Category: Microsoft

May 16 2010

Skype Beta – Five-Way Video Calling Released

A little while back, I wrote about Skype and how it is great for free, high quality voice and video calls to other people that also use the Skype service. This week, Skype released a beta version of Skype into the wild that is capable of five-way video calling which is up from the usual …

Continue reading

May 12 2010

Handy Tip – No Dataflow and Pings Respond with “oy”

Bit of a strange one today (perhaps a bit dry) but I was out fixing a problem with a computer at For Dogs’ Sake this evening fixing a computer that had been infected with some malware. The computer had no dataflow through a web browser (which would promptly crash) but ping tests would work albeit …

Continue reading

May 07 2010

100th Blog – Roll the Highlights Reel!

Today marks the 100th post on my blog and of course, no significant celebration of a milestone would not be complete without looking over some of highlights since the beginning. I’ve written some informative pieces looking at ways to improve the accessibility and reliability of the technology that we use in our everyday lives. In …

Continue reading

May 06 2010

SUPER – A Great Audio & Video Conversion Utility

SUPER (Main Screen)

Have you ever been caught in a situation where you need to have an audio or video file in a specific file? It could be one of those “just in case” things as you never know when you might need it. Anyway, I was caught in a situation this week where the CIO wanted to …

Continue reading

May 02 2010

MS Courier & HP Slate – iPad Killers Being Killed Off Themselves

Over the course of this week, there have been some shock announcements regarding potential competitors to the Apple iPad, specifically the Microsoft Courier and the HP Slate. On Thursday, Gizmodo reported that Microsoft had summarily pulled the Courier out of the incubator and tossed it in the bin. Certainly, in my opinion, the Courier looked …

Continue reading

May 01 2010

TPG Unlimited 24×7 – One Month On

A month ago, I wrote a blog entry regarding TPG’s introduction of their new ADSL2+ Unlimited 24×7 plan at selected exchanges. TPG is still rolling out the availability of this plan at exchanges as it requires the provisioning for suitable backhaul (presumably using the recently acquired PIPE as the, umm, pipe). So how did the …

Continue reading

Apr 27 2010

Windows Home Server V2 – “Vail” Makes its Debut

After a period of expectancy, the next version of Windows Home Server has made its way to being released as a “public preview”. What this means is that the product is still very much in testing and many things may not work properly (or perhaps not at all). Codenamed “Vail”, Microsoft has unleashed this second …

Continue reading

Apr 24 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 RTM – First Look

Microsoft Office OneNote 2010

For those who don’t know, Microsoft Office 2010 went RTM (which stands for “Released to Manufacturing” and means that the software has come out of testing and is finalised). So what’s new in this release? Office 2010 sees the new ribbon interface deployed to all of the applications in the suite. If you happened to …

Continue reading

Apr 23 2010

Feature Phones vs Smartphones – A Lopsided Battle

Over the last decade I’ve owned a number of mobile phones (as I am sure most people will have as well). To give you a quick idea, these are the phones that I have used: Nokia 7110, O2 XDA (rebadged HTC Wallaby), O2 XDA II (rebadged HTC Himalaya), O2 XDA IIs (rebadged HTC Blueangel), O2 …

Continue reading

Apr 21 2010

iTunes for Windows – Good, Bad or Ugly?

Apple iTunes APIs

Not too long ago, Steve Jobs made a general comment regarding platforms in defence of the changes to the iPhone SDK agreement, specifically: We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform. Somehow, the extrapolation has been made that Steve …

Continue reading