All platforms: A new version of the most popular media converter for Lifehacker readers, Handbrake, adds several useful features like universal input (it's not just for DVDs any more), better video quality, and now integration with VLC to do DVD decryption. Download version 0.9.3 and see the full release notes here. [via]
Saturday, November 29, 2008
HandBrake Media Converter Gets Even Better
Monday, November 24, 2008
Lazarus Form Recovery Saves Web Page Form Data
Firefox only: At one point or another, every power surfer has filled out a long web page form, then lost all the time and effort when Firefox crashed before you could submit it. The Lazarus Form Recovery add-on is out to keep that from ever happening. Each time you fill out a web page form (whether it's name and address or blog comment), the Form Recovery extension auto-saves the information and makes recovering or re-entering it a one-click deal. With Lazarus installed (Lazarus rose from the dead—get it?), after you've filled in a web page form, right-click inside a text box to access the "Recover form" menu item and re-enter lost text. Firefox has gotten a lot better about re-filling in form data after a crash or accidental page departure, but Lazarus offers extra insurance. Lazarus is a free download which works with Firefox. Thanks, Shane!
Can I Change the Default Wallpaper Directory in Windows?
Dear Lifehacker,
I always thought it was ridiculous and dangerous that Windows puts wallpapers mixed in with essential system files in the Windows folder. Is there a way or program to point the Display Properties -> Desktop tab to another folder? It would be nice if it then allowed me to organize it with sub-folders.
Sincerely,
Organized Papers
Dear Organized Papers,
Agreed. Now that the majority of people have expanded their wallpaper repertoire beyond the basic wallpapers included in the default Windows install, it would be a handy feature to be able to shift the default wallpaper directory. Never fear though, your new directory is a mere registry edit away! Courtesy of Windows customization blog Tweaking with Vishal, here is the simple edit you need to free your wallpapers from the /Windows/ directory:
1. Open regedit and goto:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion2. In right-side pane, you’ll see a string value “WallPaperDir“. Its default value will be:
%SystemRoot%\Web\WallpaperYou have to change it to your desired wallpaper directory path. Suppose your wallpapers are stored in
E:\Wallpapersdirectory, then set the value toE:\Wallpapers.
Choose your new directory and you're all set! When you pull up the wallpaper menu again, it will display all the wallpapers in the new folder. It won't show the wallpaper in the subfolders like you requested, but hitting the Browse button starts you in the root wallpaper directory with all the subfolders right there. If you'd like to spend less time fiddling with Windows and more time enjoying your wallpaper collection, you should check out some of the robust wallpaper management programs we've reviewed like John's Background Switcher or Wallpapers from MSN. Happy customizing!
Love and Productivity,
Lifehacker
QuoteURLText Copies Highlighted Text and Source URL
Firefox only: If you like to copy and paste snippets of web pages—but want to include the source URL and date and time in one shot—the QuoteURLText add-on's for you. Once installed, just select the relevant quote from a web page and press Ctrl+Shift+C (Win) or Command+Shift+C (Mac) and the selection will be copied along with the URL of the source page. Additional options allow you to include the time browsed and title of the page, as well. Advanced options let you refine the metadata added to the selection in the clipboard further. QuoteURLText is a free add-on download for Firefox browsers.
A Complete Guide to Playing Video Files On Your PS3, Xbox 360 or Wii
If you're here reading Gizmodo, there's a good chance you have a hard drive full of video somewhere. And you also probably have a PS3, Xbox 360 or Wii. If those two things aren't working together for you in beautiful symbiosis, allowing you to watch all of your downloaded or ripped video on your TV instead of hunched over a laptop screen, well, this is the guide for you.
Now there are two general strategies you can take: physically copying your files to a USB drive, memory card or CD/DVD, which is pretty straightforward, or streaming your video over the network, which is where things get more fun and interesting. So let's dive in.
First things first, codecs. Now that you're all learn-ed on the ways of video encoding thanks to Matt's Giz Explains from this week, the issue of codecs will make a lot more sense. Thankfully, it's not something you have to worry too much about here, because all three consoles can handle a large number of the codecs you will find commonly: AVI, MPEG (1, 2 and 4), H.264, DivX/XviD, and WMV—and if a particular format you want to play isn't supported, it's often possible to convert it to work on the fly. The PS3 also supports AVCHD, a format used by many HD camcorders. Not all formats are supported with every streaming method though, especially in the 360's case, which we'll get to in a second. Now, for getting all those files on the TV.
Note: if you need to re-encode a video in a different format because it won't play, nothing beats VLC's transcoding wizard. Here's a guide.
Xbox 360: Streaming (PC)
In typical Microsoft fashion, there are tons of different ways to pull of streaming your video to the Xbox 360—and the only one that's truly comprehensive, in our opinion, comes from a third party. TVersity is a free UPnP media server that can manage your video and music files anywhere on your PC and stream them out to your 360 over the network. It will also kindly transcode just about any video you can throw at it into a codec your console can definitely read. You might have to install some additional codec packs here and there for Windows but for the most part, you can forget about worrying about codecs with TVersity. This also allows TVersity to handle files not officially supported by the 360, like MKV containers.
