Results for Microsoft

Some interesting things I bookmarked on del.icio.us on October 2nd, 2007:

• 40+ Media Players That Aren’t iTunes – Mashable lists over 40 players for those who don’t want to use iTunes.
• McLaggan Smith Mugs – Lovely mugs, sweet mugs, cool mugs, and… more mugs.
• The Atari 2600 celebrates 30 years of low-rez fun – Retro Thing takes a trip down memory lane.
• Using CCTV for low-budget filmmaking – Mediashed involved a group of kids who usually hang around in the streets to engage in Video sniffin’ activities and turn CCTV into a free broadcasting system for their own use.
• Microsoft bows to pressure on XP – Customer demand has forced Microsoft to extend the shelf life of Windows XP by five months.
• rsizr – With rsizr, in addition to normal image rescaling and cropping, you can also resize images using a new image resizing algorithm called seam carving (a method of image retargeting) that tries to keep intact areas in your image that are richer in detail.
• Ronald’s Crisis – On September 15, 2007 Ronald McDonald, who had fallen in love with the food of New York and become frustrated with the corporate agenda of McDonald’s, stepped into action closing every McDonald’s store in Manhattan.
• M.T.A. Makes Deal for Cellphones in Stations – All 277 underground stations in the subway system are to be wired for cellphone use.
• New AT&T terms of service – From now on, AT&T can terminate your connection for conduct that “tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries”.

Some interesting things I bookmarked on del.icio.us on August 30th, 2007:

• Pac-Man carpet – Hand woven carpet in 100% wool. One of two made (from Portugal).
• Coffee Drinks Illustrated – Side-by-side diagrams of a few common espresso drinks
• AutoPatcher shut down – Microsoft requested the immediate take-down of the download page.

Microsoft has included XAudio 2 in the August 2007 Direct3D 10.1 Tech Preview.

MSDN DirectX downloads – the latest SDK includes XAudio beta

From the SDK page:

The August release includes Beta 1 of XAudio 2. XAudio 2 is a new cross-platform audio API (Windows and Xbox 360) that is based on the Xbox 360 XAudio API. XAudio 2 is a low-level audio signal processing library for Windows XP and Windows Vista providing a fully modern audio pipeline, including:

• Multi-channel and surround-sound support with full per-channel volume and mapping control
• Programmable, cross-platform DSP effects framework
• Per-voice filtering, arbitrary submixing, and multi-rate processing
• Multicore optimized, non-blocking API design
• Pluggable and generalized 3D spatialization support, with a full-featured implementation provided by the independent X3DAudio math library

XAudio 2 is designed to be the game-audio API that will replace DirectSound.

Read more about XAudio 2 on the Microsoft Connect XAudio 2 FAQ page.

Seems like I won’t be uninstalling my RME ASIO drivers just yet.

Link via CDM

Box.net, the file-sharing application, has launched a few more plug-ins due to the success of its plug-in developed for Microsoft Office.

From Mashable:

There are now box.net plug-ins available for Open Office, Photoshop, Acrobat and 3ds max. These plug-ins allow you to back up files and share directly from each application. There was already a few other plug-ins, such as FireUploader and mobox, and box.net’s recent API included a Firefox plug-in and a mobile application. Use of the plug-ins are free during this beta test phase.

In other box.net news, its file-sharing features have been optimized for the iPhone, and was among the first to launch a Facebook application.

Visit box.net for more information.

Do you ever Google for error messages shown in Windows error message boxes? Then you probably know you usually get the best results when typing as much of the exact error message as possbile.

Now instead of (making a screenshot of the error message and) typing it in your favorite search engine manually, you can also just copy the whole contents of the message box to your clipboard by simple using Windows’ Ctrl-C copy function.

Windows Error Message: Just copy, paste!

From Lifehacker:

Apparently since Windows 2000, you’ve been able to copy the entire error message to your clipboard by hitting the universal copy shortcut, Ctrl-C (who knew?!). That means the whole process of hunting down obscure error messages—especially those containing cryptic error codes—just got a whole lot easier.

And if you use Firefox, you can combine this tip with the paste multiple lines to input boxes setting!

Yep, you can learn new handy Windows features every day! (Apparently the message box copy/paste doesn’t work in Vista…)

If you find the window manipulation features of Microsoft Windows a bit lacking, you might want to try Pitaschio (freeware).

Pitaschio includes a large number of useful functions.

• Stick window to other windows when moving and resizing
• Restrict window position to inside of the screen
• Minimize window to system tray
• Use small icons in the desktop
• Disable Windows key, Insert key, Alt key etc.
• Lock mouse or keyboard while you are cleaning keyboard or mouse
• Take statistics about mouse and keyboard
• Calculate Moon’s age
• Pitaschio is a essential tool to use windows efficiently

You can even use Pitaschio to generate passwords.

Pitaschio configuration screen (click to see full dialog)

One of the features I enjoyed is mouse scrolling on a window’s title bar, which lets you change the transparency.

Just give it a try and download Pitaschio. If you don’t like it you can simple delete the files and forget about it.

Link via Download Squad