to a web page, such as http://www.imdb.com in this example, that allows you to search on it’s site. Most all web sites allow this, but not all are friendly to this custom search provider feature we’re discussing. Here is the crucial test to determine if this’ll work. Find the search box on the web site. Type into the search box  “TEST” (without the quotes) and click the button to start the search, or in this case the “go” button.  Here is the important thing to notice. After you ran the search, look in the browser’s address bar. Do you see the word “TEST” (without the quotes) in the address URL? In the example on the left a big red arrow points to it. If it’s there, then you’re going to be able to create the search. But, we’re going to need a copy of that address URL you just generated with this search. So, select the entire address. It should turn blue as in the picture. Then right click it and select copy.

Now, click the search box dropdown and select “Find More Providers…” Toward the bottom of the “Add-ons Gallery: Search Providers” page which just opened there will be a link to Create your own Search Provider that you will click. This is the page where we will create and install the custom search provider and is shown to the left.

The three basic steps are outlined on this page. We’ve already done the first two. All that’s left is to paste the IMDB URL we copied from the address bar into the box as shown and give the search a name. Then click the “Install Search Provider” button.

So, now when you type a search term in the Internet Explorer search box, you can click the dropdown and specifically select IMDB as the search. The resulting search will be of the IMDB movie database ONLY.

Sometimes when you use a web site’s search feature to set up custom search provider the resulting URL doesn’t contain the word “TEST” – which MUST be in uppercase for this to work – and as such, you cannot create a custom search provider for this web site using its engine.

But don’t despair!  The final technique I’ll cover in this post is creating a custom search provider using a standard search engine such as Live Search or Google Search.

While the “TEST” method works for most sites, one that I use on a regular basis does not. If you’re an audiobook fan, as I am, then you may be familiar with the Overdrive site. My Phoenix Public Library allows me to download and check out audio books and other ebooks (in DRM pdf format) as well as other media.

Just as with IMDB, I can go to the http://phoenix.lib.overdrive.com search box and type “TEST” which will result in a address bar URL that does NOT contain the magic word “TEST” – so it won’t work…

However, there is another way. I’ll demonstrate with Live Search as it has a friendly search builder. Open you browser to the http://www.live.com/ page and click the “Advanced Search” link. It should open with “Search Terms” pre-selected. So, if you guessed that we will be using “TEST” as our search term, then you’d be right on the mark. Type in “TEST” then click the “Add to search” button. Now click the link for “Site/Domain” and paste in the most basic part of the address URL you can use to get to the site. In this example I’ll enter “phoenix.lib.overdrive.com” without the quotes and then click the “Add to search” button. You’ll notice that at each step the search query is being built up. At this point the query looks like this:

TEST site:phoenix.lib.overdrive.com

But this isn’t the piece we’ll be needing. Again, we’ll need the address bar URL that looks like this:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=TEST+site%3Aphoenix.lib.overdrive.com&form=QBRE&qb=2

Notice that the magic word “TEST” appears in that URL. So, we can use this search URL in our custom search provider. Using this URL we follow all the same steps as before. Now, when you do a search with this custom search provider, instead of the web site performing the search, in this example Live Search will do the heavy lifting.  In this manner you can create custom searches for anything that you’d use a regular search engine to find and limit the scope to just a particular web site. I’ve created them for my local online newspaper as well as other things I search on a regular basis. Your only limit is your imagination. Any special features of the search engine can be used!

Now, for the coup de grâce for browsers sans accelerators… All these custom search providers now appear in the accelerator menu. If your reading a review about “Star Trek” and they mention the actor, Chris Pine, you can  select his name, highlighting it, then click the accelerator button. Then select  “All Accelerators” and click “Search with IMDB” to open the search results in another tab! How kewl is that!

It’s features like this that make Internet Explorer one of the must have applications I can’t live without. I hope you find this feature as useful as I do, and good luck creating your own custom search providers. If you make some good ones, then please share them!

-Jeff

Windows 7 RC, presumably the only release candidate, is off and running. I put the official RC on my test system and overwrote the the previous version 7100 that I downloaded early off of a torrent. This was probably unnecessary. But I have a clear conscience now. Since there are so many blogs covering all the ins and outs of Windows 7, I won’t attempt to reproduce this feat. Instead, I’m going to cover a few things I’ve noticed, a few things I liked, and some I didn’t.

The Good

This is harder that you might think. Since Windows 7 is by definition “ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC” and being universally praised, it’s hard for me to come up with some good things about Windows 7 that haven’t already been blogged to death about. But, I do have a few.

The taskbar (also known as the Superbar) is awesome. It combines the functionality of the Quick Launch bar with the application button on the taskbar. So now the Quick Launch toolbar has been officially deprecated and is off to the dust bin. However, if you are a big fan of the Quick Launch toolbar, there are ways to build it from scratch. I don’t see the point, but many people do, and instructions on how to do this abound all over the web. But, I wouldn’t worry about this. You don’t need it anymore.

This new Superbar (Sounds like something made out of protein!) has some new tricks for you. If you click and drag an application button from one place on the taskbar to another, you can change it’s position in the taskbar. This makes it possible to assign the Windows key plus a digit key to activate the first ten buttons on the taskbar. For example, l set it up so that Windows+2 activates Notepad.  In prior versions of Windows doing this required third party applications to rearrange the taskbar buttons. I used one of those for this purpose, but it’s sad to run an application whose sole purpose is to allow you to relocate a taskbar button. Actually, it did do some other things, but… So, I for one, am very happy about this new feature. This taskbar, like those preceding it, is highly customizable. If you just can’t handle to the new look and feel, you can set it so that it behaves much like the older versions. But don’t do that!

Change is a good thing. And speaking of shortcuts… Because of all the Windows+number key talk, I thought they might have done away with the old standby – the define your own shortcut key. I haven’t seen a lot of people do this, but perhaps it’s because they don’t know. And, I am happy to report, it still works. Here’s how: Right click on a shortcut. This includes the shortcuts in the Start>All Programs menu. Select properties. In the Shortcut key box it’ll say “None” if one hasn’t been assigned so click in that box. Now type a letter or a number. You can even use some symbols such as on the numeric keypad. The shortcut will now show in the Shortcut box, and it’ll usually add some modifier keys. This is to prevent your shortcuts from getting confused with Windows shortcuts such as Windows+E to open Windows Explorer. They will usually have the format of “Cntl-Alt-“ whatever key you assigned. One on the numeric keypad will look like “Num-“ whatever key, and those may not require any modifier keys. For example, when I type the numeric asterisk key my Sony ebook Library software fires up because I assigned it to that shortcut in the program menu. But it no longer functions as an asterisk! I still have shift+8 for that.

Another feature of the new taskbar, which is actually a feature of every other version of Windows since Windows 95, is the ability to drag through the taskbar. In Windows 7 this has new abilities. But most importantly, this feature was partially broken in Vista when the taskbar auto hides and was never fixed in Vista. To be sure, there are work arounds to doing this in Vista, but it was always a major annoyance of mine as I am probably the only person in the world that uses this feature. So, I am happy to report that it works as it should in Windows 7.

What is this feature you ask? Basic dragging through (or to) the taskbar is simply clicking (and holding the click down!) then dragging the file onto a button on the taskbar which has an open instance of the application. Then pause briefly on the button (while still dragging!) to AeroPeek at the open instances of the application. Now drag to one of those, and the application will come to the surface. While it comes to the surface you are still dragging the file. Now, drop it into the application that has just come into view, and it’ll be opened in that particular instance. In Vista, if the taskbar was hidden,  then you had to do something else. My method for Vista required me to hit the Windows key while dragging to “pop” the taskbar into view. Then you could proceed as expected. It’s a little flakey though.

If, however, the application doesn’t have a running instance, then this effect changes. In prior versions of Windows, if there was a taskbar button then the application was actually running. Not so true anymore. So, Windows 7 lets you know if it has open instances of an application by the shaded box around the icon. If you drag and drop a file onto an icon, and it has no open instances, then you’ll pin the file to the Jump List instead of opening it. So, if you would like to open it, then the trick is to hold down the shift key while you drag it. Then just drop it onto a taskbar icon, and that application will open your file in a new instance.