1. Grab TVersity here and install it.
2. Click the giant plus sign in the top left corner to "Add Your Media Source" - namely, the folder on your PC with all of your videos.
3. Under advanced options, set your transcoding preferences: "When Needed" will make sure most all of your files play.
4. In the main TVersity menu, select "Start Sharing"
5. On the Xbox 360, TVersity will now appear as a source in the Media blade or under My Xbox -> Video Library in NXE.
The other three options via Microsoft's own various software solutions all have their own drawbacks, which we'll cover here briefly. Our advice? Use them only if you already use the Zune software, Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center to manage all of your video.
Windows Media Player 11: WMP 11 can stream out to the Xbox 360 pretty easily. Here is an in-depth guide. Drawbacks? Somewhat clunky format support. In our tests we could not stream Quicktime video at all, and had inconsistent experiences with MP4 files. MPEG-4 and H.264 support are technically supported via third-party WMP codec add-ons, but even with those, we still had trouble—MP4 files tended to play fine on the WMP 11 end, but not show up as browsable on the 360. Somewhat unbelievably, the Xbox 360 team actually recommends you manually rename your unsupported MPEG-4 and H.264 files, adding the ".avi" container extension to fool WMP into playing them. This worked occasionally, but not for every file and was generally inconsistent.
Zune Software 3.0: Zune offers a much nicer interface than WMP (Settings -> Sharing -> Add is the extent of the setup), and thankfully supports MPEG4 and H.264 much more consistently. Drawbacks? No DivX or Xvid support, which means a huge chunk of your Torrented video probably won't work.
Windows Media Center Extender: If you already have a Media Center setup honking on your network, there's a good chance you won't need this guide, but the Xbox 360 can of course stream your MCE content to your TV seamlessly (a complete guide is here). The interface is really fantastic. Drawbacks? The gimpiest codec support of the bunch: only MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and WMV are supported. So unless you're converting everything you have into those formats, you'll still need something like TVersity to play most files you'll find up for download.
So, in the end, TVersity wins hands down as the easiest and most elegant streaming setup for the 360. But do keep in mind—if you're playing a format that your Xbox can't handle (MKV being the most common of these you'll find), TVersity will have to transcode, which means you will lose a bit of quality.
Xbox 360: Streaming (Mac): UPnP support—the networking standard used by both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 in various flavors to play network-streamed video, music and photos—is not natively supported by OS X yet. And unfortunately, there isn't a stellar all-in-one free package like Windows' TVersity.
Nullriver, however, makes an incredibly slick piece of software called Connect360, which easily streams all of your iLife libraries or any folder full of video on your Mac to the 360. Unfortunately, it'll cost you $20. There is a free trial version that supposedly shuts off after 30 minutes of sharing, but sometimes it seems to forget and lets you play longer. But even so, $20 isn't bad for the convenience factor here. No transcoding, but it will handle every codec the console itself can play back.
1. Download and install the Connect360 preference pane.
2. In System Preferences, start up Connect360 sharing. Here you can also add folders for more sharing.
3. Access the Connect360 source on your Xbox in the usual way. Done.
Xbox 360: Physical Media
1. If streaming isn't for you, and you don't mind hauling a storage device back and forth between your computer and Xbox, then this is super easy: Insert Flash disk/USB/CD/DVD and browse it with the Media blade or the Video Library section of NXE (under "My Xbox"). Enjoy.
Playstation 3: Streaming (PC)
TVersity: Again, Tversity is your friend. It works just as well for the PS3 as it does for Xbox 360 (see above for setup).
1. With Tversity set up and sharing turned on, just browse to COMPUTERNAME: TVersity in the XMB and you'll see a listing of all your shared files.
Windows Media Player 11: Just like for Xbox 360, you can use WMP11's built-in DLNA/UPnP serving capabilities to stream to the PS3, too—but with the same codec funkiness as noted above.
1. In the Media Sharing preference box with your PS3 powered on and connected to the network, select "Unknown Device"—that's your PS3.
2. Your library should now show up in XMB.
Playstation 3: Streaming (MAC)
Mac: Nullriver didn't just hook up 360 owners—Media Link is the version especially for PS3. It costs 20 bucks, but will give you totally seamless and painless streaming of all of your iLife libraries (photos and music too) as well as files in any folder you can access with your Mac, whether it's on a network or local.
1. Operation is just like Connect360—with sharing enabled in the Media Link preference pane, just browse through all your files under the "Media Link" source in XMB.
Playstation 3: Physical Media
1. Easy as pie. If you're using a USB flash or hard disc or an SD or CF card, just dump all of your videos into a folder named VIDEO on the root of the drive and they'll show up automatically in the XMB.
