19th July 2008, 02:43 pm
This morning I spent some time adding Google Adsense adds and Google Analytics to my web site. This was mostly just an experiment to see how the two services work together, and to find out a little about where web traffic comes from and where it goes.
Since my web site has been sadly pathetic for so long there are very few links to it from other sites, so it’s almost like starting up a virgin web site (even though jeff.com has been around since about 1992). Prior to today it was getting between 80 and 200 unique visits per day, mostly just to the home page, with just a handful of people drilling down into the rest of the site. Now that I’m adding a little more content it will be interesting to see what happens over time.
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17th July 2008, 09:39 pm
For the past year or so I’ve been using a Nokia E61i SmartPhone. It’s a pretty good general-purpose phone for messaging, email, web browsing, etc. and it’s also, get this, a pretty good phone. It has it’s strengths and weaknesses, like anything, and some things I had to figure out or fiddle with to make it really useful. I also found some pretty good software for it which lets me use it instead of a laptop for all sorts of stuff.
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16th July 2008, 10:37 pm
To get your music, videos, photos etc. stored on a Windows Vista machine to show up on your DirecTV HD-DVR you just have to get your windows machine set up to correctly share your files. The DVR, once on the net, will find the windows machine and try to get the content.
I did this with a DirecTV HD-DVR HR20-700, and an HP 2510p laptop running Windows Vista Ultimate. It should work more or less the same with any HR20 or HR21 DVR, and any Vista machine with the media components (I think that means home premium or ultimate, vista business probably doesn’t have the media stuff, not sure about the other home versions). The DVR needs to be running one of the latest releases that includes the MediaShare Beta software (otherwise you won’t have the menu item that gets into the shared media area).
Continue reading ‘Playing Windows-Shared Media on DirecTV HD-DVR with MediaShare’ »
16th July 2008, 09:53 pm
I’ve been fiddling lately with Windows Vista, attempting to get the Media Center software to recognize and play DVD’s stored on a hard drive (rather than a dvd in the dvd drive). It’s a bit frustrating but eventually following a few simple tricks it does seem to work. The DVD player functionality seems to be not a good as, for example, WinDVD, but this effort is part of a larger goal to re-build my home media systems to run from a computer-based system rather than individual audio/video components, and since the concept behind Windows Media Center seems to be going the right direction, I decided to give it a try.
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