Try this out. Create a file in Wordpad. It’ll save as a rich text document somewhere. Be sure to pin rhe Notepad application to your taskbar so we can use it to open the RTF file you just made. Do this by clicking the Start button>All Programs>Accessories and then right clicking on Notepad.Now click on “Pin to Taskbar” and a Notepad button will appear on the taskbar but won’t have any instances of Notepad running. You can then move the Notepad icon where you like. Now, open Windows Explorer and go to the folder (or library) where the Wordpad RTF file you just created is located. If you drag the file onto the Notepad icon on the taskbar and drop it it’ll pin to it to the Notepad Jump Lisr, but it won’t open - provided you don’t already have any open Notepad files. If you then right click the Notepad icon on the taskbar the Jump List will be visible and you can click the newly created entry for your file.

However, if you hold the shift key while dragging the file to the Notepad icon in the taskbar and drop it, then the file will open in a new Notepad regardless of existing instances of Notepad running. This feature is the same as dragging a file, in an older version of Windows, to a Notepad Quick Launch button. You’ve probably never done this before  because you didn’t know you had the POWER!

Anyway, not many people use these types of features. I have found very experience Windows users who didn’t even know they could do this! But when is using this useful? Some people, like me, like to open files in applications other than the intended ones. Just clicking a file will open it in a default application only. You can always right click a file and use the “Open With…” feature, but sometimes dragging through or to the taskbar is just plain useful.

For example, I frequently have numerous File explorers open. And they may all be open full screen. In such cases, it simply isn’t possible to drag files from one open File Explorer to another to move or copy files from one location to another. So, by dragging through the taskbar, one can start the process in one full screen File Explorer window and drag through the taskbar to bring to the surface another instance of File Explorer and drop the files in it. As in all things Windows, there are a thousand and one ways to do this. You could have just right clicked the files and selected to copy or cut, but that’s to easy! As a purist, I am happy they fixed this in Windows 7.

Anyway, there are so many new and wonderful things to like about Windows 7. And most of these have been blogged about by others. So, I won’t bore you with yet another blog about the kewl new Windows 7. I’ll just talk about things I’ve noticed, but I haven’t read about anywhere else or things I might like to touch on and point out in detail.

The last kewl feature I’ll talk about isn’t actually Windows 7, but it is being introduced with it, and possibly will only be available for certain versions of it. This is the infamous XP Mode whose beta publically debuted with the release candidate launch – plus or minus a day. So, of course I had to try it out. And there happens to be one application that I’m fond of, that I’ve blogged about it before, and I know it WILL NOT INSTALL on Windows 7. This is the Microsoft Photo Story 3 released for Windows XP some time ago. When Vista first arrived on the scene, I was also unable to install it. I learned quickly that I could install it using compatibility mode and all was well. Eventually, Microsoft tweaked it to allow it to install into Vista without all the hoopla. I don’t know if they put it on a special instaltion list that made it automatically install in compatibility mode or if they just removed the internal software check it does to make certain that it is only running on Windows XP. Whatever the case may be, it simply refuses to install in Windows 7 regardless of the way I set the compatibility modes.

Enter XP Mode! Using this feature, which is basically application virtualization for those that care, I am able to install and use Photo story. This makes me happy! Anyway, my first photo story on Windows 7 is below. It’s nothing fancy. I just downloaded some pictures I had in one of my online Windows Live album since I have no other pictures on this machine, and imported them into Microsoft Photo Story 3. Then I grabbed an MP3 from somewhere and put it in, and shazam! Above is a partial screen shot. Notice how the old XP application is working happily right along with the Windows Live Writer app. But the close buttons (circled) are stylized per the respective underlying operating system. Here is the demo:

Dobbins Point AZ Photo Story

Well, crud. I am removing it from the post, but you can click the link above to see it, if you like. YouTube wonked it, but the link has the original which is good. Anyway – this video has an audio track of the theme song to “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Soapbox disallowed it entirely. So I posted it to YouTube. They  posted it, but they incuded this “NOTICE:This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled”  So, no audio! Those BH bastards! Anyway, it did have audio –they  just muted– no biggy though. The link above has it all.  This is just an example of what Photo Story does, and to show it still works on Windows 7. Also, One other thing to note, I didn’t try the USB feature which I could have. I didn’t install my headset mike yet. But Photo Story also allows you to narrate your story – if you have a mike. I’ll try this out later, but better luck next time!

Anyway, I am really fond of this application, and I would like to encourage the Windows Live team to appropriate it, and then include it in one of the Live Essentials applications or make it stand alone like Windows Live Photo Story 4 or something.

The Bad

There’s nothing to say here! It’s all good. OK – there are a few issues I’ve had that I’ve wanted to report since the Release Candidate has come out. I should have reported these sooned, but you know the old adage, “why do today what you can put off till tomorrow!” Well, did you know that adage is recursive? No – that doesn’t mean “RE – curse – ive” as the joke went a while back around my Windows Live network. It just means I never did it because I didn’t do it today. Shame on me! In any event, I have done something about it, and I’ll share that with you (even though I might be sharing bad secrets with you).

The first issue won’t affect most of you. In fact, it’s been an on again – off again issue in the past with Vista. Microsoft Office has a feature called Document Imaging. You have to either install the full application or specifically install the Document Imaging stuff starting (I think) with Office 2007. Anyway, it’s one of the older features of Office, and it looks that way too. But, it allows scanning and OCR. I like the OCR! (Optical Character Recognition – a way for software to read the words in a picture of text like a scanned newspaper article or a received fax.)

Anyway, when this feature is installed, it also installs a printer driver that allows you to print directly to a Document Imaging Printer. So, you end up with a TIF file or a MDI file of what you’ve printed, which can later be OCR’ed. As it stands, this printer does not install in Windows 7, but from the picture on the right you can tell it’s trying hard. I’m upset. It took like a year for Microsoft to fix the broken indexing when Vista came out because Vista had a whole new indexing service. *sigh*

The other misgiving that I have (so far) is a feature that I was very happy to see in added to Vista is removed in Windows 7.  Anyway, it’s such a simple thing. So, in all versions of Windows since Windows 95, you’ve been able to right click, in Windows Explorer, on a CD or DVD drive and select “Eject.” And it was good. With Vista they added a “Close Tray” on the same right click context menu. But what one Windows giveth, the next taketh away! That feature “Close tray” is gone. I assumed that they would get this right in Windows 7 by putting the two options next to each other instead of so far apart as in Vista. But WTF? (Pardon me…) I know they did this just to see if I would notice. Well, I did. Now can you put it back please?

This is the last, and then I’ll stop. When I downloaded AVG Virus Protection for Windows 7 from Download.com, I noticed that it downloaded the install file sans the file extension “.EXE”. So, as provided, the file was unusable. Of course I know how to add the extension back, and I did just that. It installed and is fine. But another person might be confused by this. I assumed this was a Download.com issue, and it may be, but when I repeated the steps to put AVG in the XP Mode virtual machine this did not happen. Perhaps they send a different file based on detected OS? I don’t know, but this might be an issue.

OK – now for the little secret – please don’t tell anyone! So, if you had an issue with the Windows 7 beta, you could report it using the feedback tool. And in the release candidate they removed it. But not really. It’s still there. You just can’t get to it. But if you need to, then do this

Create a shortcut on the desktop by right clicking the desktop and selecting NEW>Shortcut.

In the box for “type the location of the item” paste in this text: rundll32.exe FeedbackTool.dll,ShowWizard

The rest of the long path will fill itself in after you click next. Click “Next” and then name the shortcut “Feedback Tool” and you’re good to go. I have submitted these issues listed above – a couple of them at least – and it worked fine for me. You should use this sparingly as it could “just quit working” at any time if they get to many submissions of the wrong type. In fact, I don’t know that they even look at anything submitted using it anymore, but it made me feel good to do it. No more waiting till tomorrow for me! Then click the new shortcut, and it’ll take a second to get configuration data then you’ll see this:

You might want to use only the last item for “It seemed to be broken.” They are no longer soliciting feedback for general comments, and so I would reserve this only for real problems. they are not going to consider anything – other than perhaps bugs or bad drivers – but nothing that would change the look and feel of Windows 7.

The Ugly

“No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.” Oscar Wilde

OK – I’m able to install Windows 7 all by myself. But, it isn’t a pretty install. Because my PC is connected to a 46 flat screen TV, it had an issue. It’s ugly too! The problem stems, I believe, from the fact that my TV does not support VGA mode (640x480), and the installer doesn’t check to see if the mode is supported. This is, of course, my theory. I could be wrong, but let me show you some full screen pictures I took of the display. Now, take note that these pictures are not as bad as it gets! Early in the install, before I got the camera out, the whole lower part of the screen showed a colored snow effect, while the upper part showed the display in a manner similar to these pictures:

This is the initial “type in you name” screen:

Here you can see that I moved the windows so I could get to the “Next” button at the bottom right. Some people might need to make a phone call over this one!

