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How to Install Windows Vista

A lot of people who bought the new windows Vista have been having trouble installing it on their computers. Here's Anthony from the Opie and Anthony radio program showing you how to properly install it. [youtube]LxQm3IsSKAo[/youtube]

Five T-Shirts That Can Improve Your Life

T-shirts are the apex of human fashion design. Although man and womankind have clothed themselves in many different materials, in arrangements ranging from the functional to the impractical, from the plain to the ebullient, nothing tops the simple comfort and versatility of the T-shirt. You can even use yours as a laptop case. Need proof? Below are five T-shirts that can actually improve you life. window blinds T-shirt1) Can a T-shirt with a simple, elegant design, help you find your soul mate? The answer is yes. Pull the cord, and suddenly it is apparent why this shirt is so brilliant. By raising these shades, you can send a subtle but sexy message to that attractive person from across the dance floor (or bingo parlor, whatever, I'm not going to tell you how to live your life). Made by a Japanese company with an inscrutable name, it's a good illustration of the kind of clever, art-and-craft ideas you buy Make Magazine and shop at Ikea for. Unfortunately, it's only available at museum shops in a few select cities.
digital watch T-shirt2) Watches have become completely superfluous. Everything has a clock on it, and you are never at a loss for the current time. In my house, if I want to know what time it is, I can check the stove, the microwave, my phone, my MP3 player, my computer, and my wife's extensive clock collection. The point is, watches are superfluous, and if you try to get a watch that actually is useful - like a calculator watch - you will be ostracized for your poor fashion sense. So this shirt is perfect, in that it makes owning a watch even more optional than it already is. How will it improve you life? Well, having thrown away all your watches, if you ever find yourself adrift in the open ocean, you can use this accurate time piece to calculate longitude. You can see it at ThinkGeek.
dry-erase T-shirt 3) One of the age-old dilemmas of the human condition is the problem of communication. Homo sapiens is a social animal, yet outside of speech, we are given few ways to express ourselves. And things like text-messaging and sign language don't count, because they are unnatural abominations. T-shirts can solve this problem. They impart super powers - specifically, telepathy. This shirt uses an advanced dry-erase technology to allow you to communicate your thoughts without speaking a word. Finally you can transmit abstract, complicated concepts directly from your brain (or actually your neck, from the placement of the thought bubble) out to the world. More information at Blue Fish T-shirts.
Math cheat sheet shirt4) Unlike sombreros, tabi shoes, and saris, T-shirts are useful and universal. So it is fitting that this next shirt helps you with the universal language: mathematics. That's right - although languages and religions vary from place to place, when it comes time to build a bridge or send up a satellite, everyone uses the same math. But how are you supposed to remember your sines, cosines, and tangents when you haven't used any of that stuff since high school? Now you don't need to, you can bring a math crib sheet everywhere you go. Don't even get me started on calc--what the hell was all that supposed to be? It's sold by a place called Computer Gear.
Air-guitar T shirt5) This last shirt will make you wonder how you have lived you life wearing such boring, non-musical shirts. What would you say if I told you that all the time you have spent at Van Halen concerts rocking the air guitar from the bleachers no longer will go to waste? Strum the air, and a chord is produced - almost as if a guitar was there. Dr Richard Helmer a team of researchers at CSIRO Textiles and Fibre Technology have made your dream a reality by inventing a functional air-guitar T-shirt. Although actually, there is some controversy over who was the true inventor of the air-guitar shirt. As far as I can tell, it's not yet available for sale. So you will have to wait, most likely with bated breath. If the prospect of a magical air-guitar T-shirt does not make you gaze skyward and sigh, then you, my friend, must already be dead inside. Special bonus: Want more ideas? There's a book, Generation T: 108 Ways to Transform a T-Shirt, that should give you a few little projects to try.

iTunes 7 Crashes and Freezes, or How to Ruin the User Experience

Apple gets a lot of credit for putting effort into the user experience. Many attribute the success of the original Mac, iPods, the iTunes Music Store, iBooks, and their other products to ease of use. But building a brand based on user experience can be much harder than, say, a brand based on low prices (like Dell) or ubiquity (like Microsoft). Because it doesn't take too much to go from "it just works" to "it doesn't work," which has been my experience with iTunes 7. The worst problem: it freezes up whenever I don't have an internet connection. For a long time, I used WinAmp as my MP3 player. As a nerdy web developer, I'm stuck at my computer for inordinate amounts of time, so I tend to listen to a lot of music through my SoundBlaster. By long time, I mean 1997 through a few years ago. I didn't have much of my collection ripped, so a static list of the 100-or-so songs I did have converted was fine. After ripping the majority of my CD library, and getting my wife an iPod, I started using iTunes. WinAmp has media library features, but I just liked iTunes better. Fast forward to 2006, when iTunes version 7 appears. It added some cool features, like album covers. It also was pretty buggy. Apple has released a few fixes so far, but now with even the latest version - iTunes 7.0.2 on Windows 2000 - I run into issues whenever my Internet connection goes down, or I have VPN up and running, blocking all traffic. It will start up and play like normal, but then after a few songs, the audio cuts off. Sometimes the track looks like it is continuing to play, others the time stops ticking off as well. Skipping to the next track results in more silence. When I finally close iTunes, it doesn't really close - I have to go into the Task Manager and manually end the process. I've done some Googling to see if there was a solution, but so far no luck. I found a blog post by Don Loper talking about freezing, but disabling automatic checking for podcasts did not resolve my issue. I tried disabling Audioscrobbler, a great plugin that uploads what you've been listening to to last.fm, and anything else that looked like it might be trying to send or receive data. Still no dice. Now, this is obviously not a huge problem, but when I'm dialing in to work from home, it would be nice to be able to listen to music. I can always dig up WinAmp, but I don't want to bother importing or recreating playlists. My solution so far has been to listen to NPR on my headphones. The risk that Apple runs with each release of iTunes is that bugs, even if they are fairly uncommon, can put the breaks on the flow of the user experience like Fred Flinstone jamming his feet through the floor of his stony, Neanderthal car. Which is why all the hype (and the 6 month lead time) around the iPhone could still blow up in their faces. My advice: test, test, test, and do it with actual users. Oh, and anyone have any ideas to fix my freezes that I haven't tried yet?

