A few days ago, I blogged about the many problems people were having with the new iTunes. Well today, actually, looks like just a few hours ago, Apple popped out iTunes 7.0.1! I just installed it and so far, my problems haven’t come up… We’ll see how it goes.

UPDATE: Well, it’s kinda better… Still not completely fixed tho. When I have iTunes playing and then fire up Firefox, playback breaks up a little but recovers WAAAY better than 7.0 did.

You know. You’d think that by this time with USB drives, CD Roms and all that jazz that Microsoft would have updated their Windows installation CDs to take into account that not everyone has a floppy disk drive.

I’m installing Windows XP Pro on my desktop on a new SATA hard drive hooked up to an ASUS A8V motherboard. Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t think there are any drives on the system and I need to make a drivers disk in order to even get the installation started.

Lucky for me, I have a disk drive on the desktop. Not so lucky for me is that I have 2 other computers and they’re laptops without floppy drives. Great.

I had to dig out my old Sony laptop which is on the very brink of self destruction and create a floppy disk through IT!

For anyone looking for information on installing a fresh copy of Windows XP on a SATA drive, check out Chovy’s Blog post on what you need to do. It’s for the A8V but the steps are all the same for any other motherboard which requires drivers.

So this is interesting. We all know that Vista is going to be released in a number of flavours when it comes out and normally if a user wanted to upgrade from say, XP Home to XP Pro, they would have to head out and buy another copy.

In what I would assume is a move by Microsoft primarily to save money, and indirectly make it easier for customers to upgrade, they have decided to release all versions of Vista on the same DVD. There will still be specific copies of Vista for each of the versions but if someone decides to upgrade now, you’ll already have the DVD to do so.

This also makes it a little easier for software pirates since now you’ll only need to download one ISO, not that we would EVER do such a thing!! (but seriously, we all know everyone’s going to go for the Ultimate Edition right?)

To help with the confusion, the different versions of Vista DVDs will be colour coded to help you pick it out.
- Home Basic : Light Green
- Home Premium: Dark Green
- Business: Blue
- Ultimate Edition: Platium

For anyone who wants to try out Vista, you can still download RC1 from the Microsoft site.

Apple released a new version of iTunes full of new features. Unfortunately, along with the features there is what appears to be a bug. A number of people are reporting (including myself) that after upgrading to iTunes 7, the playback on MP3s was garbled like someone had turned up the amplification and everything was distorted. After a bit of digging, I found the solution on the Apple Support Forum.

The problem has something to do with the Size setting in your Quicktime audio settings. The way to fix this is to go into Control Panel > QuickTime Preferences, then to your Audio tab and change the size from 24 bit to 16 bit. If this is already the case, change it to 24 bit, apply it, then change it back to 16 bit.

Seems like the setting doesn’t get changed in the upgrade or something and for some reason, QuickTime won’t play nice with the Size set to 24 bit.

Restart iTunes if you haven’t already and you should be hearing the sweet sounds of music.

Every once in a while Microsoft actually comes up with something pretty revolutionary. In this case, a way that may change how we view or photos and perhaps even the many photos online. Photosynth will be able to essentially join your group of photos and create a virtual model of the area based on the photos in your album. In their example, they have tons of shots of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Italy which get joined and catalogued so that you can pretty much fly around the area and click on areas to view the actual photo or photos taken which share the same view.

While we can’t give Microsoft all the credit, we can surely see how this could grow into what Microsoft dreams as being an online community where if you had a photo and you didn’t know exactly where it was taken, you can put it into Photosynth and it would find out and show you other photos taken of the area.

As one of the Live Labs guys put it, “What if your photo collection was an entry point into the world, like a wormhole that you could jump through and explore…” There is some real neat potential here and I can’t wait to see how it develops! Check out the Live Labs website to see what new things they’re working on and more on topic, the Photosynth page to see some videos of the product.

In trying to improve image search results, Google has made a little game where you get to do the dirty work. Playing either as a guest or by creating a user, you and a partner (randomly selected person also playing), over a 90-second period, will be shown the same set of images and asked to label each image based on what they see. Once a keyword is matched, you move on to the next image.

Points are pretty much useless and are just a way of showing your contribution to the greater good of Google.
My only beef with this is that the images are so small it’s hard to see what some of these even are. Hopefully Google will fix this.

Enjoy!

With the power of game consoles getting more and more powerful and more and more like PCs, software developers are now presented with another avenue of development and platforms. One such movement is by Sony and the Folding@Home project.

A quote from the Folding@Home PS3 FAQ:

The PS3 client will also support some advanced visualization features. While the Cell microprocessor does most of the calculation processing of the simulation, the graphic chip of the PLAYSTATION 3 system (the RSX) displays the actual folding process in real-time using new technologies such as HDR and ISO surface rendering. It is possible to navigate the 3D space of the molecule using the interactive controller of the PS3, allowing us to look at the protein from different angles in real-time.

Now, I wonder how many people are actually going to leave their PS3s running 24/7?

Check out this video on YouTube and jump to about 3:30mins to see it in action on what appears to be a PS3 development console!