I have already moved the maximized Windows so it appears completely in the top left hand quandrant of the screen. At this point, I am in Windows, with it up and running! Since you see two mouse cursors, it can be confusing as to which way to move the mouse to get from point A to point B. I hope they fix this before launch. It really looks terribly ugly during the install on my setup. Anyway, while it looks terrible, it didn’t prevent ME from installing Windows 7. But it might prevent some from installing it.

Anyway, again, I should have reported this earlier, but, well, I could still do it tomorrow. Oh, wait – that was yesterday… Or the day before. I can’t recall.

-Jeff

PS: I have had serious problems uploading this post. Spell check locked up, and I had to kill the app. I got errors regarding unauthorized file access. I’ll try this again. I hope it works now!

A question I’m hearing a lot lately is “what’s a category, and what’s it good for?” I’ll try to briefly answer both those questions, and give you an idea of what you can do with this feature.

First, categories are created and managed in a several places. This feature is related to your contacts, and as such, it appears in applications that involve them. So you’ll see it in Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, and possibly elsewhere. The extent of what you can do with a category depends on where you are using it. For example, you can create categories in Messenger, but you cannot in Photo Gallery, but you can use them in both places.

The picture on the left shows my categories. I divide categories into purposes. The most apparent purpose for a category is to group similar types of people together. But another less obvious purpose, and you’ll see several of this type in the picture, is for setting up permissions. So, categories like friends and family have specific meanings that those contacts in them are one or the other, but other of my categories, like “Can leave notes” is are not as clear. I’ll cover that later in this post.

Also, another important concept to keep in mind is that there is a many to many relationship between your contacts and your categories. This means each category can contain several or all of your contacts. But it also means that any given contact can be in one or more of your categories. This multivalued nature of categories gives them a great deal of flexibility.

How do you create a category?

1. Go to the People Page http://people.live.com
2. Click on “Manage categories”
3. Click the “New” link. (There is also an “Edit” and “Delete” link.)
4. Fill in the boxes with the appropriate information like the name of the category you’ll be creating.
5. You can add users by typing their names in the second box. Take note that there are other easier ways to do this, but this gets you started.
6. You can also edit and delete categories. but you must first have one or more selected by checking the box next to the name. Deleting a category does not delete the contacts in it. They just lose that category, but continue on otherwise as if nothing happened. If you edit a category, then you can change the name or see who’s in it and add or delete members. Very handy!

Where can I use a category?

1. In Messenger. If you have the “Organize contacts by category selected then you will see each contact under the categories they belong to. You can also manage categories in Messenger. You can copy, move, and remove contacts from a category by right clicking the contact. You can manage categories in Messenger by right clicking a category to rename it, edit it, or delete it. You can also manage who’s in the category here. In order to see this view open Tools>Options>Layout. At the bottom is an “Organize contacts by…” section. Select “Categories” from the list and choose the options you want.
2. In Photo Gallery. Contacts in Photo Gallery are thought of as “People Tags,” and the categories you set up group these tags together in logical units. If you click a person’s people tag then you’ll see all the  pictures that are tagged of that person. If you click on a “family” category then all the people tags for all the contacts in that category (of family) will be selected. And the result is that you’ll see all the pictures from your family.
3. In Mail. You can send email out to a category of people. This is like sending to a mailing list. In my list on the left, you’ll notice I have a category called “Politics” and if I mail to that category, and if you’re in it, you’ll get that email. One easy way to do this in the web client is to click the “To:”, “Cc:”, or “Bcc:” button in a new email. A contact selector will open which has three tabs. The center tab is for categories, and if you select one or more of these then everyone in the category will receive the email. So, sending an email to my “family” category results in each family member receiving it. You can do this in the desktop client, but the process is different. There the categories and contacts are mixed. Just find what you need.
4. Lastly, you can use categories to set permissions. A lot of people are doing this. It certainly makes managing your Live Network a simpler task. Now, setting these permission is deserving of its own post, and many have been done. But, here is an example of how you can do it. My first category of this type is “Can leave notes.” There is nothing inherently special about this category. I could have called it something like “QWERTY” and it would work just the same. If you’ll go to your Profile page, you’ll find the Notes area at the bottom. And at the end of that section there’ll be a link “View more.” Click it. This takes you to the full Notes page. At the top of this page is a link “Edit permissions.” This takes you to the “Permissions for notes” page as shown on the right. By default, many of the things you can set permissions for come pre-set with either “Everyone (public)” or “My network” preselected. This is fine, if you want to share everything with everyone. I used to do this with Notes. I let anyone who wanted to leave a note do so. But I started getting notes from strange people, and I decided to lock them down. So, if you can see and add notes on my Profile page, then you’re in one of these categories that I have checked off on the right.
   
   Here are some things to consider. First, you must be in one or more of the selected categories in order to leave Notes on the profile page. It’s not required that you be specifically in the “Can leave notes” category. It’s just a special category for contacts that don’t belong in any of the other ones that can also leave notes. I use it for people who are not family, friends, etc.
   
   For example, I have decided that any of my family members can leave notes. I do this by making sure that this category has a checkmark giving it permission. As such, they DO NOT also have to be in the “Can leave notes” category. In fact, many of my contacts fall into several groups that can leave note, but may not fall into the one specifically for it. For example, Several family members are also favorites. Either of those categories also gives you the power to leave notes! To have this option you must be in at least one of the selected categories.
   
   So, how do I use this? When I add a person to my network, I am provided the options to add the contact to any number of categories. I have three I use for almost all new adds. First, I add them to “Can leave notes” then some to “Can see profile” which also allows them to leave notes (because of the checkmark), and finally to “Virtual Buddies” if I have never met the person and don’t really know them other than online. Virtual buddies do not get to leave notes because I haven’t checked the box for that as shown on the right.
   Some people can see my profile. I figure that if I have allowed you to see it, then you are probably OK to leave notes too. This is just something I decided. You might think differently.  Should you want to see who you’re granting these permissions to then click the little blue number next to the permission. A list of contacts in the category will appear.

The bottom line is, if I remove you from any of these categories, then you cannot leave a note. Notice the last item on the Permissions page. It’s for Individuals. Rather than add and remove on a person by person basis, it is so much simpler to simply add them to a category. Categories are easy to manage. I wish Windows Live could excluded by category too. Then we could exclude all the “Bad guys” without losing the “Everyone (public)” category. But wishes are like…

Finally, you can manage the categories from the People page. If you click the link for the category on the left, then all the contacts for that category appear. If you select one, by checking its box, then you can “Remove from this category” or you can add that contact to one of the other existing categories from the “Categories” dropdown list. Also, you can create a new category right here.

This post just touches on some basic ideas for using categories. Once you start using them, you’ll stumble upon other useful techniques, but this post should get you started. There are a lot of things not covered as well as certain important functionality that seems to be missing entirely. For example, there is no list of categories a person belongs to regardless of editing those categories. You just have to figure it out for now. Maybe they’ll add this in a future version as it seems an oversight. So, I hope this clears up any confusion you have about categories and how you can use them.

-Jeff

While reading a fine post the other day on how to use Photo Gallery, I encountered a comment from a Windows Live user saying he had been using the Photos area of Windows Live, but he had no idea about the Windows Live Essentials Photo Gallery. This amazes me! We need to get the word out. Anyway, this fortunate soul learned of the existence of Photo Gallery, empowering him to take advantage of all it has to offer.

The basic use of Photo Gallery requires some basic skills you probably already have from using Windows. And there are many fine posts to get you started such as this series you can find here: Windows Live Photo Gallery…..1..Importing your pictures.

This post assumes you already know the basics. In fact, this post takes on a different format from my usual “how-to” type posts. Each tip tries to stand alone, and is presented in a rapid fire “Did you know…”  bulleted format.

A popular feature of many programs, alas more so in the past than now, is the tip of the day or the start up tip. Little known facts about the program or its usability come to the surface in a way that didn’t require you to read through a thick manual to get to the “meat” and do interesting things. By design, these tips get right to the point and are not lengthy step by step procedures. I found these tips fantastically useful for the programs that provided them. Sometimes, I would start the program just to read them. Most programs provide a “next tip” button, so I would scan through them all, and before you know it, you’re an expert!

