Larry Larsen

Larry Larsen

Total Posts: 269 |
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TweetCraft: Tweet From World of Warcraft

Posted By: Larry Larsen | Jul 2nd @ 10:10 AM
Channel 9's own Dan Fernandez has come up with one of the coolest hacks I've seen recently. TweetCraft is a Twitter client that runs within World of Warcraft. It allows you to tweet, read tweets, automatically tweet your acheivements, and even post screenshots through TwitPic. The app can be downloaded by going to http://c9.ms/TweetCraft/. You can also read the FAQ here, the Getting Started Guide, or read how TweetCraft works. Dan even had a video made, which you can watch here (left).
Tags: Twitter, world of warcraft

Get Your Photo on Bing.com

Posted By: Larry Larsen | Jun 29th @ 4:04 PM
People seem to really like the daily images that Bing shows as backgrounds. And if you'd like to have Bing.com use one of your photos as a background, you're in luck. Until July 16, you can submit your photos through a Facebook contest where the photo will be judge along with others and one winner will have their image used on Monday August 3rd. Contest rules can be found here, and even if you're not submitting a photo the contest rules are interesting to see what types of selection criteria Bing.com has for photos. There is no cash or prizes for the winner, only the recognition that goes with having your name and work in front of millions of eyes.
Tags: bing, contests

Windows 7 Pricing and Availability Announced

Posted By: Larry Larsen | Jun 25th @ 11:29 AM
Windows 7 pricing and availability has just been announced, along with a couple nice benefits to help put you into Windows 7 at half the price. First, Windows 7 will be rolling out on new PCs starting October 22nd. But starting tomorrow if you buy a new PC from a participating retailer you'll be able to get Windows 7 for little or no cost at all. (See www.windows.com/upgradeoffer for more details)

As for pricing, the retail prices for full and upgrade versions of Windows 7 follow:

  • Windows 7 Home Premium (Upgrade): $119.99
  • Windows 7 Professional (Upgrade): $199.99
  • Windows 7 Ultimate (Upgrade): $219.99
  • Windows 7 Home Premium (Full): $199.99
  • Windows 7 Professional (Full): $299.99
  • Windows 7 Ultimate (Full): $319.99

And if you want to skirt around paying full price - pre-order! From tomorrow until July 11th in the US and Canada (July 5th for Japan) you can pre-order Windows 7 Home and Professional from the Microsoft Store, Best Buy, or Amazon and get more than 50% off! That means Home Premium version for under $50 and Windows 7 Professional for under $100. Click here for more pre-order information.

[Click to read the full post ]
Tag: Windows 7

Watch Wimbledon 2009 Online in HD

Posted By: Larry Larsen | Jun 25th @ 1:04 AM
If you're a tennis fan, you'll be happy to know NBC Sports will be streaming a simulcast of the broadcast coverage of the championships this year -- in full 720p HD! You can go to the site now and watch daily previews and highlights. But come Saturday, June 27th, the streaming will kick up to HD. So drop by this weekend and check out an example of Microsoft's Live Smooth Streaming, we'll let you know as more Smooth Streaming events are launched later this year.

Tags: silverlight, Silverlight Streaming, sports

Windows 7, A New Low

Posted By: Larry Larsen | Jun 23rd @ 12:12 PM
One of my favorite features of Windows 7 is the fact that I can install it on all my old hardware and it works incredibly. I've got Win7 on netbooks, old tablets, a Sony UX, even an old machine that I have no reasonable expectation of every really using. So it put a smile on my face this weekend when I saw this PC World article,Windows 7 Hits A New Low.

