shahine.com/omar/

A long time ago, I started a quest to find a portable music player that matched the iPod in every way. This is now my 4th device in that journey.

That quest is now complete, thanks to the Philips GoGear HDD1630 6GB (also in 30GB).

I can’t begin to explain how impressed I am that a device is finally available that offers:

• Good Sync experience (does not come with any proprietary crappy software, relies on Windows Media Player, and does not push some other agenda on you)
• Good design
• Good out of box experience
• Nice Color screen
• Photo support

The device has the best PlaysForSure support of any non Portable Media Center device. A bunch of devices that claim PlaysForSure can have other hidden surprises like USB 1.1 support (not 2.0), buggy sync experience, no support for subscription audio etc. A good clue if your device really supports Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) or is a mass storage device is if it has subscription audio support. You can still get PlaysForSure support by having a mass storage device since that will technically sync with WMP (like my Samsung YP -F1Z) but you will be dissapointed as I was to find that the experience is buggy at best. So, when buying PlaysForSure make sure it has both regular audio and subscription audio.

MTP support is what allows this device to finally sync such things as:

• Album Art
• Ratings
• Play Count
• Playlists

I’ll post a review in the next few days. This device really shatters the devices that Creative and iRiver make (which is great cause I never had very high hopes for those guys). Creative seems like a hopeless cause to me.

So if you are looking to buy some one a holiday gift and were thinking of an iPod cause it was the only game in town, take a look at the GoGear device. They are just as sleek, sexy, well designed and usable as an iPod (well the Video definitely raises the bar again).

Wierd title, but it's true. http://digg.com is a great site. I was never one to like reading slashdot, so I checked out digg and found that the design, site layout, and content was more to my liking.

I mainly read it from live.com as I find it's the perfect kind of feed for the live.com dashboard style rss reader.

BTW - Why in the bleeping hell does IE allow web pages to steal focus from the address bar? 9 times out of 10 I find myself typing a url when pages like msn.com and live.com steal the focus away from me multiple times. update: appears that all the focus issues were related to the MSN Toolbar. live.com no longer steals focus. I guess I’ll have to use firefox to get back tabbed browsing.

If some one told you to design a stylus retention mechanism, is this what you would come up with? If it was I’d fire you.

As you can see, the re-enforcement is in the wrong place, creating flex in the thin plastic. Over time the plastic wears out and it breaks, making the pen fall out of the case.

I fixed this by taking the device apart, and sticking some rubber at the end of the stylus silo to create enough resistance to keep the pen in place. Shoddy engineering. No wonder carriers test phones for so long. Imagine if 100% of the devices you sold needed to be serviced after 30 days?

If you have an HTC Wizard (k-jam), get ready for this. It will happen to you.

Ray just blogged about something he and his CTO team have cooked up since joining Microsoft. He calls is Simple Sharing Extensions, and it’s a really cool way to solve some hella hard problems by bootstraping on RSS. I got wind of SSE a while back when Ray came down to meet some of us in Hotmail. It was the first time I met Ray and I was incredibly impressed with what he had to say, and the approach he was taking to solving the problem around sharing of calendar and contacts data. Here is why SSE will succeed where other technologies have failed:

1. It doesn’t invent anything that doesn’t already exist. SSE makes use of RSS and XML namespaces.
2. It does not dictate a transport protocol. Anything can be used, including such things as HTTP and P2P file sharing
3. It doesn’t dictate how the RSS fragments are ACL’ed.

It’s quite simple, yet very powerful way to deliver software that can finally allow users to share data in a “mesh” scenario. I really look forward to one day sharing certain events on my calendar with my wife, and allowing her to read/write into my calendar (we both have Exchange accounts in different places as well as MSN Calendar accounts and we can’t do simple calendar sharing).

Congrats to Ray, Jack and George for getting this out there.

I’ve had one of these on my wishlist for a while, and I just saw that Radio Shack is selling them for $29.95 (normally $99.95).

You can find it at radioschack.com by searching for catalog # 63-1085.

Cool device. It gets the weather forcast wirelessley from accuweather.com.

[via ambient411]

A lot of people seem really excited about the new Windows Live Custom Domains. I've seen some great individual posts on blogs about the service. Some folks left me some comments asking questions about the service. Well it turns out that the team has a blog that answers most of these questions.

There is one unfortunate thing about the service and that is the accounts are on classic hotmail (not Kahuna). We'll hopefully address that soon.

Oh, and I'd like to note. Some people have noticed, but this is hopefully one of many SBG (Shipped Before Google) features :-P.

I think Sony has single handeldly re-invented the word, and what it means to harm consumers. Watching the events unfold over the past few weeks has been surreal. It's the first time I've witnessed a blog really uncover a REALLY BAD situation, and turn the screws to a company.