That’s what this post is about. These are some “tips of the day” that Windows Live Photo Gallery might present, if it had such a feature. Since this imaginary friend of a start up screen doesn’t exist, I can stray outside the bounds of purely tipping on Photo Gallery. That’s the beauty of taking liberties with imaginary friends – you can do what you want! But I will restrain myself to things regarding Photo Gallery, photos, and usability.

In these tips, I will refer to different areas of the user interface for Photo Gallery (from here on referred to as WLPG). The central panel shows items. These items will be referred to as “shown items” if they are viewable in the panel but not necessarily selected, and “selected items” for those that are both shown and are selected. A selected item will show a check mark in the Select Check box when the mouse is moved over it and is highlighted. Note that you might not see a shown item if it has scrolled off the central panel, but it is still considered a shown item. Since the documentation doesn’t clearly name these areas, I provide a diagram below for reference:

OK – let’s get started!

Importing and exporting:

• Did you know you have many options naming your photos on import? Set the defaults in File>Options>Import to override your camera’s default names.
• Did you know you can import from cameras, video cameras, online photo albums, photo CD’s and DVD’s?
• Did you know you can name the folder and provide multiple tags when importing your pictures? Set these options when the Import Photos and Videos dialog opens.
• If your camera contains a lot of new pictures taken over a large time span, did you know you can adjust the groupings used to make folders based on a time span? To use this feature, select the option to “Review, organize, and group items to import” on the import wizard. Click next. The next page of this wizard shows you the default groupings of your photos. Move the slider at the bottom to change the default amount of time between groups. The lowest setting is a half hour between groups. The highest setting is “All items in one group.”
• Did you know you can provide unique names for each imported photo group and set multiple tags for each imported group?
• Did you know you can download photos and albums from Windows Live Photos into Photo Gallery? Online photos have a download link. Download albums by clicking More>Download>Download with Photo Gallery.
• Did you know you can download an Windows Live photo album in one zipped file?  Download albums as a single Zip file by clicking More>Download>Download as .zip file.
• Did you know that you can publish to other online services beside Windows Live? To use this feature click on Publish in WLPG and select More Services.
• Did you know that WLPG can sync your photos between two computers? Click the Help button in WLPG, the “?” in a blue circle in the upper right corner, and select “Get help with Photo Gallery” then search for “sync”.
• Did you know that, unless you disable this feature, you can upload your tags to your online photo album? Wouldn’t it be nice if Live Search could find them using this metadata?
• Did you know that uploaded photos with tags will download with the tags?

Selecting:

• Did you know you can select all the items in a grouping in the central panel picture area by clicking the group header? Click it again to unselect.
• Did you know that you can select all the shown items by typing cntl-A?
• Did you know that you can select photos and videos by using folders, Date taken, People tags, and descriptive tags on the right hand side of the WLPG? Clicking the little triangles on the left hand side of a choice expands or collapses the choices beneath it.
• Did you know you can select photos taken during a period of time, be it a year, month or day by drilling down into the Date taken selection on the right hand panel?
• Did you know that you can select more than one choice at a time from the right hide side? For example, select a person using the People tags, then while holding the control key down, select a date.
• The right hand panel has four groups. First is folders, then dates, then People tags, the Descriptive tags. Did you know that multiple selections within the same group result in all items from all the choices? For example, select a person by clicking on their People tag. Now select a second person by holding down the control key and clicking their People tag. the result is all items for both people.
• The right hand panel has four groups. First is folders, then dates, then People tags, the Descriptive tags. Did you know that multiple selections from different groups results only in the items belonging to each of the groups? For example, select all photos of a person by selecting its People tag. Now select a year from the Dates taken group by expanding into the Dates taken to find the year, then hold the control key down while selecting the year. The result is all the photos of the person taken in that year.
• The right hand panel has four groups. First is folders, then dates, then People tags, the Descriptive tags. Did you know that you can mix and match selection criteria by selecting multiple items both within the same groups and from multiple groups as well? For example, select a People tag, now holding the control key down select another People tag. The result so far is all items of both people. Now expand the Date taken to find a particular month. Expand the month and select two days within it by holding the control key down and clicking on each date. Now the result is all the photos of both people but only taken on either date.
• Did you know that selecting two people tags results in all items containing either one of the people? If you want items that contain BOTH people then click the People tag for one of them, and type the other person’s name in the filter box. The result is items containing both people.
• Did you know that selecting two Descriptive tags results in all items containing either tag? To find items containing BOTH tags select one of the descriptive tags from the right hand panel then type in the other as a filter in the “Find a photo” box. The result is items containing BOTH descriptive tags. For example, you want vacation pictures of the ocean. Select the “vacation” Descriptive tag and type ocean into the Find box.
• Did you know you can select multiple items found in the central panel by holding the control key down while clicking them? You can select a range by clicking the first one then holding down the shift key to select the last one. You can select individual items by clicking the select check box for the item.  You can also make a lasso by clicking and dragging a box around all the items you want.
• Did you know that while there is a menu item under file to “Select all”, there is no menu item to clear the selection or to select the inverse. You can clear the selection by clicking in the central panel on white space. Invert selection requires a lot of thought…
• Did you know you can select items based on their star rating? To use this feature make your selection in the filter area.
• Did you know that you can use tags for temporary purposes? One example of this would be to invert a selection. Another example would be to select all the pictures that do not have people in them. Be creative!
• Did you know that WLPG can remove any unused tags automatically? To do this right click on the “Descriptive tag” header in the left hand panel and select “Tag cleanup”. This can also be done from Options.
• Did you know that you can right click on any descriptive tag and select “Convert to people tag”?
• Did you know you can right click on a People tag and merge it with another contact?
• Did you know that People tags come from your contacts in Windows Live? If you wanted, you could make your pets into people!
• Did you know that your contacts can be grouped into categories, and that those categories are available in WLPG? For example, I could add “Felix”, “Oscar”, “Sylvester”, and “Pity Kitty” as contacts. I could then put them into a “Pet” category.
• Did you know that if you select a category in People tags on the left hand panel that you select everyone in that category? So, if you have a category called “family” then selecting it would show every item that relates to at least one person in your family. If you had a category called “pets” then selecting it would show every item that relates to al least one of your pets. In effect, it results in all your pet photos and videos.

Viewing and Selecting:

• Did you know that you can change the groupings and order of items in the central panel? There are two button in the upper left of this panel for this. One is “Arrange by” and the other is either “Ascending” or “Descending” depending on which is currently set.
• Did you know that you can change a number of groupings related settings by right clicking on a Group Header? Try it by right clicking a group header and selecting Group by>Tag. The results are all the shown items are grouped into individual tag groups – one for each and every tag available for all the shown items. Because items can have multiple tags, some items may fall into more than one tag group.
• Did you know if you right click on any group header, that the “Table of contents” can be selected? This results in a new section on the left hand side of the central panel with quick links to each of the groupings in your shown items. If you’ve grouped by tags, then the table of contents will contain a list of all the tags available for the shown items. Click on a table of contents item (such as a tag) to quickly jump to that grouping. Repeat the process to turn the table of contents off.
• Did you know that the blue highlighted area in the table of contents covers the range of items visible on the screen?
• Did you know that the table of contents indicates the size of each grouping by the size indicator bar?
• Did you know you can resize the shown thumbnails? To do this use the slider bar in the lower right hand corner of WLPG.
• Did you know that all the tags, both People tags and Descriptive tags, that are being used by all the selected items appear on the right hand panel? These tags are clickable. Click one to make a new set of shown items based on that tag. Each clicked tag changes the shown items and, all the tags for the remaining selected items appear, and the original items remain selected. You can do clever things with this.
• Did you know that the header for each grouping shows the number of items shown in the group as well as the number of items selected?
• Did you know the status bar (at the bottom of the WLPG application window) indicates the total number of items shown as well as the total number selected? Note that these may not be visible because they’ve scrolled off the central panel.
• Did you know that the Information section of the right hand panel shows information about the selected items. It shows the information about the last selected item. You can also change information here that’ll apply to all the selected items. For example, clicking on four stars will make all the selected items four star items.
• Did you know that you can identify people in a selection? Select the photos in interest, and all the people in them will show in the People tags area on the right hand side. If the “People found” link appears here then you can click it. The viewer will open on that photo with a box around the unidentified face it found. Identify it and any others, but do not close the viewer. Instead, click the next button in the lower right hand side of the viewer, and the next photo with a face found with appear. Repeat until there are no more.

