Virtual Box - Free Desktop Virtualistaion

You may have heard of desktop virtualization if you own a Mac and have looked at products such as Parallels or VMware Fusion. These products help you install and run another operating system within your existing one. For example I run a Windows XP virtual machine from my OS X Mac. Although this is similar to using Apple's boot camp, it enables both operating systems to be active at the same time. You can switch seamlessly form one to the other, or use both at the same time as well as having access to a whole hoast of other features.

Some of the things I use it for are:
-Streaming Windows Media DRM content
DRM content is not currently supported under OS X so it is useful for streaming videos such 4OD catch-up content.
-Platform specific applications
There are many applications written just for Windows and now Mac users can have access to these too. One big use is testing websites in Internet Explorer as this is still the most popular browser.
-Testing cross platform applications
If you develop applications and wish to make them cross platform you can now easily develop under one plaform and test in many. This obsiously has some restrictions but one possible use is for testing audio plug-ins such as VST's.

While I have never used VMware Fusion and not pushed Virtual Box to the limits yet, the initial performance is very good. Video streaming is much better than in Parallels and it seems to be less memory and CPU hungry providing a smoother experience even with my 2.0 GHz Intel processor. It also supports a wider range of both host and guest platforms than Parallels.

The application is not perfect yet and lacks a few useful fetures which rival products already incorporate such as dragging and dropping files from one OS to another and super smart keyboard controls such as using expose and spaces shortcuts when a guest window is active. However, these are all minor niggles and I'm sure they will be worked out soon.
You can work around these issues by mapping host folders as network drives (or even the whole disk if you wish) and relasing keyboard focus by pressing the command key once (in OS X).

The best thing about Virtual Box is the price, it is completely free, no trials, no restrictions, nothing. This means if you have an old Windows disk lying around or are interested in trying out some Linux distributions but don't want to reformat your hard drive now you can free of charge. You don't even have to worry about the VM's taking up massive ammounts of disk space with dynamic virtual disks.

I'm so glad there is now a free (and in my opinion better) alternative to Parallels and Fusion that I've already installed it on two of my friends computers (having only discovered it yesturday). Thanks a lot to Sun Microsystems who developed the product.

Virtual Box

Color Oracle - Colour Impairment Screen Filter

This is a very cool tool that I have been using for a while now which simulates colour blindness on your screen. According to the website 8% of males have some degree of colour visual impairment so this is something well worth considering if you intend to reach a wide audience with graphical content.

The application is available for Mac, Windows and Linux although I have only used the Mac version. It sits in the menu bar where you can change the current filter (there are three types) and also save a screen shot with the current filter applied. It is has a very low CPU and RAM usage so there's no need to worry about it if you have large Photoshop projects open.

Although this has many applications I mainly use it when designing colour schemes for web sites. Content needs to look different enough to be distinguished by the user (such as links etc.) whilst maintaining an aesthetically pleasing design.

The website has some great tips on designing for the visually impaired and explains colour blindness in a little more detail.

If you don't do any form of graphic design it's still worth checking out to see the effects of different types of colour blindness. It's a tiny download and easily removed.
You will be amazed at how different the world can look, try looking at some landscape or animal photos with the filter on.

Color Oracle

Adblock Plus - Ad Content Blocker for Firefox

As the title may suggest this is a great content blocker add-on for Firefox. The add-on sits silently in the corner of your browser and unobtrusively filters ad content from all pages visited. The content removed is based upon a compiled list you select when installing it.

At any time you turn it off, view the filtered content and add unfiltered content to your blocked list such as images and flash elements. The best thing about this add-on is that it works really well and simplifies a lot of ad heavy pages.

I have tried a few ad-blockers but this is the easiest to install, set-up and use and works the best.

Adblock Plus

Sage-Too - Lightweight RSS Reader for Firefox

I have searched for a while now to find a light-weight, neat and simple RSS reader and have tried many that didn't suit my needs. Then I found Sage-Too.
This is a great add-in for Firefox that sits in a sidebar, not taking up too much space. You can set the update frequency of the feeds, the feed folder and how feeds open when clicked on.

What I like about this RSS reader over others is its simplicity and unobtrusiveness. It's automatically there when I open my browser (Firefox naturally) and will discretely notify me if new atricles have been published by a change in the feed's title icon. When clicking on a feed title I can see a list of atricle titles, unread ones in bold, and hovering over them will give me a longer description of the content so I can easily decide whether to view it or not.

You can organise your feeds using Firefox's bookmark manager if you prefer and even create custom subfolders to group similar feeds.

Check it out, it may be just the RSS solution you have been searching for.

Sage-Too

Recomended Software

This is a list of free programs that I use frequently and think you should all be aware of.


