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For the longest time I've wanted to get a digital picture frame. Well, they are finally big enough and affordable enough that I took the plunge and purchased one. Now that we have a little one, I wanted something at work that I can keep on my desk at work and keep the pictures fresh. Right now I have a bunch of ancient analog pictures that are really dusty.

So, with that in mind I was in Costco the other day and saw the Digital Spectrum NV700 for like $120. Since I was thinking of getting the Philips 9 inch frame which is twice that price I jumped at the chance to get a frame almost as big for cheaper. Well big mistake. That thing is a piece of junk. For one thing, it's got some bizarre resolution (I could not actually figure out the resolution from a bunch of test images I tried) and it will always scale your images using it's cheap horrible scaler which will make any good looking picture look distorted. Their web site claims the resolution is 480 x 234 pixels. Just so you know how weird that looks, most digital cameras shoot pictures in 4:3 or 3:2 ratio of horizontal to vertical pixels. Consumer point and shoot are generally are 4:3 while SLRs are 3:2.

Here are some examples of what that translates to.

The Digital Spectrum would be effectively 2:1

Who wants to look a a frame that makes people either look extra skinny or extra fat?

Anyway, back to Costco it went (within 2 hours). Next I took advantage of our Microsoft Employee Purchase Discount at Philips and got the frame I should have gotten in the first place. The quality of the Philips frame is amazing, and it also has a built in battery allowing you to unplug it from it's location, move it to your PC so you can upload some new pics over USB. The viewing angle is great and I'm really pleased with the frame.

The Philips frame comes in two sizes, 9 inch and 7 inch. Each is available in a number of finishes. I got the 9 inch milk frame. Note that Amazon and Philips are using different metrics to size the frame. I have no idea what's going on there. The Native Resolution of the Philips 9 inch or 8 inch (depending on who you believe) is 720 x 480 which is good old 3:2 (thanks for pointing out my mistake Tommy).

I have Vista Ultimate running at home on our family iMac. If I were a consumer I would make sure this was the version of Vista my machine was running. Why? Because it has a feature called "volume shadow copy". Here is the description from a Microsoft site:

Have you ever accidentally saved over a file you were working on? Accidental file deletion or modification is a common cause of data loss. Windows Vista includes another useful innovation to help you protect your data: Previous Versions. This feature automatically creates point-in-time copies of files as you work, so you can quickly and easily retrieve versions of a document you may have accidentally deleted.

Last week, I dumped a bunch of pictures and videos of our daughter Sarah from my wife's camera to our iMac. Later that week I decided to sync all our 11,000 photos from my home office machine to our iMac so my wife could tag them etc. Well in doing so I overwrote the contents of the Users\Public\Pictures folder where I had previously copied the pictures of Sarah. These were irreplaceable photos and videos of Sarah's first days and my wife would have killed me had I not remembered reading about the "Previous Versions" feature in Vista.

So what did I do? Well after I was done panicking, I right clicked on the Pictures folder, selected the Previous Versions tab, selected the Pictures folder version from the day before, clicked Open and copied the folder of pictures and videos over. I then copied that folder back to my home office machine to be automatically backed up to Carbonite. Eventually I will configure SyncToy to keep the two computers in sync or get a Home NAS server, but for now, disaster was averted.

I don't know about you, but this feature alone was worth the upgrade. If you are a consumer, this feature is only available in Vista Ultimate. It's also found in Business and Enterprise Editions.

Yeah, Ultimate is more expensive than Home Premium or the other editions, but it's Ultimate for a reason .

Uh, looks like I was tagged to write a post about 5 things people don't know about me... I don't even know what a "meme" is. Why do I have to write it? Because Sanaz tagged me. Oh, and I almost fell out of my chair when I read Mike's #3. I am guilty of getting rid of a gadget or two because I scratched it... I'm also borderline OCD, but not nearly as bad as Mike... Geez man, that's creepy... but I aspire to have OCD like yours...

1. I can't spell without a spell checker (well some people know about that). With a spell checker I use the wrong words (like homonyms). This is a direct result of #2.
2. My first language was French. My second language was Arabic. I learned English when I had to attend Nursery School, a side effect of that was I forgot my French and managed to average a B- for 7 years in school. I hate languages, except computer languages (cause they have rules allowing them to be compiled unlike spoken languages that have more exceptions than rules).
3. I was pre-med in college, applied to like 20 medical schools and never got in. I was devastated as that's what I spent a good chunk of my life at that point trying to do, but it was also the best thing in the world that ever happened to me. I would have been a terrible doctor. Instead I got lucky because Dick hired me pretty much on the spot at Macworld... but only after I asked my mother if it was Ok for me to go work at Microsoft. Anyway, my wife turned out to be an amazing Doctor and I'm much happier we're not both Doctors.
4. I have a filling in almost every tooth in my mouth. I spent an ungodly number of hours in the dentist office and an ungodly amount of money for that privilege. What you don't know is that for every cavity you have, you're chances of later having to replace that filling, or worse, get a crown or inlay is pretty high. Oh, and these things don't last forever. A result of my misery and the quickly disappearing money I was spending on this problem is that I started to floss on Jan 1st 3 years ago and have yet to get another cavity. My only problems have been issues related to my existing cavities or chipped teeth (as a result of the fillings in my mouth). I only wished I started flossing a decade ago.
5. When I was in grade school I wanted a job one summer. I applied for a job picking strawberries in a field. I wasn't paid by the hour, and in fact this wasn't a legitimate or legal job. I was paid by how many strawberries I picked. Well, I sucked at picking strawberries, and I made half of minimum wage cause I was so slow. One morning I woke up and it was drizzling. I called my "boss" and said it's raining and I'm not coming to work. He fired me. It's the only time I've ever been fired . I used my money to go see a movie and buy some popcorn.