Aren’t Machines Cool?

FantasticMachine Poo, guys, I really wanted to have the video here for you to watch but it isn't cooperating. Please promise me that you will check out this link because this a a video of a really cool machine that makes music. I know that you won't be let down.
Now, before there are panties in a bundle, I know that this is not a real machine but some computer animated thing. But it's still cool. And realistic. I can see it happening.

We called it – 8 Apple iPhone predictions that came true

Today Apple finally released details about their new iPhone. There have been rumors and speculation about how Apple could bring it's iPod design skills to the mobile phone world for years now. Lots of web sites have posted predictions, feature wish lists, insider information and supposed leaks, including this one.

Does the iPhone live up to the hype? We'll take a look at it by going down the list of our 10 predictions about the Apple iPhone.Apple iPhone

1. Simple controls. - Apple has struck a blow against the proliferation of buttons by creating a phone with only a few buttons and a large touchscreen. This is a welcome change from smartphones and PDA-phones which have a whole QUERTY keyboard. The keyboard is nice the 5 percent of the time I'm taking notes to texting, but 95 percent of the time they just make it harder to hit the button I do want.

2. Consistent controls - This is a little bit harder to judge without having an iPhone in hand to play with, but from the demos and the fact that the iPhone runs OSX it seems likely you won't have to learn totally different ways to navigate your voicemail, songs, and photos any more. At the very least Apple has solved the mystery of the Green “dial� button and the OK button.

3. Innovative controls with obvious affordances - The iPhone's control scheme definitely falls into the innovative category, but is it's use obvious? Although I missed my guess about hanging up the phone, some of the features are automated responses to actions people are already very used to performing. The touch screen turns off when you put it close to your face, and the display shifts to landscape when you turn it. The learnability and obviousness of the individual applications which use the touch screen are a little harder to judge just yet (especially for old codgers), but it is nice to see the use of large, simple icons like the Palm or Blackberry rather that a Windows-style Start Menu, which just plain sucks on small devices.

4. Streamlined interaction design. - Apple has chosen to put Phone, Mail, Web and iPod icons along the bottom of the screen for ease of access. Presumably they expect other features, like the Calendar and Maps, to be used less often and so they are represented by icons filling the top of the screen. Assuming they are right about which tasks are most commonly used, this is a smart move. Calling and iPod functionality are obviously the biggies and are located appropriately at the corners in compliance with Fitt's Law. Will email and web browsing be as important? Millions of blackberry users say yes to the former, and built-in wifi make the latter possible.

5. No more disgusting face grease on your screen. - Unless the touchscreen is coated with some miracle material, maybe not. But wait - it looks like the solution comes in the form of the included hands-free headphones and optional bluetooth headset. I'm still a little surprised that the horror of gobs of face grease all over his beautiful device didn't push Steve Jobs over the edge. Apparently he can console himself with the thought that most people will use the headphones to listen to music and all the cool kids have headsets.

6. No more lock in - Not so fast. The iPhone is a Cingular exclusive, at least in the U.S., at least for now. It works on GSM, which is a widely used standard, and I am pretty amazed that Cingular is allowing a device with built-in wifi, but I will take this one as a failed prediction.

7. It will look really, really nice - This is, of course, completely subjective, but I have a feeling a lot of people will be lusting over iPhones when they hit stores this summer.

8. Integrated voicemail, chat, SMS and email - Hit the nail on the head with this one. This is the first device I've seen which takes the obvious step of allowing you to manage your voicemail the same way you do email. No more listening to 4 messages to get to the one you actually want to delete.

9. No camera - I was completely wrong on this one. The iPhone has a 2 megapixel camera built-in. I still think cameras on phones are really only used by drunk people and people with new phones. Maybe I have to add a new category, people who will soon be famous on YouTube.

10. Connectivity - The iPhone has bluetooth, Wifi, and EDGE meaning lots of potential for connectivity. Since it runs OSX, I'm guess that means the sky's the limit on how you connect and transfer files around. This is a very smart move – get your customers used to using the Internet often enough with Wifi, and they'll start wanting to use it all the time with EDGE (and an expensive data plan).

So that's that - our record was 8 out of ten. Not bad for a site with no insider information.

What did we miss? Let us know in the comments below.