Although Chris Pendleton previously reported on a Bing Maps plugin for WordPress back in July, Johannes Kebeck of the Bing team recently came across an alternative: the Silverlight Bing Maps plugin. Developed by Regart.net, this plugin lets you install an interactive maps on your WordPress site while allowing customizations like width, height, display mode, zoom level, menu display, language, and many others.

For example, a tag using several of the options would look like this:

[sl-bingmaps background="transparent" width="100%" height="300" NavigationVisibility="1" CopyrightVisibility="1" LogoVisibility="1" ScaleVisibility="1" ZoomLevel="5" Mode="Aerial" StartLocation="48.8756271_2.3493838" Pushpin="48.8756271_2.3493838" Culture="fr_FR"]

or:

[sl-bingmaps background="transparent" width="100%" height="400" NavigationVisibility="1" CopyrightVisibility="1" LogoVisibility="1" ScaleVisibility="1" ZoomLevel="17" Mode="Aerial" StartLocation="51.50809105417733_-0.07589511573314667" Culture="en-GB"]</p>

In order to use this plugin, you’ll need to first create a Bing Maps Key here. For further instructions, check out Kebeck’s post.

The launch of the next installment in the popular Halo series is almost upon us. At 12:10 AM on Tuesday, September 14th, millions of fans will at last be able to purchase Halo:Reach, the prequel to the trilogy of Halo games already released. But for those fans who live in New York City, there’s an event that can’t be missed: the Best Buy Theater in Times Square will be hosting a marquee event where fans will get to play the game just before it goes on sale, meet the creators of “Halo,” win Halo-themed prizes and experience a “surprise” musical performance.

West coast fans won’t be missing out though – at the Music Project | Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, Bungie developers will greet fans on Sept. 13th during the countdown to launch. There will also be prizes and fans will get to play the game early there, too.

Even if you’re not located in one of these cities, a number of retailers will be holding their own celebrations, including Best Buy, GameStop, Wal-Mart, Toys”R”Us and many others, so check out your own local shops for details.

Microsoft Hotmail, calendar and contacts can now be automatically pushed to your phone using Exchange ActiveSync technology (EAS). That means that whatever you do on your phone, from reading an email, creating a new calendar appointment, updating a contact, etc. with be automatically and instantly synced with the web service at www.hotmail.com. It also means that emails get sent to your phone as soon as they arrive. And if you access your Hotmail in Outlook with the Outlook Connector or in the free program Windows Live Mail, whatever you do within the software program also immediately shows up on the web, too.

To set up support for ActiveSync on your phone, you’ll need the following info:

• Server / URL: m.hotmail.com
• Username: Enter full email address, for example: someone@example.com
• Domain : Leave this blank
• SSL: Enable this
• Certificate: Accept the SSL certificate when prompted
• Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks: All can be enabled (see the Solution Center article for exceptions on some phones)

Currently EAS is officially supported on Windows Mobile 6.x phones, Windows Phone 7, the iPhone (iPad, iPod Touch, too), Nokia E-Series, S-Series and N-Series. Other devices may work, but support will be limited. Android support is currently not available but testing is underway. For details on your particular device, go here.

(via Windows Live team blog)

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Microsoft is reintroducing the Windows 7 Family Pack, a discounted pack of multiple Windows 7 operating system licenses for use in homes that have more than one computer. Starting October 3rd in the U.S., you’ll be able to get 3 upgrade licenses of Windows 7 Home Premium for $149.99. On October 22nd, a discount will also be available to shoppers in Canada, the U.K., Germany, France, Australia and others, a date which also happens to be Windows 7’s one-year anniversary.

If you’ve been waiting around to upgrade your home’s computers, this is a good time to buy. To see if your PC can run Windows 7, check out the Upgrade Advisor here.

(via the Windows Team)

The team from FUSE Labs (the folks behind Outlook Social Connector, Spindex, Kodu, Emporia, Bing Twitter Maps and Docs) have just launched a new project called Team Crossword. This application isn’t a major release like Docs.com, the Facebook-enabled Microsoft Office service, but is rather just a simple but fun social game. At TeamCrossword.com, you and your friends can solve crossword puzzles together online. The site also tracks the fastest time a team took to solve a puzzle, so you can see how you and your friends compare.

