My Life in the Tech World

My friends at Foodista Friends  are posting some great recipes. Check out their site.

Air Video allows you to stream your videos to iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad devices. I like it and recommend that you give the free version a try. Here's how to set it up in a few minutes. Air Video Air Video has two parts. The first part is a server that runs on your desktop machine at home or whenever your videos are stored. The server essentially reads the local videos (that you've configured to be viewable) and publishes them for your mobile devices. In some cases, that requires that the videos be converted to a format for your mobile device. This conversion can happen in real time (Air Video "Live Conversion") if you have at least a Core 2 Duo processor on your desktop. Live conversion allows you to watch the video instantly. The videos may also be converted in batch mode. You basically say you want to convert a video and it will be available to watch as soon as the conversion finishes. Step 1) Install the Air Video Server  on a fast machine with access...

My two year old Lexus LS is in the shop getting valve springs replaced as part of a recall. Apparently, a small percentage of these springs have impurities in the metals which may cause them to break apart. The job is going to take several days so I have a loaner ES 350. I've taken this opportunity to check out the new electronics in the ES 350. Lexus made several improvements to bluetooth support versus my system. First, they added a "phone" label to the "Info" button so that users can actually find the phone setup. This change alone probably saves new Lexus drivers thousands of minutes everyday. The on-screen menus are also improved so I was able to setup handsfree in just a few seconds. The phone power and signal meters are also accurate which isn't true with the LS screens. The LS often indicates incorrectly that the phone battery is near death or that I have signal when I don't. The biggest improvement is bluetooth audio support. Music can be stre...

The latest piece of equipment for home theater puzzle is an  Acer AspireRevo AR3700 . It's a very small nettop PC that can easily be hooked up to a TV using HDMI. My plan was to load the amazing XBMC application  onto the device, point XBMC at my library of ripped movies, and then enjoy watching. I also wanted to keep Windows 7 installed in case I needed other Windows applications. By the way, for those who already know Google TV and Apple TV you can think of XBMC as a much better application for playing back content on your home network. Maybe someone will port it to Google TV one day. After cabling up the Revo 3700 I spent some time removing all the extra software Acer had loaded onto the system. Then I ran windows update and loaded XBMC. I configured XBMC to use files on an SMB server and started playing some video. It worked but the video stuttered quite a bit. I worried that the Revo did not have enough horsepower to play 1080p video so I put some video on a USB dri...

Tried to sign up for Google IO today at about 11AM but by the time I loaded the registration page the conference was sold out. 5000 seats sold out in less than an hour! I understand the excitement. Talks detailing Google's latest APIs, a few free gadgets, and access to Google engineers. Personally, I really wanted to hear about GWT. Access Denied! Poor me.