Need to catch up on some cool stuff Kahuna team members have blogged about. Aditya has a few good posts on two subjects near and dear to my heart: FireAnt and Watson.

In his FireAnt post he discusses the rational that went into the wire format that we chose for moving data from the server to the client. Lots of good stuff here on why we went this route. We called our wire format FireAnt Proxy Protocol (or FPP).

In his Watson post he talks about how Kahuna can report both client and server errors (javascript and code exceptions) to the Watson system that most Microsoft Win32 applications use. Watson is simply da bomb. We can get a really good view of what kind of errors our users are hitting, and address them in the next release, or if they are severe enough, in a service pack. I believe that we are the first Microsoft Web Application that uses Watson w/o running any client software on the user's machine. Almost every week we get a report from our QA team about the top Watson issues, and how many "hits" we've seen total, and in the past week. For the next release of Kahuna (M4) we've addressed all the issues we've been able to reproduce. For others we've added more diagnostic code to get more information.

Finally, Aditya announced that he will be moving to Shanghai, to work in our MSN Shanghai Tech Center. We actually have a small team of really smart developers and testers over in Shanghai that are working on various aspects of Kahuna. For those of you that have Kahuna accounts, they are responsible for getting the MSN Calendar into the M3 release of Kahuna which is a project I worked on in my "spare time" while also working on Kahuna M3. I'll be going over to Shanghai in a few weeks to hang with them.

Aditya (who is one of the folks I manage) is one of the co-creaters of FireAnt, the technology that we built Kahuna on. While he'll be missed around the hallways of our campus, he'll be continuing to do some great stuff over in China. It's an amazing opportunity, and I'm really excited about growing and building a strong product development team there.

Reeves has a great review of some photo sharing sites, and why he settled down on smugmug.

When I was in Egypt, I decided to read Flags of our Fathers. It is written by James Bradley who is the son of one of the flag raisers. Before reading this book I knew jack about Iwo Jima. The Iwo Jima photo everyone knows when they see it is of the picture that was taken by Joe Rosenthal. It's apparently the most reproduced image in history, and isn't even a picture of the original flag raising. Nevertheless, the story is incredible.

The book is about the men who are in that picture. It talks about their lives before the war, life as a marine in WWII, and what became of them after the war. I can't begin to describe how I felt while reading this book. It was one of the few times in my life where I felt actual immense gratitude for the sacrifices of those who fought and the many who died in the battle (it was one of the deadliest in American History). I really believe every American should read this book, but for now I'll leave you with a quote that was chiseled outside the cemetery where 3 of the flag raisers lay:

When you go home
Tell them for us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today

I've finally gotten around to updating Send to smugmug. Here are the fixes in 1.0.5316.0:

• You can select folders and individual images
• You can change your login to a different smugmug account
• some fixes for pro user album settings
• images loaded in the background
• bad images should not cause error messages
• you can filter uplaoded images, keywords, and ratings from the upload
• lots and lots of small little things fixed

You will receive a notification that there is a new version if you launch the old version, or you can just download from the link above.

This is one of my favorite live sites, and I've been waiting to blog about for a few weeks.

If you have a custom domain (like me) and you want to give out free hosted email accounts to family members and friends (in my case, shahine.com has a few accounts that my family uses) go to http://domains.live.com/.

Windows Live Custom Domains allows you to basically point your MX record to us (Windows Live) and get free Windows Live Mail accounts, messenger accounts, and well anything you can use a passport for. No longer are any @hotmail.com or @msn.com domains necessary. You can get or use your own domain, and then enable all these great services. Plus you maintain control of your domain, so you can have your web site hosted elsewhere, etc. Only your email services are hosted by us. You can also kick people out of your domain, sign up for premium features in our network (like extra storage accounts, outlook live, msn premium etc).

Oh, did I mention, the service is FREE. All you need is access to change your DNS records. Once you do that you can create accounts and give them out for folks to start using.

Reeves has an awesome tutorial on how to Geotag your photos. I just did this for my trip to Egypt and Paris and it’s unbelievably cool.

The hardest part was dealing with lots of indoor/outdoor photos and aligning those to the timeline. You also need to change your PC Timezone to whichever timezone you took the pictures when stamping them.

If you are looking for a good inexpensive GPS device to use with your camera to geotag, I highly recommend the Garmin Foretrex 101. Make sure you also order the serial cable.

Jimmy Grewal’s Weblog » I can’t believe it’s real snow

Imagine, most people in the middle east have never seen snow. I wouldn’t even know how that felt. It must feel sureal.

Flight Test Journal: Mission accomplished! 777-200LR sets world distance record

Mission accomplished! 777-200LR sets world distance record

This is actually pretty cool. Flying more than half way around the world on a single tank of gas .