Windows:

Anti-virus - AVG

Firewall - ZoneAlarm

Anti-spyware - Spybot

Computer Maintenance and Registry Cleaner - Easy Cleaner - CCleaner

Hard Disk Space Viewer - Windows Directory Statistics

Web Browser - Firefox

VNC Server - UltraVNC

Codec Pack - Vista Codec Package

Video Conversion - Any Video Converter Free

Screen Capture - Screen Hunter

Screen Recorder - Auto Screen Reorder


Mac:

Instant Messenger - Adium

Hard Disk Space Viewer - Disk Inventory X

Web Browser - Firefox

PDF File Merger - PDFMergeX

Remote Desktop Viewer - RealVNC

Tuner Free MCE - On Demand TV in Media Center

I wanted to share this cool add-on for Windows Media Centre that lets you watch all the UK TV On-Demand services through media centre. This means you can navigate through the programs with your remote, with the media centre interface, from your sofa.

The application is written by a guy called Martin Millmore and is very useful. The program still has its small bugs but on the whole works very well. You can browse by channel and also group episodes of the same series together. The flashy falling of the thumbnails gets annoying but is worth the wait.

The download is small at under 700Kb and installs very quickly. Once installed it will display as an icon in media centre to the left of 'Recorded TV'. It will take a while to download the listings initially but just let it run its course. If the programs aren't displayed when you open the application (after the initial download of the listings) just go back out and then into the program again and they should load. Also note the different navigation controls of the video due to the different technologies involved such as Flash, Silverlight and Windows Media.

TunerFree MCE

NB. x64 users - make sure that you copy the application folder into the 'C:\Program Files' directory due to a hard coded link.

Missing Guide Listings - Windows Media Centre

I have had the problem for a while that some channel's guide listings in my Vista Media Centre application where not showing up. In their space was just a message saying "No data available." I have found two possible reasons for this and the solutions are the same.

Firstly the lack of listings may be due to regional differences in the channels schedule. Sometimes media centre will pick these up automatically, like mine did with BBC1, and sometimes it will not, like my ITV1. The other reason may simply be that media centre has lost the listings association with the relevant channel.

To solve the problem, in Media Centre go to: Home > Tasks > Settings > TV > Guide > Add Listings to Channel
Now select the channel you are missing listings for and look through the list that is displayed. You may find a regional variation of the channel eg. 'ITV1 West of England' and if you do, this is probably the culprit. If you can't find a regional listing just select the normal channel name. This should re-establish the association between the channel and the listing.

I have had missing listings for both of these reasons and using the method above now have a full guide, no more manual scheduling of recordings for me!

If this doesn't solve your problem make sure you selected the correct transmitter when setting up the guide. You can do this again by selecting 'Set Up Guide Listings' from the guide menu as before.

Hope this helps.

Cross Platform Remote Desktop Connection

Like many people I have more than one computer, one a Windows Vista Premium desktop, the other an Apple MacBook. I recently wanted to be able to control my Windows desktop from my Mac over my home network. While this is possible with Windows Remote Desktop connection, the ability to run a server (ie. the computer being connected to) is only enabled in the Business and Ultimate editions of Vista. While there are quite a few other solutions out there, the best free one I have found is UltraVNC.

The download is fairly small at only a few megabytes and installation is fairly quick and straightforward. In most cases the default settings will be fine but there is a great guide for both installation and configuration on the site.

Once your server is running the only thing left to do is download a viewer to access your computer. I am currently trying out two but am leaning towards RealVNC for its speed and range of settings. Set-up is simple; download the file, run the application, type in the network address of your server (this can be found by hovering over the UltraVNC system tray icon) and then enter your password if you have set one. You may want to manually set the quality setting as the default tends to be a little high. There is a trade off between colour depth and refresh rate of the display but this will depend on your network speed.

Now you can shecdule recordings, open applications, access files that aren't shared on your network and anything else you may want to do remotely.

UltraVNC - Windows VNC Server

RealVNC Viewer - Cross-Platform Viewer

Chicken of the VNC - Lightweight OSX Viewer

While this currently only works over a local network (ie. both computers are connected to the same router) it is possible to remotely access your computer over the internet with the use of a VPN (Virtual Private Network). While I have not extensively looked into this I have heard good things about Hamachi which is free for personal use and may well be useful to you. More on this soon.

MCEBuddy - Automated DVR-MS Converter

MCEBuddy is a very good application I found for all versions of Windows that automatically converts your recorded television programs into a variety of more assessable formats. Not only can this save some much needed hard disk space but it allows you to transfer your programs to an MP4 player such as an iPod or Sony PSP.

While this is very useful in itself the real reason for sharing this with you is the automatic removal of adverts feature. Using a bundled program called Comskip, MCEBuddy will scan your TV programs and identify the adverts it contains. It then creates a text file listing the time location of the adverts within the program which MCEBuddy will omit when converting the video.
This feature is obviously very useful and stops you reaching for your remote every 10 minutes.

The program runs silently in the background with a taskbar icon notifying you of activity and while idle uses very little system resources. There is a wide variety of formats to convert to and you can choose a different output folder to preserve your original recordings if you desire. You can also choose a second video format to convert to if you wish so you have versions for viewing both on your computer and your MP4 player.

The only drawback I can find with converting from the DVR-MS format is the lack of information contained in the new video files. This means things such as program descriptions, series information and showing times are no longer viewable from Media Centre or any other media player.

The program is only a small download and takes literally a few minutes to install and configure.

MCEBuddy