2. You can also browse the entire drive or disc by pressing triangle and choosing "Display All" to find videos that aren't in the VIDEO folder.
Wii: Physical Media
For playing video on your Wii, physical media is the way to go, which is easy to pull off with some homebrew hacking. There are lots of services that will transcode your video and ouput it in a Flash player that you can view through the Wii's Opera browser (like Orb), but you'll take a hit quality-wise and it's not as easy as just playing the source files directly with Mplayer.
1. Install the Homebrew Channel and Mplayer on your Wii. We've got you covered here with our complete Wii homebrew guide—but hopefully you haven't installed the latest System Menu update. In that case, you'll have to wait for a workaround, but it probably won't be long.
2. Install Mplayer via the Homebrew Browser (also covered in our guide).
3. Now, you can use Mplayer to play files off or even an attached USB drive (as long as its formatted in FAT16 or FAT32, which most are). The interface is not nearly as nice, but it gets the job done.
4. Mplayer for the Wii covers a ton of codecs, but sadly, the Wii's processor chokes on HD content. If you've got HD files, you'll need to transcode them into a lower resolution with VLC.
And that's about it. Now, no more huddling around your laptop screen or fiddling with TV and audio-out cables. Welcome to the good life.
Additional reporting and testing by Seung Lee. See more Giz how-to guides here. And as always, if you have anything to add to our findings, please let us know in the comments.
Mmm Free Declutters Busy Context Menus
Windows XP only: When you right-click on your desktop or on a file, do you have to go through two dozen useless menu items before you hit the one you want? Free utility Mmm offers an easy interface for hiding and organizing context menu items—into a "Rarely used" subfolder, for example. With Mmm running, hit the colored button it adds to the top left of the menu to see the configuration area, shown here. Check out the before and after photos of my context menu using Mmm.
Before:
After:
Recently, the How-To Geek explained how to clean up your right-click menu by editing the Windows registry—a fine option for super-savvy users who don't want to run yet another utility to achieve the same end. If messing with your registry isn't your bag, previously mentioned FileMenu Tools and ShellExView also get the job done. Mmm Free is a free download for Windows XP only; Mmm+ offers more options for $9.99. Thanks, gravi_t!
Friday, November 21, 2008
SearchWiki: make search your own
Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? Maybe you're an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it's not there at all and you'd like to add it. Or maybe you'd like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. Starting today you can do all this and tailor Google search results to best meet your needs.
Today we're launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don't feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.
The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link.
Watch our lead engineer, Amay, demonstrate a few ways to use SearchWiki in this short video:
This new feature is an example of how search is becoming increasingly dynamic, giving people tools that make search even more useful to them in their daily lives. We have been testing bits and pieces of SearchWiki for some time through live experiments, and we incorporated much of our learnings into this release. We are constantly striving to improve our users' search experience, and this is yet another step along the way.
Posted by Cedric Dupont, Product Manager, and Corin Anderson, Software Engineer
Today we're launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don't feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.
The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link.
Watch our lead engineer, Amay, demonstrate a few ways to use SearchWiki in this short video:
This new feature is an example of how search is becoming increasingly dynamic, giving people tools that make search even more useful to them in their daily lives. We have been testing bits and pieces of SearchWiki for some time through live experiments, and we incorporated much of our learnings into this release. We are constantly striving to improve our users' search experience, and this is yet another step along the way.
Posted by Cedric Dupont, Product Manager, and Corin Anderson, Software Engineer
Forkbombs and Other Things Not to Type in Terminals
"Tell the noob to type rm -rf /," the troll types to his friend in IRC before you're a series of lulz after a friendly call for Linux tech support help turns into a formatted hard drive. If you don't know what a forkbomb is or what it looks like you might want to check this list of seven commands that could prove lethal if typed into a command line shell. If you're making the plunge into operating systems like Ubuntu but are worried about what not to do, check it out. Any horror stories you readers might want to pass along to save someone else a headache down the line? Photo by zakwitnij
Thursday, November 20, 2008
How to Declutter Your Windows Context Menu
Windows tip: Whether you use them or not, many applications install superfluous entries to your Windows right-click context menu resulting in a cluttered mess. The How-To Geek weblog details how to clean up your messy Windows context menu using a variety of methods, from manual registry hacks to using the simple, previously mentioned ShellExView. If you steer clear of the right-click because it's become such a cluttered mess, do yourself a favor by cleaning it and customizing it to fit your needs.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Tidy Favorites Is a Customizable Thumbnail Homepage
Windows only: Web browser plug-in Tidy Favorites creates a customizable bookmarks start page for Firefox and Internet Explorer complete with thumbnail previews. We've seen several Firefox extensions covering similar ground before—most notably previously mentioned Fast Dial and Speed Dial—but Tidy favorites adds a few more ideas to the thumbnail start page. For example, Tidy Favorites lets you customize each thumbnail individually, so you can independently resize different thumbnails or zoom in and out on a page. You can also create different tabs and folders for bookmarks, or place any bookmark in the Tidy Favorites stack. Be sure to check out the demo on the homepage for a closer look at how your Tidy Favorites bookmarks can be customized. Tidy Favorites is a free download (a Pro version is available, but the free version is functionally complete), Windows only, works with Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you want to take your Tidy Favorites bookmarks with you, try installing Tidy Favorites in portable mode to your thumb drive.
