Killer cellphone and Kyte

I decided to check out the new web video posting service, Kyte.com tonight. To do my premier test, I took an MPEG video that I had lying around and uploaded it to their service. It was pretty straightforward, and I was also able to add a viewer poll to the video. I wish that I could pop the poll up at the end, I don't like it covering the video, but the service is new, and I didn't tinker with it much...



This video is from a email that circulated in late 2000 and shows a Yogoslavian or Croatian made four chamber .22 caliber gun. It is encased in a chassis resembling a mobile phone and buttons on the keypad are used to fire the rounds.

Note that these have not been found on U.S. soil, only Eastern Europe, and airport screeners have been trained to look for these weapons. This story is really only a test, but I wanted to throw a gadget into it that would make you think twice about why things like this even make their way out of people's minds and into the world.

Vista Media Center dual-screen bug

Media Center Primary HDTV - Web second monitor under Vista
Originally uploaded by gadget.

If you use a dual-screen monitor setup these days (with LCD monitors so cheap, who isn't?) there is a good chance that you will perform work on your primary monitor (the screen with the start button) and use the second monitor to multi-task and enjoy some media. I typically use my Sling Player or the Winows Media Center interface on my second monitor.

These days, I am testing Windows Vista Media Center Edition with a HDHomeRun ATSC/QAM digital tuner which outputs its video via dual 26mbps Ethernet streams. Vista does not require a legacy analog tuner, which is an improvement over MCE 2005, but there is a glaring and obvious bug. My Vista powerhouse machine (trust me, the OS requires it) is a 2.4GHz Dual Core with 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 7900 WDDM video card.

The problem with this system (besides Vista not supporting many multimedia conversion utilities) is a glaring BUG that the Media Center development team did not fix. When you move the mouse over to the Media Center monitor, make a seclection with the mouse, etc, then try to slide it back across the screen to the primary monitor, it "hits a wall." That is, as soon as you click within the Media Center "full screen" interface, your mouse becomes "locked" on that screen.

To fix this; use the Windows Media Center interface in a stretched (not maximized) window or if you are in full screen mode, you can hit ALT-TAB to re-activate the primary screen window, then after the flickering ensues, you can then move your mouse off the Media Center window and onto the Primary screen.

What a silly bug to have to blog about...