The idea here is that people are pushing the envelope trying to find exactly how far down the hardware ladder they can go and still successfully install a working version of Windows 7. The current recordholder, that we know of, is "Hackerman1" who has Win7 running on a Pentium II with a 266 MHz CPU, 96MB of memory, and a 4MB graphics card. If you happen to break a record, please let me know, I may have a t-shirt to go with that old hardware.[Click to read the full post ]
Tag: Windows 7

Take a Look at DirectX 11

Posted By: Larry Larsen | Jun 17th @ 1:43 PM
I don't know how I missed this but a couple weeks ago Tech Fragments wrote about some videos AMD put out showing DirectX 11. We're across the board gamers here at Channel 10, so we love seeing the PC platform fight it out against the Xbox. DirectX 11 looks like just the thing to give PC's the advantage, or at least strong parity with the best console games.  

What makes DX11 sing is the use of tessellator, which is basically a system to map a higher-order geometric surface with triangles. Tessallator hardware is part of the Xbox 360 already, and it's in many late model ATI cards, but up until now there hasn't been an effecient framework to use it on the PC.

Also hot in DX11 is the use of Compute Shader, which will essentially allow developers to treat the GPU as a highly parallel CPU (aka GPGPU). DirectX 11 also has been redesigned to be much more effecient, which will be especially evident on multi-core machines.[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: AMD, directx, DirectX 11

Donavon's Home Servidor

Posted By: Larry Larsen | Jun 10th @ 10:12 AM
Friend of 10 Donavon West, who brought us the Obama DeepZoom, a 2008 Olympic Medal gadget, and Home Server Tweeter, is back with an interesting new Home Server called the Home Servidor. The idea is cigar humidor up top, server downstairs. And while we don't officially condone smoking stinky anything, this is pretty cool. Starting at $799 for the 1TB model, the hardware below is an Atom processor which puts off very little heat. Since a humidor has to keep your goods at a specific temperature, this server comes with a firewall between precious cargo A and precious cargo B. More info at www.HomeServidor.com.
Tags: Cases, Windows Home Server

Install IE8, Feed The Hungry

Posted By: Larry Larsen | Jun 10th @ 9:53 AM
There's never been a better time to install the ACID 2 compatible Internet Explorer 8. With Accelerators, Web Slices, and In-Private Browsing, there is something for everyone. In fact, now is the best time to install because for every install of IE8 until August 8, 2009, Microsoft will donate 8 meals to Feeding America food banks.

Just go to www.BrowserForTheBetter.com and click the "Download IE8 For Free" button.
Tags: Internet Explorer 8, social causes

New Photosynth Features in June Update

Posted By: Larry Larsen | Jun 2nd @ 9:27 PM
The Photosynth team released their June update and it's looking better than ever. The site has had a design tweak, you'll now see a featured synth on the home page. The search results are much improved and you can sort your result set by popularity, date, author, and even synthy-ness.

One of the coolest updates is the ability to "highlight" the photos you want. In the image for this post, you can see the grouping of photos that make up this statue. A previous update made it so you can hover over the object and get arrows that allow you to dolly around the object. But what if there's a few really good pictures you want to point out? By highlighting these photos you'll see they show up on a right side rail. Try it out here, or here.

You can go back and choose highlight photos on any of your old synths. Just log in, browse to your synth, click the new "Edit Synth and Highlights" button. Now you can browse your synth, when you get to a picture you want to highlight, click the Add Highlight button. You can put in a title, caption, and change order of the highlights.[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: photography, photosynth

Today Skyfire is an Integer

Posted By: Larry Larsen | May 27th @ 8:31 AM
Congratulations to the folks at Skyfire who today release version 1.0 of their mobile browser. With support for Silverlight, Flash, Quicktime, and full AJAX, Skyfire is a desktop web browser running on phone hardware.

Recent updates gave us WVGA support, (background) Windows Media streaming audio support, and performance upgrades. This 1.0 release includes a smoother, more intuitive zoom (double tap to zoom to elements). Text is sharp on zoom rather than blurring in like a progressive jpeg. There is better handling of AJAX-intensive pages and iFrames, and performance was given another boost.

Get it by pointing your browser to http://get.skyfire.com.
Tags: Skyfire, windows mobile
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