Fashion Your Firefox Creates Quick, Custom Extension Packs to Fit Your Tastes
Mozilla is looking to streamline the process of multiple extension installation with a new webapp called Fashion Your Firefox. In a nutshell, Fashion Your Firefox identifies a handful of browsing types, from the "Finder and Seeker" ("I want to make finding information on the Web simpler and more relevant to me.") to the Digital Pack Rat ("I want a hassle-free way to keep track of my favorite sites, bookmarks, blogs and, well, everything!"), then suggests popular extensions for each type of user. Just click through each list of suggestions, cherry pick the extensions you're interested in, and then click Install my Add-Ons.
Fashion My Firefox confirms your choices, then downloads and installs the lot of them in one fell swoop. Granted, you probably have a pretty good handle on what extensions you want and need to install to get things done, but Fashion My Firefox is perfect for someone new to Firefox and the whole idea of extensions. As for you—the add-on junkie—Fashion Your Firefox could still uncover some hidden gems you haven't tried. The webapp is a little limited relative to the giant selection of great extensions available, so we'd love to see Mozilla run with this idea and develop it even further.Fashion Your Firefox
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Create a Live-Booting XP CD or DVD
The creators of the previously mentioned, versatile CD/DVD burning tool CDBurnerXP have posted a guide in their forums to using the program to create a live-booting Windows XP (or 2000/2003) disc. It's a multi-step process that involves a lot of settings to tweak, but at the end you should have a Windows desktop that loads straight from the boot. If you're going to roll your own live-boot XP, you might want to get familiar with trimming it down to the bare essentials for faster loads, or slipstreaming your installation to avoid Windows Update nags that will, frankly, never go away. I haven't given it a thorough test yet, but online forum users seem to give it the thumbs up. Let us know your experience with live-booting XP in the comments.Creating bootable Windows 2000/XP/2003 Disc (CDBurnerXP 3) [via Confessions of a Freeware Junkie (Delicious)]
Get 3D Compositing Effects in Linux Without Compiz
If you'd like to use desktop apps or features that require a 3-D compositing manager but lack the hardware power (or patience) to enable Compiz effects, the Tombuntu blog points out that the standard Metacity window manager can fit the bill. As noted, enabling metacity's compositing gives you just a few effects—mostly window previews on Alt+Tab switching, drop shadows, and window movement smoothing—and relies only on the CPU for power, so nearly any graphics card can use apps like the OS X-style Avant Window Navigator. To enable Metacity's built-in composite manager on most any modern GNOME-based Linux distro, open the gconf-editor tool (by launching with Alt+F2 or through a terminal), head to apps->metacity->general, and enable the "compositing_manager" option. Hit the link below for a command line switch you can script or shortcut to turn compositing on and off.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Track Down Startup Programs and Processes with a Comprehensive Guide
If you're stumped trying to figure out where a rogue background process on your Windows system came from, and what it does, the Los Angeles Free-Net's web site will likely have your answer. On a page meant to help volunteer mentors of the non-profit ISP, there's seriously comprehensive list of programs and processes, easily searched with a Control-F text find. It's based on the well-linked PacMan's list, and combined with the more system-based Process Library database, there's not a listing in Task Manager that can't be identified and dealt with swiftly. For a guide to getting built-in process lookups and more details on what your system's running, try our guide to reclaiming memory by mastering Windows' task manager. Thanks, kgeissler!.Startup Programs and Executables Listing [The Los Angeles Free-Net]
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Quantum Of So What?
Call it truth in advertising. The new James Bond movie Quantum Of Solace has a title that's vaguely science fiction-y and obscure. And the movie itself is sorta science fiction-y and really confusing. The science, in this case, being geo-engineering, the practice of making massive changes to the planet to affect our environment. The movie has something grand to say about natural resources and the obsolescence of the New World Order, but it swallows its tongue. Spoiler alert!
So it's really hard to talk about Quantum Of Solace as having any kind of a story, because it's so choppily edited that stuff just sort of happens most of the time. Someone obviously told director Mark Forster that a good action movie should be so choppy that adrenaline trumps logic or even being able to tell what's happening. But you can sort of glean that there's a story buried in all the jump cuts.
The giant irony in Quantum Of Solace is that all of the governments, and their spooks, are still thinking of oil as the world's most valuable resource. They're still in their 1990s mindset, going to war over oil and trying to control countries that have untapped petroleum deposits. There are a bunch of conversations about who controls Russia's oil, what's happening in the Middle East, etc. So when James Bond overhears our new villain Dominic Greene (who's sort of a smarmy Al Gore-type environmentalist) talking about pipelines and controlling the most precious resource in Bolivia, he assumes Greene means oil. So do his bosses.