Photos

• Did you know you can make panoramas with WLPG? Don’t think one dimensionally! Many people make these by sweeping across the horizon and stitching them together. But they can be stacked too. Try making one that is three photos wide by two photos high. The stitching algorithm is so smart that it even gets it right for off kilter, angled photos! try it – it either will work or it won’t!
• Did you know that panoramic photos can be odd shapes? Use the built in cropping tool to make them rectangular again.
• Did you know that panoramic photos can be odd shapes? If you upload them to an online album, use one of the resizing options to make sure the online thumbnail appears. If you don’t, then you may end up with an plain icon instead of a representation of your photo.
• Did you know that Microsoft Research provides a free Image Composite Editor? Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. The application takes a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location and creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all the source images at full resolution. It adds itself to the Extras menu when you install it.
• Did you know that you can right click on an item(s) and change some of the properties? By right clicking you can change names, times, size etc.
• Did you know that you can right click on an item to get its file properties? The Details tab has a wealth of information.

Batch Operations:

• Did you know that you can rename all the photos you have selected in one step? To do this select the photos you want renamed, and the order you want them. Then either right click a selected item and chose rename, or just go to the information section in the right hand panel, and enter a new name. All the photos will have this same name as a prefix and an index number inside parenthesis to distinguish them. For example, you may have some vacation pictures in a folder. Each are name something like IMG_XXX where XXX is a number. Select all of these, then right click, select rename, type the new name in the information area, and the pictures will be renamed like Vacation (1), Vacation (2) … (Note: You can also do this for any files in the Windows XP, Vista, and 7 operating systems. Do the same steps in File Explorer.)
• Did you know that you can give all the selected photos the same caption? This may be useful to you for uploaded photo albums or if you want all the photos to have some part of the caption same – such as a the location. To do this select your items. The type the caption in the Caption area on the right hand panel. Later you can edit each item by adding something to the caption without removing what was already there.
• Did you know you can batch change other metadata for the selected items? To do this, select your items, then type in the Information section in the lower part of the right hand panel the metadata you want to change, either the caption, name, date, time, stars, or author. This is then applied to all selected items. If you have Windows Vista or later, you can also change metadata at the operating system level.

Searching for Photos:

• Did you know the Find box at the top right of the central panel is not as full featured as the search box in Vista? You can type criteria here, but it appears to be “AND”ed together. It doesn’t like you to use (Boolean) terms like “AND” or “OR” in the box. Using this box in conjunction with the selections on the right hand panel can yield results that most need.
• Did you know that Descriptive tags are available in Vista and Windows 7? (Possibly XP too??) Whatever descriptive tags you put on items in WLPG are available at the operating system level. They are a part of the file itself.
• Did you know that (it appears that) People tags are NOT available at the operating system level. To get around this you can use WLPG to select persons of interest using their People tag, making sure to select every item of theirs and assign a descriptive tag to represent them. This tag will now be available at the operating system level.
• Did you know that you can do advanced searches to find items at the operating system level that you cannot do from within WLPG? For example, you can select all the photos using a tag, say “X” and exclude all the photos that also have a different tag, say “Y”.  To do this within WLPG you can use temporary tags to implement complex set logic. You must be a mathematician or a magician to accomplish this. You’ll need to understand how to both add and remove descriptive tags for set logic operations.

The WLPG application

• Did you know the right hand panel us really two panels? You can adjust the size of each by moving the dividing line up and down between the”Caption” and “Information”.
• Did you know that the three panels, the left hand panel, the central panel, and the right hand panel can be resized by moving the dividers between them?
• Did you know that you can right click on an a single selected item and select “Open file location” to gain access to the item at the operating system level via File Explorer?
• Did you know that the Help system can answer many of your questions? You should consult it first if you need help.

Other Applications – Helper applications

• Did you know that WLPG, while a great tool, doesn’t have all the functions and features you may need? If you have another photo editing program installed, it may appear in the “Extras” menu in WLPG. If it does, then you can select up to 15 different items, click Extras>Open with and then the program you want to use. The application will open all your selected items. If your application doesn’t appear then you can manually associate it with image or video file types by right clicking an image file in File Explorer and selecting “Open With” and then “Choose Default Program…” Find the application you want to use and add it. You may wish to uncheck the “Always use the selected program to open this type of file” checkbox – otherwise you’ll be changing how you open these files rather than just adding an option to open with this application.
• Did you know there are free applications available to help you edit your photos? These can be made available via the Extras menu, and provide you with advanced editing features such as layers, dodging and burning, and color control. Try these: http://www.getpaint.net/ and http://www.gimp.org/ (in order of ease of use).
• Did you know that WLPG doesn’t do geotagging? However, Microsoft Research provides a free tool that allows you to add the geotagging metadata. Look here for this: Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2
• Did you know that WLPG doesn’t do the Ken Burns Effect? However, Microsoft kindly provides a free tool that does. You may have heard of it. It’s called Photo Story 3 and it works on XP and Vista. I haven’t checked if it’ll work on Windows 7, but I hope it does. It’s a wonderful little program that allows you to make sound synced / music / narrated videos out of your photos using the Ken Burns effect. You can read more about this (and how Apple thinks they invented it!) on Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows:

Coincidentally, Apple Computer announced iMovie 3.0 for Mac on January 7, 2003 as well. That product included a highly-publicized feature called "the Ken Burns effect" which provided iMovie with Plus! Photo Story-style animations and slideshows. Curiously, given Apple's digital media strengths, however, iMovie 3.0 and the Ken Burns effect were harder to use and delivered poorer results than did Photo Story. I find it odd to this day that, while Microsoft announced its product first and delivered a more elegant solution and simpler solution, Apple is still given credit for "innovating" with animated photo slideshows.

How typical!

OK – so this was a little different. I think I got a lot more information out in under 4000 words. And half of those are “Did you know!” It doesn’t have all the pictures, and specific instructions, but I find that often times, it’s not the “how” that gets you there, but the “what.” For many people, they will see these tips, and go “oh – I didn’t know you could right click there!” And once the realization comes into play, you really won’t need a visual guide, if you can already get around in the program. That’s what I’m going for here. I hope it works.

So, please correct me if I got anything wrong, and please, I would love it, if you have more tips I can add to the list. Please post them in the comments! I know I’ve skipped entire areas such as printing.  Let me know if anything is unclear. I’ll try to rephrase it.

Ultimately, I would like it if Windows Live Essentials added a “Tip of the day” start up type screen. But maybe I’m being nostalgic. In any event, I hope you enjoy these, and they help you be more productive.

-Jeff

During an interesting course of events today, (which just got more interesting as the Windows Live team just released Messenger in the Windows Live Hotmail client and in People! This is good news!) which started out by reading Docextreme’s How long Have You Been Using Windows Live in which he asks how long have you been using these Microsoft services, I thought to myself, gee, I don’t know. I know it’s been a while. So, for grins, I went to the “View your account” found in the upper right hand corner of most web pages.

That takes you to a page showing your account details, one of which is your account creation date. So, it turns out that I just had my ten year anniversary! The account was Registered since:  March 20, 1999. Funny thing, though, that I know this isn’t my first Hotmail account. I’ve had Hotmail accounts before Microsoft bought them. So, I thought to myself, when did “HoTMaiL” come about? And for that, I went to Wikipedia and looked up Hotmail. I don’t recall which Passport or Live ID I used back then. I’ve used a number over the ages. But my, how time flies!

I continued to read this article.

As part of the update, Microsoft also added integrated capability for instant messaging with contacts on the Windows Live Messenger service. The feature is the realization of a project that began as "Windows Live Web Messenger" in 2007, a replacement for the outdated "MSN Web Messenger" service that was first launched back in August 2004. It was noted that the original "Windows Live Web Messenger" featured tabbed conversations in a "conversation workspace", however since its integration with Hotmail this has since been removed.

Windows Live Web Messenger

OK – so I’ve used the MSN Web Messenger, but not this Windows Live Web Messenger. My first thought was that it’s just a new name for the same thing, but the article seemed to indicate it has additional features, etc. OK. I must try it. So, I highlighted the “Windows Live Web Messenger” in the article and used the Google accelerator. 

I found what I was looking for. It’s the first returned item and is located at http://messidog.live.com. So, I clicked it. And I got this:

An error has occurred.
There's a problem with the Windows Live Web Messenger service right now. Please try signing in again later. If you have a different account, you may want to try signing in with that one.