There’s a new puzzle available every day via the website. You can get started here by signing in with Facebook and inviting your Facebook friends to join.

(Thanks Steve Clayton for pointing this out!)

This is a nifty little app to have: JumpControl, available here on DeviantArt. It’s a simple program that lets you add shutdown, restart, sleep, log off, lock and switch user options right to your Windows 7 Taskbar.

As you know, Windows 7 introduced a new taskbar which lets you “pin” programs to it which could then be right-clicked to display “jump lists.” These jump lists include things like frequent tasks associated with that program and/or a list of recent files, among other things.

To use the JumpControl app, you just download the zip file, extract the files it contains to a folder on your PC, then right-click on the executable and choose “pin to taskbar.” You don’t actually have to run the executable, though, unless you want to configure which options will be displayed in the jump list.

After the app has been pinned to the taskbar, you can access these common shutdown/log off options right from the app’s jumplist – that’s handy!

The program is available as freeware and works as advertised.

(via NirmalTV.com)

While I’ve personally been enjoying the new Bing themes (especially the RSS-enabled one!), not everyone is interested in setting a tranquil landscape, cityscape or nature-inspired photo as their desktop background. If you would rather have something a bit more artistic to look at, you’ll be pleased to find that the Windows 7 Personalization Gallery has recently been updated with a big selection of new themes, all with a more artistic focus.

Here’s what’s new:

• 26 Creative – This theme features “cheerful florals” and “patchwork characters” from artist Chang, Fan-Hsuan.
• Imagination – A gently surreal theme from artist Yeh, Hsin-Hung.
• Bake House – A theme made up of cartoonish breads and pastry characters by Wang, Hsueh-Shih.
• Girls Rock – An anime-esque theme featuring girl rockers.
• An Hsin Pu Tzu – A dreamy, romantic theme featuring cartoon characters relaxing in nature.
• Gears of War 3 – not necessarily an “artistic” theme, but worth a mention – this one features portraits of Marcus Fenix, Dominic Santiago and Anya Stroud from Gears of War 3, due to arrive on Xbox in April 2011.

Windows Live Sync, the service which keeps your documents, photos and files synced in between all your PC, has now been released for Mac users. The download, available here at the Microsoft Download Center, serves as a replacement for Windows Live Mesh, the beta service which was merged into Live Sync, a part of the updated Windows Live Essentials suite of applications.

According to the download page, Live Sync for Mac (beta) will let you choose the folders you sync across your computers, and those will then be able to sync between both your Mac computers and your PCs.

Live Sync for Mac requires Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard or  Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard and works on Intel-based Mac computer only.

When the Bing Team announced that they were holding a contest for developers to create new Bing Map applications, called the “King of Bing Maps,” the blogosphere soon erupted with news of one of the entries: the Taxi Fare calculator.

The Taxi Fare Calculator app was developed by Ricky Brundritt, and, as you may imagine, it lets you enter in a starting address and end address and then see what the cab fare may be, as well as the shortest route. Fare estimates are based on rates for cabs in the area, and include pick-up rates and by-the-miles costs, as applicable.

Obviously, this map app is extremely handy, which is why everyone was raving about it.

Now the Bing Team has revealed that the app is the official winner of the contest, news which was announced via a video on MSDN's Channel 9. Brundritt, as the grand-prize winner, won $1000.

The other winners included in GeoSales Tax and Ricky’s Data Viewer

Thanks to the recent refresh of the Windows Live Essentials beta, Windows Live Photo Gallery now supports geo-tagged photos via Bing Maps. Geo-tagging (adding location information to a photo) helps you see, on a map, where a particular photo was taken. By supporting geo-tags within Photo Gallery, you can optionally sort your photos by location within the application.

Also, thanks to the new feature that allows you to publish a series photos directly to Photosynth (Create menu –> More Tools –> Create a Photosynth), the geotagged option will allow the synth to be rendered and then placed on Bing Maps. Then all you would have to do to finish your synth is add a title, tags, and a description.

To get the new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery which supports this feature, just head over to the Windows Live Essentials beta homepage here and hit the “download now” button.

(via the Bing team blog)