This is what Greene and his shadowy organization Quantum are counting on. He makes a deal with the CIA: Greene will organize a coup in Bolivia, and the U.S. gets all of the country's oil deposits. But the natural resource that Greene really means to control is water, which is going to be much more valuable than oil soon. He's been damming all of the underground water flows and creating a massive underground reservoir underneath an apparently barren patch of land that he'll own after the coup.
The giant reveal of Greene's underground damming system could not be less dramatic. Bond and his sidekick Camille crash in the desert and stumble underground, then they find some kind of underground lake and mumble about damming. Meanwhile, we see shots of poor Bolivian people lining up to get water from a well or cistern and finding no water there. The poor Bolivian babies must go thirsty because of Greene, that shady pseudo-environmentalist.
This is our new new world order, apparently. Instead of fighting brutal wars over oil, we'll fight them over water. And instead of blowing the poor up, we'll parch them.
The movie makes a stab at driving this home in various ways, by having Greene give a speech about the world's aerable land that's being irreversibly destroyed every year, and by having the CIA agents debate over whether it's safe to drink the bottled water in Bolivia. But it's way too abstract an idea for an action movie.
Actually, here's how old-school Bond would have done it. You would have had a bombastic villain in a crazy tunic, and he would have built a massive facility stocked with tons of armed guards and maybe some robots. And a big guy with weird teeth. The facility would have been some kind of huge pumping station that siphons off the world's water and stores it in massive tanks, so Bomberg can blackmail the world. And Bond would have discovered this base and then led a crack assault team there, blowing shit up good in a giant fight scene.
Instead, the movie ends with Greene's pet dictator becoming the new leader of Bolivia, and Greene then demands to become the new water utility for the country, at an exorbitant rate. Then Bond shows up and blows up the hotel where they're meeting, which is conveniently built on top of a huge stash of super-flammable fuel cells.
That's the thing about Quantum — it's not afraid to be cartoony. It includes one CIA guy who's literally a cartoon of the callous American imperialist, with our old pal Felix Leiter playing the role of the good CIA guy by contrast. The Latin American general dictator guy is a total cartoon character. The scenes of everybody saying Bond has gone rogue for no particular reason are super cheesy.
But when it comes to having a larger than life main villain, the movie just sort of craps out. At the end, when Bond is having his final battle with Greene, it felt like it should be the end of the second act, before Bond goes on to fight the real bad guy. (Which actually is probably the third movie in the Daniel Craig Bond trilogy.)
Bottom line: At some point during the screenwriting and editing process, Quantum Of Solace had something to say about geopolitics and the mad science of the new environmental dystopia. But you're hard-pressed to get that out of the actual movie as it stands. Meanwhile, this is nowhere near as ground-breaking a film as Casino Royale, which really felt like a massive reinvention of the Bond franchise. Quantum is more like a standard-issue action movie — with a few really great set pieces — which you'll forget the details of five minutes after you leave the theater.
Friday, November 14, 2008
The Wii Fit Review: Six Months Later
I've used Wii Fit exactly 6 months. Since the review, I didn't use it every day, or even every week, but since the very first time the game told me I was fat, it never really left my mind. Every meal, every time I passed on exercise to eat a little more ice cream, every time I exercised but stopped a little early, I heard those words resonating through the bit of side blubber on my sleight frame: "You're Overweight!"
I hate Wii fit so much. Sure, it indirectly helped me lose 10 pounds, but I f'ing hate it.
Bear with me on this long post with minimal mention of the game or hardware — the game is not what will make you fit.
Over a few sessions of playing the game, I started what would eventually be, more or less, the kind of body obsession assumed normal for performance athletes and underwear models, coupled with the kind of inferiority complex that one gets when you can't beat a video game, coupled with the resentment one builds towards machines that don't do your meatbot bidding. I mean, I could have dismissed the measurement tell me I was fat — BMI (Body Mass Index) is a crude stat based on height and weight that can't tell a fat person from a really really muscular medium husky guy. The problem is, Wii fit doesn't give a crap about your excuses or perceptions either. It assumed I really wasn't that muscular short guy, it assumed I was a medium husky with a little belly. And it was right.
I did all the exercises, focusing on the harder ones like the pushup and plank exercises, jackknives, the shadow boxing and running in place for sessions, usually for over 45 minutes. But then I got bored of EVERYTHING IN the game and couldn't stand to do more than one or two at a time. And I was not losing weight. I was exercising, it seemed, just enough to stimulate my appetite and give me justification for eating more, and so I was actually gaining weight. The in game scale told me as much.