Foiled! So, Messidog is missing in action. But it isn’t the same thing as webmessenger. No matter – I can pull the Google cached page. And I did. I got this:

So it really existed! But it’s gone. And this cached image is only a week old. So, it just went missing. What does it mean? Perhaps I just caught it on a bad day? Well, we still have the old msn webmessenger. It’s been around for a long time, and we can use that! Or can we… I went there, http://webmessenger.msn.com and got this nice message:

Foiled again! Well, almost – this version still works even if complaining about Internet Explorer 8, but it still has the limitation of only being logged in once. So, I got this message pop up:

But the memories… A nice thing about this old version, it splits my contacts into two groups. The top group are those logged in, and the bottom those that are offline. I really miss that view of my contacts. I now have to hunt through massive lists of groups and categories, and other things to see who’s there, and who is not. (Update: It turns out this feature is configurable in the newest release as is whether groups display or not. See the comments for details.)

Anyway, the point of this otherwise pointless post is to wonder if messidog is gone for good or just missing in action? And, since the integration of Live Messenger with Live Hotmail has not happened, what is the future of that? I’ve experienced momentary instances where it did work. It just appeared and just as quickly disappeared. But after all this time, it hasn’t been rolled out.

And, if things go my way, it never will be. Not, at least, in the manner that I think it was originally envisioned. My hope is that the new Messenger Bar that’s available for any web site to use will actually be used on the Windows Live web sites. The original plan allowed Messenger use while using email. The Messenger Bar could allow access from anywhere in Windows Live, and, if you’re familiar with Facebook, it looks like the bar at the bottom of Facebook pages. Here are a couple pages that are using it.

http://blog.mynetx.net/
http://pulse.mslivelabs.com/

Try it out, and see what you think. They’re probably still working some of the kinks out of it, but this could be a great new feature of Windows Live.

UPDATE: As luck would have it, the day I posted this (04/21/09) the Windows Live team rolled out integrated Messenger in Hotmail and People.

If you ever find yourself losing track of what’s going on in your Windows Live network because you haven’t logged in for a while, then here is a tip for you. If you’ve so much going on in your network that updates are cycling out of the What’s New feed before you get a chance to read them, then this tip can restore your sanity. If you would like to see your public What’s New updates appear while browsing without having to be logged into Windows Live on your Home page, then this tip is exactly what you need.

If you’ve installed Internet Explorer 8 (required), then you’ve got a nifty new feature, the Favorites Bar, that can be tailored for use with Windows Live.  If you don’t have it IE 8, then you should consider installing it. For the purposes of this post, I will assume that you have Internet Explorer 8, and you have the Favorites Bar in its standard default location in Internet Explorer. If you don’t, then you are already clever enough to adapt these instructions for whatever configuration you’ve set up.

To start, log into Windows Live and go to your Home Page. Somewhere on the left side will be your “What’s new with your network” section. Mine is underneath my email area. There are up to 20 updates listed here, and if you click the “What’s new with your network” header of this section, then a dedicated page of up to 50 updates appears. This may be enough for some folks, but others of us experience update overflow – a condition in which we lose our updates - possibly because you’re in a lot of Groups which can generate many updates or you use other web activities, such as twitter, which can generate copious updates which will fill these 50 available update slots and cause others to drop out. Maybe you just have 500 friends on your network - all generating updates at the same time! Whatever the case, once the 50 slots are filled, any new updates will force the older ones to cycle off the page, possibly before you had a chance to see them and be lost. I’ve had this happen many times just because I went to bed and overslept! So, here’s a way to remedy that.

While you’re on your Home page and looking at your What’s new with my network section, focus on the end of this section. After the last update listed there’ll be some links as follows:

Click on the “Feed” link. Another page will open in Internet Explorer, and it’ll have a banner looking like this (click image to enlarge it):

OK – so now click on the “Subscribe to this feed” link in the banner:

We’re almost done.  Another dialog box will open as shown below. You can change anything you like here. I suggest you keep the same name to remember what it’s for, but you can create it in another folder if you like. Just be sure you check the box “Add to Favorites Bar.” This is the key!

Click the “Subscribe” button, and you’re done! Back in Internet Explorer 8, up above your browser page tabs, a new favorites item will appear on the Favorites bar called “What’s New with You…” This tab can be moved to your desired location on the bar by drag and drop. When there are new updates, it’ll appear bolded as shown in this example:

And when there are no new items it won’t be. In either case, if you click the “What’s New with You…” item, a drop down list of updates will appear like this:

Any new items will be bolded, and others will be in regular font. And from here you can click any individual item to open it. Also, this item remains active even when you browse outside of Windows Live. So, when the feed is periodically refreshed, and new items are available, then link will go bold and give a brief flash – even if your browsing in Facebook or somewhere else. So, you now can have a tailored history of your What’s new with my network items, and you can go on vacation and not lose anything! (Be sure to go mobile in that case!)

If you click the list item, “Open all items…” in the drop down near the bottom of the list, then the main feed page will open. From here, you can set the feed properties by clicking this link found on the upper right hand side:

That will open another dialog box which allows you to set the properties of the feed. One property I change is the the number of updates to keep. I change that to the maximum of 2500, even though Internet Explorer will only display the most recent 1000 of them. You can also change the scheduled frequency of reading the updates, but I’ve always left mine at the default of one hour. If you really like to be on top of things then you could change this to a very short period. But, you'd be fine if you didn’t change anything here. It’s up to you. So, I suggest, when you try it out to not bother changing these defaults. They can always be changed later.

Now, you can keep track of the pesky updates even when you’re experiencing update overflow! Some things to note: the listed update does not have multiple links in it as it would in the What’s new Home Page; the descriptions do not show either; non public updates, such as from groups, may not show to protect privacy. However, this is a welcome addition to Internet Explorer for me, and it adds functionality I can use, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

-Jeff

"One of the very difficult parts of the decision I made on the financial crisis was to use hardworking people's money to help prevent there to be a crisis." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Jan. 12, 2009

"So I analyzed that and decided I didn't want to be the president during a depression greater than the Great Depression, or the beginning of a depression greater than the Great Depression." --George W. Bush, Washington D.C., Dec. 18, 2008

"People say, well, do you ever hear any other voices other than, like, a few people? Of course I do." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Dec. 18, 2008

"I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Dec. 16, 2008

"You know, I'm the President during this period of time, but I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived in President, during I arrived in President." --George W. Bush, ABC News interview, Dec. 1, 2008

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it. --George W. Bush, Interview with President George W. Bush, Oct., 2004 

"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008

Quote

Talking about Worst. President. Ever.—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)
Here are some of the comments that the historians furnished:“ No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”“With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct,” said another historian. “When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of areas: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.”

"Let me start off by saying that in 2000 I said, 'Vote for me. I'm an agent of change.' In 2004, I said, 'I'm not interested in change --I want to continue as president.' Every candidate has got to say 'change.' That's what the American people expect." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., March 5, 2008

"I'm telling you there's an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is. That's the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Jan. 12, 2009

"In terms of the economy, look, I inherited a recession, I am ending on a recession." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Jan. 12, 2009

"I've been in the Bible every day since I've been the president." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Nov. 12, 2008

Quote

Talking about The Worst President in History? : Rolling Stone
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

"This thaw -- took a while to thaw, it's going to take a while to unthaw." --George W. Bush, on liquidity in the markets, Alexandria, La., Oct. 20, 2008

Quote

Talking about The Worst President in History? : Rolling Stone
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

"Anyone engaging in illegal financial transactions will be caught and persecuted." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2008

"The people in Louisiana must know that all across our country there's a lot of prayer -- prayer for those whose lives have been turned upside down. And I'm one of them." --George W. Bush, Baton Rouge, La., Sept. 3, 2008

"First of all, I don't see America having problems." --George W. Bush, interview with Bob Costas at the 2008 Olympics, Beijing, China, Aug. 10, 2008

"There's no question about it. Wall Street got drunk -- that's one of the reasons I asked you to turn off the TV cameras -- it got drunk and now it's got a hangover. The question is how long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments." --George W. Bush, speaking at a private fundraiser, Houston, Texas, July 18, 2008

"I think it was in the Rose Garden where I issued this brilliant statement: If I had a magic wand -- but the president doesn't have a magic wand. You just can't say, 'low gas.'" --George W. Bush, Washington D.C., July 15, 2008

"And they have no disregard for human life." --George W. Bush, on the brutality of Afghan fighters, Washington, D.C., July 15, 2008

