As a famous plumber from Silicon Valley and part time Blogger at TechCrunch, I think Mike Arrington is ready for an occurrence at The Simpsons. As you all know, many other famous people made their way into the TV Series and why not Mike? Below is a little shot how it could look like :)
If you like to create your own Simpsons - take a look over here
mike arrington the simpsons simpsons techcrunch
Since I use Microsoft Windows I also know the Windows Media Player. I only use Media Player when I be forced to do it. This is in most cases when some website like to show you a Windows Media Player movie - so I have no chance to watch it in some other player. Ok, I can life with that.
What I don't like is that I always have problems with the codec of a movie. When I look 10 years back - I could understand that there could be problems with a codec but today the Media Players says "Hello, there is a problem with the codec - should I download this codec for you?" Than I press "Yes, please" - but nothing happen or it says "Sorry, I can't download this codec". I swear, I never had the chance to see this automaticly codec downloader working! Can someone tell me the magic behind this Product? Did they simply drop the download function and always display this annoying dialog. I don't understand this. Even when you try to download the codec by yourself - you can't do it - because the webhelp that appears in newer Media Players don't help you to find the codec. As I can remember - we life in the 21 century or?
Windows Media Player microsoft codec download media player
Everybody is in the twitter mood/hype right now - ok not everybody - but a lot. Today I thought about developing some Firefox AddOn to post to twitter without going to twitter website. But anytime I have an idea - it is wise to check if it already exist :) After a short search on google I found the twitterbar - a great addon for your Firefox to post directly from your url bar to your twitter home. You can either post the url you are surfing right now or you can post a normal text. It is very easy and useful if you are a heavy twitter user.
twitterbar twitter firefox addon
As some of you alreaddy know we launched our Casual Gaming Site CasualGems last month. You can read my post here. Today I wanna to post some updates that we made to the site and about our experience in the first month. From the first start until today, our user base is growing every day. It seems that Casual Gaming is very popular these days and that we hit the right time to launch our site.
The Digg like voting system on CasualGems will be used by a lot of site visitors to vote for games on the site. It is really interesting how visitors vote for games and how some games go up on their release date but fall down after some days. I'm sure this will bring in some interesting data over the next years.
From what we have learned the last month, is that casual gamers are not the technical geeks that seems to use the internet very often or in a way bloggers use it. Things like the CasualGems Badge are not that popular and it seems that casual gamers only want to download the game - perhaps leave a comment but they are absolutly not interested in signing up for something. I think the normal social networking features don't work here or they must be designed in a different way - we need to check that. So, we dropped the signup process for comments and now we get a lot more comments than ever before. People are using the comment box to ask questions about games and others reply with tips and tricks. Also new to our site is the Casual Gaming News Box from GameZebo.com - the biggest Casual Gaming News Page on the net. If you are a fan of small and simple games that are fun to play and easy to get into - step over to CasualGems and try one or more of our games for free.
casualgems casual+games casual+gaming casualgames gamezebo digg games gaming game
Google recently added some new features to their Google Desk product incl. dynamic themes. You can choose from six different themes for your personal homepage and they all look really great. The best thing is they change the appearance based on the actual time and weather in your location. Six themes are available, a Japanese Tea House, a Winter Landscape, a Beach View, a Bus Stop (see above), a City Scape and some more. I heard that there are different themes depending on the country - but I am not absolutly sure about this. The themes ask for your ZIP code to control the time zone for displaying the correct day time in the theme. The themes also check the actual season in your region. The themes look very neat and they are well designed - would be great if they can be animated - but I am sure this will come.
google google+desk themes
According to techworld.com, Microsoft is testing a program, giving financial incentives to enterprise customers when they use Live Search as their prefered search engine. Customer get no cash for searching with Live Search :) but they get benefits in service and training credits from Microsoft. I think this is a very funny story and it seems that Microsoft is not satisfied with the success of Live Search. You can read the full article here.
microsoft live+search pay live
According to AppleInsider, the new released iTunes 7.1 includes several text data indicating that the Apple TV Box can also stream and play Video Games on your TV. It's not new that Apple are moving into the gaming space to participate at the growing video games market. Some articles also reporting that Apple hiring gaming experts such as game developers and game designers. Perhaps we see a Game AddOn to the Apple TV soon. Read more on AppleInsider.
apple casualgems casual+gaming apple+tv
Since Windows Vista is on the shelves I see more and more negative touches that Microsoft gets from users and from experts in the news and on blogs. I am not really an expert in this but when I read all the negative headlines and articles I ask myself if Microsoft really will survive the next 10 years.
I have been a Windows user for years but I also have used an Apple Macintosh all the years.
This year I switched fully to my iMac and OSX and I don't miss a thing.
In my circle of friends I see a lot of them - more than 50% - that will switch to a Mac this year. They are only waiting for Leopard but they have already made their decision.
For me Microsoft lost a lot of it's innovative factors - that I saw in this company some years before and I think there are lot of consumers that don't need a Windows Vista. Also I think that the early geeks that started with Windows are now in an age on which they think if they really want to "use" a computer or if they want to be still a developer or technical geek to understand why a piece of software is not installing or how to manipulate the registry to get things running. I think the time is over where computers are machines that don't work - we are ready for something that really works and we are not interested in something that don't work or make an odd feeling when you try to work with it. I want a computer that understand my needs - we are in the 21 century and I can't believe why Microsoft worked five years on Vista when they even not changed error messages like "Please make sure you use Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 4 or above".
I am pretty sure that the Open Source Community, the new Ubuntu, Google and of course Apple are those companies that are ready for our century and they will get more and more people that know what they really want.
Simple software and services that works! Just like a toilet.