When you're stuck on a level in a video game, some people look at strategy guides or cheats. The Wii Fit equivalent of this, knowing I was not getting the weaponry to obliterate my chub in the game, was to cheat by resorting to outside exercises like hitting the weights, and bicycling, running and hitting the rowing machine, my favorite for quick nearly full body exercises. This helped, and Wii fit's seemingly lame exercises were great setup in developing the necessary support muscles from head to toe to support rudimentary training — it was like physical therapy for computer nerds about to enter real sporting tasks.
Summer ended. Snowboarding season was approaching, and I knew I wanted to be lighter on my feet this year. It was great to have a goal outside of the game's mere quest for proper height to weight ratio.
But I was still not losing weight and eventually hit 170 pounds. Anyone who runs on a treadmill with a kcalorie calculator realizes that you can burn only a quarter of a cheeseburger's worth of energy in a 15 minute run, enough to go about 2 miles. Most nerds do not run this much in a day. Wii fit's charts, again, reflected the truth. Even though I was exercising, I was exercising semi regularly, but it was not denting my calorie intake. Without those charts, I would have been satisfied, but instead, Wii fit asked me "why do you think you're gaining weight?" and gave me a set of multiple choices. I choose overeating.
Let me tell you something about eating in my family. It was always my job, as directed by all grandparents, to finish not only everything on my plate, but everything on the entire table. One day, staring at a place of creamy French food, full after the first 3 bites, and thinking about what Wii fit was telling me, and how far my goals were, I realized that I had to change. I felt a bit guilty, but I knew that where my family would disapprove, Wii Fit would make up for it. And sure enough, the charts showed my weight was dropping. First I was below 170, then 165, and then 161. Miraculously, this happened without the pain of extreme exercise and without the pain of extreme dieting. I lost about 2 pounds a week, more or less. I never realized this is all it would take.
Checking the calendar, I had one day left til my 6th month of Wii Fit would end. And my BMI had dropped from 26.5 to a low of 25.01. If I lost another pound, the game would crown me fit.
Then, work got stressful, with this economy. I eat when I'm stressed. So, I ate some greasy Chinese food. And the next day at lunch, I had a cheeseburger. I just couldn't resist and I didn't know if I had blown my chances or not at finding acceptance from this stupid game. I thought that I could keep from overeating, something I'd been practicing for 31 years, forever, but the binge made me realize it would never be easy.
The next day, I got on the balance board and took a test. I have to admit, I took my shorts off for the competitive advantage, but I didn't expect to make it: I scored a 24.91, low enough at 158 pounds for Wii Fit to declare me normal even with my shorts on. I learned a new lesson, a few days of binging cannot overcome weeks of discipline.
And then, satisfied, I put the game away, ate some ice cream and booted up Fable II. As long as I never start Wii Fit again, I'll always and only remember the last kind word the game said to me, "You're Normal."
The game's core value isn't the exercises, which don't burn many calories unless you play them way beyond the point which a normal person will become bored by them. It's the fact that through charts and graphs and the in game coach, the game makes you think about your fitness and weight enough that you eventually realize you have no real excuse for being out of shape. And that you have no real choice but to go outside the game and figure out the answers for yourself in the real world.
Before:
After:
Hmmm...I kind of look the same.
Dealzmodo Hack: Get Some Use Out of Your Useless Old PC
The PC upgrade cycle is a brutal, senselessly fast one. Problem is, every upgrade doesn't mean disposal for your old PC — it means suffering a much more depressing fate in the back of a dark closet. It doesn't have to be that way. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of dusty towers yearning to breathe free — we've got some ideas.
It turns out that crappy old PCs are kind of a hot commodity nowadays; numerous software projects have succeeded in dressing up retired computers for purposes that often didn't even exist when they were first wheeled out of Circuit City. Here are a few suggestion for your dumpy old rigs:
Make a browsing machine for your grandmother and/or kitchen
The most straightforward, obvious use for an old PC is to wipe it clean and install a lightweight, browsing-oriented OS. With a modest PC, you can run the web-app-inclined gOS, which is essentially a modern, stripped down Linux distribution with a modern web browser and lots of links to cutting edge online services.
For older hardware, there's always Damn Small Linux. This superlight distribution will boot straight from a CD in about a minute on just about any box you can find — and it's fast. It'll make your Pentium feel like a Centrino 2. Until you try to play YouTube.
What it can salvage
gOS has room to breathe on just about anything from about 700mhz and 256mb of RAM. It's based on Ubuntu, so it's not the lightest distro, but it get good mileage out of your hard. DSL will run on anything, seriously.
How you do it
Download, burn to a CD and pop in in your computer. Both will ask you if you'd like to install or just run from a CD. Give them a try first, but you'll get your best results running from a hard drive.
Make a professional grade home router
For people who want to rule their home networks with an iron fist, Monowall a FreeBSD-based operating system that flips any PC with two network cards into a superrouter. If that sounds boring to you, I completely understand — but if full bandwidth monitoring and control, easy setup VPNs and a complementary web server with a remote interface perk your ears up, then you should give Monowall a shot. And step outside for a few minutes a day.