"The economy is growing, productivity is high, trade is up, people are working. It's not as good as we'd like, but -- and to the extent that we find weakness, we'll move." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., July 15, 2008

"Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter." --George W. Bush, in parting words to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy at his final G-8 Summit, punching the air and grinning widely as the two leaders looked on in shock, Rusutsu, Japan, July 10, 2008

"Amigo! Amigo!" --George W. Bush, calling out to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Spanish at the G-8 Summit, Rusutsu, Japan, July 10, 2008

"Should the Iranian regime-do they have the sovereign right to have civilian nuclear power? So, like, if I were you, that's what I'd ask me. And the answer is, yes, they do." --George W. Bush, talking to reporters in Washington, D.C., July 2, 2008

"But oftentimes I'm asked: Why? Why do you care what happens outside of America?" --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., June 26,2008

"And I, unfortunately, have been to too many disasters as president." --George W. Bush, discussing flooding in the Midwest, Washington, D.C., June 17, 2008

"One of the things important about history is to remember the true history." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., June 6, 2008

"We got plenty of money in Washington. What we need is more priority." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., June 2, 2008

"And so the fact that they purchased the machine meant somebody had to make the machine. And when somebody makes a machine, it means there's jobs at the machine-making place." --George W. Bush, Mesa, Arizona, May 27, 2008

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., May 13, 2008

Quote

Talking about Bush's golf claim angers veterans | World news | The Guardian
George Bush has angered US war veterans by declaring that out of solidarity with those who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq he decided to make his own sacrifice: giving up golf.

  

"How can you possibly have an international agreement that's effective unless countries like China and India are not full participants?" --George W. Bush, Camp David, April 19, 2008

"Oftentimes people ask me, 'Why is it that you're so focused on helping the hungry and diseased in strange parts of the world?'" --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 18, 2008

"So long as I'm the president, my measure of success is victory -- and success." --George W. Bush, on Iraq, Washington, D.C., April 17, 2008

"A lot of times in politics you have people look you in the eye and tell you what's not on their mind." --George W. Bush, Sochi, Russia, April 6, 2008

"Wait a minute. What did you just say? You're predicting $4-a-gallon gas? ... That's interesting. I hadn't heard that." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Feb. 28, 2008

"I'm oftentimes asked, What difference does it make to America if people are dying of malaria in a place like Ghana? It means a lot. It means a lot morally, it means a lot from a -- it's in our national interest." --George W. Bush, Accra, Ghana, Feb. 20, 2008

"There is no doubt in my mind when history was written, the final page will say: Victory was achieved by the United States of America for the good of the world." --George W. Bush, addressing U.S. troops at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, Jan. 12, 2008

"I can press when there needs to be pressed; I can hold hands when there needs to be -- hold hands." --George W. Bush, on how he can contribute to the Middle East peace process, Washington, D.C., Jan. 4, 2008

Wow! If you have Silverlight installed then Worldwide Telescope will now work in IE 8 (and whatever else you have Silverlight installed in) without having to install the binary! Very nice! I’ve been using this for a while, but I had to install it. This is great! So even our Mac using friends can enjoy this fine software.

Click on this link to try it out!  http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/

Use the number pad “+“ and “-“ to zoom in and out. Drag the mouse to move the through the sky. Hold the “cntl” key while dragging to rotate. And shift click objects to get details. Use the “Esc” key to escape or get out of something. I haven’t figured out how to orbit yet. But, once I do, I’ll update here. Try the tours too. There great!

I am of the opinion that many people don’t fully use the Windows Live “More” menu. Several of the options on it appear to reproduce the functions available on the left hand side of your Profile page as shown below. This may cause some to conclude they are the same. The truth is, these are quite different.

Here is a simple guide to finding all the comments, notes, guestbook entries, file comments, shared favorite comments and the like. And this will all be pretty much in the same place. Just follow the pictures.

First, from anywhere in Windows Live you can access the “More” menu:

You’ve probably been here before to get to your calendar or to any groups you belong to. Groups is the middle selection above. If you haven’t noticed, it’s now enhanced with group updates. Any group you belong to will show its updates (from others) on the page from “More>Groups” and allow you to go to your group. It’s a very handy addition to Windows Live.

The other two options open summary pages for either SkyDrive or Spaces. SkyDrive is where your photos, shared files and shared favorites live. Your synced personal (private) favorites are also located here. And Spaces is where your customized page is which can include your blog – or your blog can be on its own page.

The thing is, all these things can have comments. And keeping track of these comments can be difficult if you don’t know where to look. Many people spend a lot of time jumping around from one area to another to find new their comments, and some invariably get lost or go unnoticed. 

So, click on “SkyDrive” from the menu shown above. A page like the one below will open:

This page tells you about recent activities on your SkyDrive as well as the activities of all the other SkyDrives on your network. Let’s now click on “Recent comments” to open the page shown below:

Here you’ll see a summary of comments on all the files stored in your SkyDrive. I sometimes upload a pdf of a web page or some other document here. This allows others to read it and comment on it almost like it was in a blog by itself. But these comments can be overlooked if you’re not careful. Also note the “View:File comments” link above. We’ll come back to this shortly.

Had you clicked on “Spaces” instead of “SkyDrive” you would see a page similar to this one:

And it has a “Recent comments” too. If you click on it, then a page like the one below opens:

And this page gives comments from each of your blogs and your Guestbook. But the real trick is clicking that link I pointed out before. Clicking the link for “View:Spaces comments” or “View:Files comments” opens a menu.

This menu is comment central. From here you can select which comments you want to see. You can jump back and forth without having to drill down the menus to get to this page. This is a direct access link to each areas comments pages.

Here is the menu:

From here you can select any of these four options, and the comments you’ll see will be specific to this area of the application. In each section, if there are more comments than room to display them then a direct link to where all the comments are is provided. If you select the “All comments and notes” then you get just that. Everything that was recently commented on appears on this page in chronological order of the most recently commented on items and their comments also in chronological order. You can select the link again to change to a different area to filter the comments. Very handy!

So, now you can find all your comments no matter where they’re buried!

The Ultimate and Home Premium versions of Vista include Media Center DVR (digital video recorder) software. If you have one of these versions, then you can add a TV tuner card or two to your computer and turn it into a TiVo-esque DVR device. And if you have a TiVo  too, lucky you, then they can work together.

If you have a Media Center computer, it isn’t absolutely necessary to add a TV tuner card to your computer to enjoy all the features this software has to offer. For example, Media Center also allows your to play DVD’s on your computer without the need to buy additional expensive DVD software. And it does a great job of this as well. If you connect your Media Center directly to a large screen TV, then the DVD playback function gives you all the options for scaling the picture that you would get with a regular Media Center TV recording.

For example, there is a normal playback mode in which a standard definition 4:3 recording will have two black bars on the left and right side on a 16:9 display, or you can zoom into the picture maintaining the proper ratio of the image, but at the expense of losing some of the top and bottom of the picture, another zoom that stretches the image from the left to right but not top to bottom which tends to make thing look thicker but is less distracting than the black bars on the side and doesn’t lose any of the picture, and finally a panorama mode which also stretches the image left to right  to fill the screen, but the stretch is concentrated on the left and right edges of the screen instead of uniformly across the picture leaving the center unstretched. This fourth mode is my favorite way to watch DVD’s and tiVo recordings as it doesn’t distort the center of the picture which tends to be where the action is and make the center subjects face look fat. This mode is almost unnoticeable and gives great results for most standard definition recordings.

This fourth mode is the inspiration for this post, but all the other modes can be applied for different results as well. You’ll have to decide what you like for each case. But by using Media Center you’ll have the ability to make this choice. Other playback methods, such as through the ubiquitous Windows Media Player, don’t offer any choices in this area. This is the only choice you’ll get for non Media Center computers for TiVo playback.

Some lucky people will also have TiVo’s and use those as well as Media Center. And that’s OK. I am a TiVotee myself. I own both a series 2 and a Series 3 TiVo. But I love both my Media Center and my TiVos. There’s nothing like having the best of both worlds. So this post is primarily for these TiVo people who also own a Media Center computer. But the techniques probably apply to other DVR software as well. For example, I believe what is discussed here will also work for Beyond TV, but I haven’t tried it, and the file types for Beyond TV are different.

So if you have a TiVo, then you probably know about the TiVoToGo software, and how it can transfer some programming from the TiVo to your computer. This is ideal for laptop users. They can tranfer TV shows to it and watch them later while traveling or where ever or transfer them for longer term storage.

