Someone at ZuneScene has figured out how to modify the registry so that the Zune player will show up on your computer as a removable storage device allowing you to copy files to your player, transfer them via Wifi to other Zune users so that they too can bring it home and copy it to their computer!

While the hack doesn’t assign an actual drive letter to your Zune, and you have to cheat a little by renaming your files with a .jpg extension, it still makes for a pretty quick and easy solution to share files between Zune users!

The way this works is that once you’re able to access the Zune via your PC directly, the Zune itself believes the files stored on its drive are just really big JPEGs.

I wonder how long before Microsoft decides to shut this down with a mandatory firmware update…

This is a Firefox extension for all you Flash developers out there. The ever so aptly named Flash Switcher extension for Firefox does exactly as it says, allow you to change between every published version of Flash there is from version 2 to 9.0.16 or no Flash at all. See how backwards compatible your Flash applications are or how they perform under different situations.

A little old news, but still amusing enough to be post worthy

Microsoft confirmed on the 17th that the new Zune the “iPOD Killer”, which hit markets this past Tuesday, is not yet supported by their new Windows Vista product but will be available to end users by the end of January.

While I’m a little surprised about the announcement I can also see where Microsoft is coming from. Why release support for the new player when no one is technically supposed to be using the new operating system to begin with? Sure it was released to manufacturers on November 8th but consumers won’t see the light of Vista until the January 30th release date which is coincidentally when Zune support comes out. Hmm….

Methinks Microsoft wanted to hold out to cause a little bit of grief for all those people out there who have downloaded the RTM copy of Vista and also ran out to get a Zune. While I wonder how many people this actually affects, still a good call in my opinion.

Well, I think it’s time that I give this blog a new name… Its original purpose was to be a personal journal to rant, rave and share stuff from my personal life but that quickly changed when I found myself posting stuff more on what I was interested in instead of what I had intended.

So I’m open to suggestions. I was thinking maybe “Ken in Tech,” but I’d like to hear what you all have to say. Operators are standing by

The keyboard that geeks around the world have been drooling over is finally being offered for per-order come December 12, 2006. While there is no pricing out yet for the Optimus-103, I’m sure people will be “lining up” to get in on the action before they decide to stop taking orders. Anyone who wants to follow along with the Optimus Project can check out their blog here for the latest news and announcements. As much as I want one of these, I think I’ll wait until after the first batch reaches the desk of fanboys to see how they perform.

My grandfather passed away this morning. At the strong age of 89, my grandfather slipped away from his coma. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, according to a robot built by NEC System technologies and Mie University that is. Hopefully this isn’t the beginning of a robot uprising…

The robot was created as “an electromechanical sommelier”, capable of identifying wines, cheeses, meats and hors d’oeuvres. Upon receiving the sample, the little robot will speak up and tell you want it was fed.

But when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot’s omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.

Looks like now is the time to get that book on How To Survive a Robot Uprising. Check out the article on Wired to see a picture of the robot so you know what to look out for. I’m sure those big eyes light up a deep red when it’s on the hunt for humans…

The idea behind OpenDNS is really quite neat and may prove useful for those of us who have residential clients.

So what is OpenDNS? Well simply put, it’s a caching DNS server open to the public with a twist. The first feature OpenDNS provides is, as mentioned, it’s faster response since it doesn’t need to go out and find the IP because it already knows it. But what sets OpenDNS apart from any other caching DNS server is that it also provides simple spell check and, in collaboration with PhishTank.com, protection against known phishing sites.

The spell check isn’t always going to work obviously with so many weird domains out there, it’s hard for it to really know what you were looking for. It does however, catch simple mistakes like typing .cmo instead of .com or a .or instead of .org, etc. If it can’t be sure, it’ll return a quick list of search results from which you can click on or try again.

While this may not be something advanced users may want to take advantage of, it might be nice to set up on computers used by people not quite as tech savvy and may not know a phishing site when it hits them.