What it can salvage
Got a 486? It'll work, with 64MB of RAM. If your hardware is less than five years old, though, you should probably aim a little bit higher than making a Linksys out of it.
How you do it
Again, this is a wipe>install situation. m0n0wall is based on FreeBSD, which is based on Unix. None of that matters much, though — the m0n0wall team has designed a pretty straightforward installation routine.
Create a media center PC
There's no reason to spend money on a Windows Media Center PC if you've got an Athlon XP or Pentium 4 machine with an s-video port at hand, because you can do better with the free XBMC Live. Without modern hardware you won't have much luck playing back HD video, but virtually everything else — music, standard def video, streaming content — will play beautifully. The interface is very intuitive and gives a solid set-top box feel.
What it can salvage
Recently obsolete PCs. Don't expect to get a good experience on a 1GHz Athlon or Duron system, but anything newer can handle the load.
How you do it
Like most of the other hacks here, this one is a start-from-scratch project. If you want to run it within Windows or Linux there is also an option for that. The full, OS-replacement XBMC Live is ideal, however.
XBMC Live download
XBMC HowTo
Note: Boxee is a much more polished and feature-rich fork of XBMC that runs on Linux and OS X currently, but it's in a semi-public alpha. Use this link for Gizmodo readers to skip the line a bit and get invited into the alpha.
Run a server
An obvious use for old PCs for years, running a web server has now gotten easy enough for anyone. Apache is the de facto free web server, but it's a pain to set up. Enter XAMPP, a super-simplified click-and-run version of Apache. Forward a few ports on your router and get yourself a static DNS and you've got your very own website, with as much space as you've got on your hard drive and as much transfer as your ISP will let you get away with. If you have no need for a website, you can host your music, video and files for easy access from anywhere.
What it can salvage
Anything that can run Windows or Linux, gOS and Damn Small Linux included. You can reach waaaayy back into your closet with this one.
How you do it
It's a matter of running the installation routine on your chosen operating system — there's no drive wiping or OS installing involved.
Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.
Quantum of Solace Is the Perfect Bond Movie
The latest Bond is the perfect Bond Movie. Yes. It is. In fact, Quantum of Solace is not only the perfect Bond movie, it's the best Bond movie ever, period. Even surpassing Casino Royale—and I mean both the Craig's one and the original Peter Sellers, David Niven, and Woody Allen's delirium—which to me surpassed Connery's best (I know, sacrilege). It has everything a Bond film must have and more: Cars, cocktails, airplanes, boats, cocktails, smart hot girls, evil baddies, slimy baddie sidekicks, cocktails, and gadgets. Yes, the new Bond has some really cool gadgets in it. I don't mean cheesy stupid mini-rockets firing from the exhaust pipe of an Aston Martin or laser watches that can cut through steel and french lingerie. I mean cool, believable technology that integrates in the movie transparently [Warning: Some minor spoilers ahead].
To start with, real multitouch makes a stellar appearance with a giant Microsoft-Surface-style table which Judi Dench—the head of MI6—and other agents use with ease, simultaneously. In fact, the user interface on the table—albeit adorned for the required Hollywood eye candy—actually makes sense and is extremely attractive, gesture includes. Everything on it is doable with current technology, even the part in which they place a dollar bill and it gets automatically scanned and identified.
There's also the huge video wall at M's office. Unlike the multitouch surface, this is a CGI effect. However, with enough money and the use of transparent OLED technology and gesture recognition, the video wall is also perfectly doable. In fact, I saw something similar in my visit to Philips Labs last August, although that transparent video wall—a simulation of a glass storefront—used projection rather than OLEDs.
Only a couple of technologies were exaggerated. One was Bond's cellphone camera capabilities—with 007 taking pictures of faces with 3D depth of field information from a very long distance. The other was the speed of data transmission between the cellphone and MI6's headquarters. However, you can perfectly imagine that all that may be real in the military world and just not available to consumers, specially looking at some of the latest camera and communications research.
But what really makes this movie is not the technology. Yes, it plays an important role: Bond gets geolocation information on the baddies, and he uses his camera to get some of their pics, which then are analyzed and cross-referenced by MI6 databases. But none of it is a gimmick. There is no magic zippo lighter capable of launching kinetic rocket fire balls and save the day at the end of the movie. The technology in Quantum of Solace is realistic and it integrates naturally into the film, it flows with the plot.
What makes it the best Bond movie ever is what makes an action movie good. The script to start with. Serious, but also witty, and with the right amount of reality stretching. It even has an underlying social theme, which is interesting and relates to the current world's political climate. Marc Forster's direction makes you wish he directed Indiana Jones IV. His movie runs like clockwork, with the action scenes being masterfully choreographed and filmed, and painting a deeper, much more complex portrait of not only Bond, but also M, who gets a lot more presence in this one (and is Judy bloody Dench. I rest my case).