This software is necessary because TiVo recordings are encrypted, and the TiVo Desktop installs the decrypting codecs on your system allowing you to watch the recordings, and it allows your TiVo to network with your TiVo Desktop. It must be installed for this to work.

When you play a TiVo recording back on your computer it plays in the Media Player by default and only in the aspect ratio it was recorded. This is typically the 4:3 standard definition ratio which doesn’t use the whole 16:9 wide screen TV area. All these recordings have a file type of “.TiVo”, which is associated with Media Player, and are usually stored all in the same default folder unless you change these settings. But they can be stored anywhere. In fact, individual files can be moved wherever you like.

So, here’s the deal. If you play the copied content on your computer via the TiVo Desktop application, you’ll watch it in Media Player by default. BORING! Instead try this…

In the main TiVo Desktop screen for TiVo Recordings there is either a link or a button at the bottom of the application that tells you where your recordings are stored. Here is an example:

If you click this link then your “My TiVo Recordings” folder will open. If you right click on any of these recordings in this folder and select “Open With” another menu will fly out. On this menu other options for playback will be available. Two that should be available are “Media Center” and “Windows Media Player.” The “Media Player” option is the likely default program which will open when you play a video from the TiVo Desktop application.

However, if you select “Choose Default Program…” from the “Open With” menu as shown here:

Then you can change this behavior. After you click on the “Choose Default Program…” you will see a dialog box like this:

Click to select “Media Center” if shown. If it’s not shown, then click on the “Other Programs” drop down arrow and find it. Make sure that “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” is checked. Then click on the OK button.

From now on, when you open a TiVo recording from either the TiVo Desktop application or any other direct means, it will open in Media Center.

And now, while in media center, right click on the image (or use your remote’s “info” button) to bring up the menus shown. Select “Zoom” repeatedly until the zoom “4” is shown. This is the panorama mode. And you’re good to go! TiVoToGo that is!

If the programming is already formatted for a 16:9 display then any of the zoom functions may work well or may not be required at all. Try them all and decide which is best for yourself for the particular recording.

Note that you can add additional folders to your Media Center Library by adding another folder for Media Center to watch. Maybe I’ll go into the details of this in a later post, but for now just know that you can add your “My TiVo Recordings” folder to your Media Center Library and watch TiVo recordings directly from Media Center without first going through the TiVo Desktop application. Whenever a new recording is copied from your TiVo to your TiVo Desktop it automatically appears in your Media Center Library ready to go.

Also note that these instructions are for Vista systems. If you are using a Windows XP Media Center Edition then adjust them accordingly.

So, now you can watch your TiVo Desktop recordings in all your Media Center splendor.  But the question I can’t answer is… Can TiVo Desktop recordings be streamed via a Media Center extender such as an Xbox? I don’t have one. So, maybe someone else can answer this question for me.

Science Friday brings you science fair project for the recession: combine cornstarch and water and make a fluid with bizarre physical properties, on the cheap. Physicists Robert Deegan, of the University of Michigan, and Harry Swinney, of the University of Texas at Austin, explain why the mixture comes to life under the right conditions.

Newest Olympic Sport?

They filled a pool with a mix of cornstarch and water made on a concrete mixer truck. It becomes a non-newtonian fluid. When stress is applied to the liquid it exhibits properties of a solid.

Walking on the water?

Walking on water surely make things interesting, and when you do, it would be a miracle. Then the mythbusters surely tried that idea, but it was "busted". One experiment was done when Adam successfully walk on it. By mixing 200 gallons of water with 1000 pounds of corn starch - yes corn starch. But, surely its not 100% water.

 I know I'm searching for something, Something so undefined, That it can only be seen, By the eyes of the blind, In the middle of the night.

Groups using "search terms domain:groups.live.com"

Search for Groups using

     "search terms site:groups.live.com"

Spaces using

     "search terms site:spaces.live.com"

Profiles using

     "search terms site:profiles.live.com"

Events using

     "search terms site:events.live.com"

Documents, Photos and Albums using

     "search terms site:skydrive.live.com"

QnA using
     "search terms site:qna.live.com"

plus more... Leave the quotes off these. These searches are what’s between the quotes. And quotes in a search have special meanings.

For the entire Live.com domain:

    "windows 7" site:live.com 

 

- or restricted to QnA -

     "windows 7" site:qna.live.com 

 

Note: Keep the quotes on this search as you want to find both the word "windows" followed by a number "7" and in that order. Quotes mean to use it as it is between the quote, in order, and won't find entries that have either the word "windows" or the number "7" but not both. For example, the search won't return "Windows Vista." You want both "Windows" and "7" and in that order.

search terms from:user@something.com

 

For example type in the “search your e-mail” box:     “ from:windowslive” without the quotes, and you’ll probably get a list of all the messages that Windows Live sends you about users wanting to join your network, and private message alerts, etc. Well, if you haven’t deleted them. I know I get them! Note that the example is partial and not a full email address. This is OK.

technogran site:spaces.live.com   

( Technogran is the owner of LiveSoapBox)

It’s official. I am now a twitterhead (ab)user, and I’m a ditz. (My twitter user ID is mjflynt.)

Some time ago I posted a blog titled “35 things I would Live about you!” which was a list of 35 things I would like to see added to Windows Live. Here is item number 24:

Web activities currently have a setting "Show updates in the what's new list," and I would like to see this broken into two parts. First would be "Show updates in the what's new with my network list," and the second "Show updates in the what's new with me list." Having this would give a finer grade of control as to what appears on my Profile page and what appears on your Home page. This would allow people who would like to (ab)use twitter (or other things like FriendFeed :) ) to not advertise their updates to everyone on there network but yet still have this information on their own profile page and possibly, maybe, hopefully on its own tab. So, some of us could have our own profile filled with gazillions of tweets but not blitz our network neighbors with updates. Anyone else interested in my tweets could come to my profile to see them. And then I could turn FriendFeed back on to display on just my profile!! And Live would be so good yet again!

In my “FriendFeed is your Friend”  post, I described a method to add a collection of feed updates to your “What’s new” feed. After discovering that I was really spamming everyone with stuff many didn’t want to see, I decided that I would still like to see it. So, I thought that having an option to show on my “What’s new” but not on yours (on your homepage) would be a great idea. And I thought that it could apply to twitter too. Well, that option is there - already.

But the instructions I gave on how to do set the Web Activity up were precisely what you shouldn’t do to accomplish this. Amazingly, no one caught me and corrected it. Consequently, I turned FriendFeed off because it was “spamming” my “What’s new.” Nobody, including me, liked it.

I discovered this “fix” when adding twitter to my Live Profile just today. I hadn’t thought about Web Activities for awhile, and so I was reinventing the set up for myself. And, all at once, I realized that the Windows Live team already added feature request number 24, and the manner in which it is implemented is superior to my suggestion and more consistent with the look and feel of Windows Live. And they did it before I even asked for it! I love it when designers are psychic. Well, they still could add the tabs – hint – hint!!

My instructions for FriendFeed made a faulty assumption that you would want everyone to see your updates. This might be true for some people with small networks. So, I suggested that you select “Everyone” in the “Share with” for the Web Activity for custom blog.  The truth of the matter is, you can narrow the advertisement's scope down a lot. If you have a large network you probably wouldn’t want to update everyone with this Web Activity. As for me, I now have mine set to “Just me.” So now I can track a lot of interesting things through this one Web Activity, and I don’t have to bother any of you at all.

How does this apply to twitter? Well, I certainly know how much I disliked having my “What’s new” feed filled to overflow with one sided messages that made no sense to me. And I know many people have turned the twitter Web Activity off completely to hide these updates. But that’s not an option for me. I actually find some of them interesting and valuable. Now that I’m guilty too, I am limiting the scope of who will see my twitters. I really don’t want to be a hypocritical twitter (ab)user.

So, now that I tweet, I am subjecting (for now) some of my friends to my twitterings. But, I am not subjecting my entire network to them. I am only sharing them with other fellow twitterers. I have created a special category in Person called “twitter buddies.” This category is already tied to the permissions of the twitter Web Activity. All I have to do is add you to that category, and you’ll see my tweets! And if you’re not in it you won’t.

Oh, I am loosely using the term “twitterhead” to mean anyone who uses twitter. Not necessarily for someone who lives for it. I myself have just started using it, and I may decide that my original assumptions about it are correct. We’ll save that for another post.