After the Wind Storm: I want my power back!

Dec 19, 2006 2 min.

It’s been a few days since the big storm blew through, but I’m still without power (I’m at Microsoft now, so I can get connected and charge a few things)… which sucks when you have kids (and visitors, my in-laws arrived on the night of the storm). We aren’t too cold now, we’ve borrowed a propane heater from a friend and we have a gas stove to boil water on for coffee/tea (and to boil hotdogs with!

Assault Heroes for Xbox Live Arcade

Dec 11, 2006 1 min.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty impressed with the recent set of non-retro, original games for Xbox Live Arcade: Small Arms, RoboBlitz and now Assault Heroes

Using your Zune as a Hard Drive

Dec 11, 2006 2 min.

If you are following Zune news, then I’m sure you’ve seen this ‘hack’ to let you see your Zune as a read-only hard drive. There are additional steps to make it so you can write to your Zune, but it seems so odd that you do it by starting a sync (a long sync I guess) that I haven’t tried it myself. I honestly haven’t thought of any reason I’d need to write to the device at this point either, but reading off of the Zune works fine and I’ve already found it useful to snag some converted videos files that I’d like to store on my PC instead of the originals.

Is XPS another Microsoft Reader?

Dec 8, 2006 2 min.

I loved Microsoft Reader, I had a ton of .lit files on my Pocket PC and I would save Word docs out as Reader files so I could read them while travelling or even just at home away from my main machine. Other than email, Reader was the ‘killer app’ for me on the Pocket PC. But Reader was never given the love it needed, the Reader plug-in wasn’t available for some versions of Office (at least not right away), you couldn’t find all that many downloads in .

Laura Foy does a 360-inspired cover of Justin Timberlake’s hit…

Dec 1, 2006 1 min.

Video: I’m bringing XBOX back (from on10.net) Follow the link to get a high-quality WMV for your PC, a WMV for your Zune or a MP4 for your iPod/PSP… or a WMA/MP3 if all you want is the music 🙂 Heck, I even have an Ogg Vorbis version up there. And yes, we know that Laura was known to bash MSFT a bit (ok, a lot…) when she was at G4… the irony is not lost on us 🙂

Two new wallpapers up on 360Style.net

Dec 1, 2006 1 min.

Both are my style… but I had to go with the Star Trek Legacy one for now… Halo 3 & Star Trek Legacy Wallpapers Added ! Time to switch up your wallpaper, choose your sci-fi poison. Halo 3 vs Star Trek Legacy !! (Both available in resolutions up to 1600×1200) Halo 3 Star Trek: Legacy

Email interview with the Superman Returns team up on 10

Nov 30, 2006 1 min.

Normally I do video for 10, but in this case I had a bunch of questions and I decided to see if the team behind Superman Returns would be up for answering them via email. They were, and the whole conversation is up as a post on http://on10.net Quick Q & A with the Superman Returns team

Check out the new Community Bar on on10.net

Nov 29, 2006 1 min.

One of my jobs over the past couple of weeks has been to build a javascript based ‘toolbar’ that could run across the top of on10.net and show folks headlines aggregated from a variety of Microsoft Community sites. So, along with a bunch of help from Adam and Erik, I managed to get it finished and deployed today. You can see it on top of the page on 10

Microsoft is working at home today!

Nov 28, 2006 1 min.

Wow, back in Winnipeg this amount of snow wouldn’t likely cause much of a slow down… but here… I’m at home and so are lots of my team mates. Pretty snow though 🙂 I have remote access and a laptop with VS 2005 though… fully productive and a coffee pot that is even closer than at work!

Recording from my Motorola Cable Box via Firewire?

Nov 26, 2006 1 min.

I had no idea this was possible, but has anyone managed to either: Pull video off of their Motorola HD DVR cable box onto XP/Vista? Hook up the DVR using Firewire to a Media Center Edition box? I’m currently using a IR Blaster and the standard definition outputs on the Motorola box to connect my cable box to my MCE 2005 XP box… works, but the quality isn’t great… but then I found this guide to firewire connections