And then there is Bond himself. Daniel Craig really makes the movie work with his presence alone. He's a badass, but feels absolutely human. He has flair and a taste for luxury—wait until he arrives to Bolivia to see what I mean—but he gets gritty and dirty all the time. He could be a psychopath, but you can see that he has heart. He can seduce a women into bed like the best Connery would do, but you can actually see that he cares about her. You can feel that he is a hopeless romantic below the cold surface. A guy consumed by the need of vengeance and the contradiction of being betrayed by the love of his life. Yet, at the same time, he still loves her to the point of risking everything, even while she is dead.
And he likes cocktails.
Yes. Go. See it. Now.
WinAudit Creates Seriously Extensive System Profiles
Windows only: Free system profiler WinAudit is similar in some ways to the previously mentioned System Information for Windows, being a no-install-needed executable and offering exhaustive amounts of data on your system. What differentiates it are the graphed views of statistics like drive usage and installed software types, its easier-to-grasp interface (in one reviewer's opinion, anyways), and the fact that it doesn't reveal browser passwords, system keys, or other data you wouldn't want to accidentally sent to IT or a helpful friend. You choose the areas of your system you want profiled in the options, run the check, then print, save, or email the results. Helpful for anyone upgrading, troubleshooting, or even donating a PC, WinAudit is a free download for all Windows systems (seriously, back to even Windows 3.1).
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Make Any Linux Directory into an ISO File
Linux newbies might appreciate knowing that you need no software app to create burn-able CD images of a particular directory on your system. One terminal command--mkisofs -V LABEL -r DIRECTORY | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz—creates a compressed ISO for easy backup (replace the italicized sections with your CD label and directory, of course). [via]
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
RBTray Minimizes Any App to Your System Tray
Windows only: Free, lightweight application RBTray minimizes any app to your system tray. Once it's running, you can tray your windows in a couple of ways: You can either right-click the bottom-right corner of the minimize button to instantly send the app to the system tray, or you can right-click anywhere on the title bar and select Minimize in tray from the context menu (which also offers Always on top and a useless My size feature). The app doesn't require any installation, so you can also toss it on your thumb drive and take it with you. Even better, RBTray used a meager 380KB of RAM on my system. RBTray is a free download, Windows only. For more alternatives, check out previously mentioned TrayEverything or Trayconizer.RBTray [via FreewareGenius]
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Transmute Transfers and Backs Up Bookmarks Between Browsers
Windows only: Some browsers stash all your bookmarks and their metadata in a single folder that's easy to import to any other browser. For everything else, Transmute makes the work of shuttling bookmarks between Windows browsers much simpler. The simple but powerful application, also available as a no-install portable folder, supports nearly every major browser for Windows—Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Safari, and, of course, Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can set Transmute to export bookmarks to a particular folder, with or without timestamp dates, and have it create its own backup files in case things get messy. That's about it, but that's certainly no small feat. Transmute is a free download for Windows systems only, requires .NET 2.0 framework to operate.
How to Burn Any Video File to a Playable Video DVD
With your BitTorrent addiction in full swing, you've filled hard drives with media but can't seem to figure out how to burn any of the videos you downloaded to a DVD. Sound familiar? It's a common problem, and there was a time that it didn't have many simple (or free) solutions. Luckily that's no longer the case, and today we're taking a look at two dead simple solutions for burning virtually any video to a DVD you can pop into your DVD player and enjoy.
DVD Flick
First and foremost, there's DVD Flick, a free, open-source application that supports over 45 different file formats, includes subtitle support, and makes creating a DVD from most common (and even uncommon) video files a breeze. I detailed how to burn almost any video file to a playable DVD with DVD Flick almost two years ago now, but the app is better than ever. Since I last wrote it up, DVD Flick has added support for creating custom menu screens and has pushed out a load of bug fixes.
Free DVD Creator
If DVD Flick isn't your thing, then check out Free DVD Creator. It's not open source like DVD Flick (we do love our FOSS), but it's still free, and it offers most of the same features as DVD Flick.
Also like DVD Flick, the Free DVD Creator wizard is dead simple to use. First select the movies you want to burn and arrange them in the order you'd like them to playback and appear on the DVD menu. On the next screen, you can completely customize your DVD menu screen. Once you've made it that far, just start burning. Free DVD Creator (like DVD Flick) will handle all of the file conversions necessary, then write the DVD-ready video to a DVD complete with your custom menu.
If you have trouble with the one step convert-and-burn (when I tested it, Free DVD Creator created the DVD but didn't immediately burn), just re-open Free DVD Creator and this time select Video DVD Burner instead of Create Video DVD. Then just point the Burner at the VIDEO_TS folder that Free DVD Creator made the first time around (by default it's located at C:\DVDTemp\ and hit Burn. That worked for me without a hitch.
Got a favorite tool for burning your various videos to DVD? Whether we mentioned it above or not, let's hear more about your tool-of-choice in the comments.Free DVD Creator [via Life Rocks 2.0]
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