Lets see. I'll tag Trina, Reeves, Mike, Aditya and Dan.

The awesome inline search plugin that I blogged about a while back received some updates and has an impressive list of changes. I find that the plugin now works much better in IE 7 and fully behaves under tabbed mode.

Mike Torres forgot to mention IE 7's totally inconsistent menus, but this was a post I was planning to write anyway. Look at all the vista/live apps and you can see just how each app decided to throw away the file menu we all know how to use and replace with toolbars, buttons and other widgets. Each app is different and inconsistent. Office 2007 however is remarkably consistent and well designed (for the apps that got the ribbon). I hope this gets fixed in Vista +1.

While you are at it, check out the Outlook 2007 SideBar Gadgets, they rock.

I would never be caught dead with these things on my ears. Seriously I don't get bluetooth headphones. Who the heck wants to run out of batteries on their headphones (let alone portable device)?

Two people that I know have written excellent articles comparing the latest breed of Windows Mobile Smartphone devices to the Blackberry. I've never used a Blackberry and I suspect most Microsoft Employees never have. As such our expectations of what a data centric smartphone should be like are probably lame. For example there are two features that the Blackberry has that are just killer features and I would have never expected from our own platform for a variety of reasons.

1. When you place a blackberry in the holster it turns off the screen and buttons preventing any unexpected interactions.
2. When you receive an email and go to grab the device within a specified time frame it will automatically display the email. What's that? You mean the device actually knows what I want to do?

Both of these are good examples of the harmony you realize when you create both the hardware and the software (like our favorite fruit company). The experience is simply unmatched. I doubt Windows Mobile will ever get there simply because of this fact, but also because most people at Microsoft who might simply do a drive by competitive analysis would never notice some of these features. The same way a Windows user would never notice the amazing ambient light detection on a MacBook Pro Keyboard.

Anyway, my co-worker, Steve Schreiber talks about his experiences with Windows Mobile and the Q and my fellow blogger Greg Hughes talks about his experiences with the Samsung Blackjack (my current phone).

My favorite idea is this one from Steve:

I find myself wondering if anyone who designs these “Blackberry killers” has ever used a Blackberry for any amount of time.  A good friend of mine has a Windows Mobile based Treo, which he uses to sync to his own corporate Exchange system.  When speaking of the dissatisfaction that he had with that device, and the same displeasure his wife had with her Q, he suggested that “those guys in your company’s Windows Mobile group need to (1) have their desktop Outlook turned off; (2) be issued Blackberry devices and have to use them for 30 days; (3) have the their Blackberries taken away and issued Treo or Moto Q devices for 30 more days.  If that doesn’t cause a light bulb to go off in their heads, then nothing will.”

I couldn’t agree more.  The only thing I can hope is that this type of exercise will happen before the next round of devices hit the scene and that Microsoft will hold their ODM partners to a higher standard before allowing them to ship with a Windows Mobile device.

I hope folks in the MDD Group (Mobile Devices Division) will take these two excellent write ups to heart and improve the experience moving forward.

I while ago I complained about how Remote Assistance is an awesome feature in Windows XP, but that I wished for a way to offer some one remote assistance. You see, every time I need to use Remote Assistance to fix something on my parents computer, I often spend 5 minutes explaining to them (again) how to go into Messenger and invite me to fix their computer. It's PAINFUL. Anyway, I wrote about this, and was messing around with Vista today and found a new menu item in the Actions menu called Offer Remote Assistance.

THANK YOU WHOEVER DID THIS!

You've saved me countless minutes!

Update: here is how you access this feature.

1. open a conversation window
2. go to the action menu
3. select offer remote assistance

Came home today, inserted a CD in my iMac that is running Vista + bootcamp and nothing happened.

Went to the device manager and I saw this message under my DVD drive:

Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)

Hmmm, did the driver uninstall/re-install etc. I even clicked "Check for solutions" half knowing that would do nothing (if it did, apparently searching the web for a solution was far more effective).

I remember something like this happening to me once on XP. I was about to re-install Windows, but I did something to the registry that fixed the problem. Sure enough I found this post in a forum:

Start Registry Editor (Start, Run and type in regedit then click)

Find "UpperFilters" and "LowerFilters" (and "UpperFilters.bak" "LowerFilters.bak", if they exist) value under the following key in the registry, and delete it:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

Quit Registry Editor.

Reboot.

Guess what? I did that and it worked. What the heck? Why is this so darned cryptic? What is UpperFilters and LowerFilters anyway and why does deleting them and rebooting them fix the problem, something that uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers does not do?

Anyway, I suspect this same problem would have manifested itself in XP and that some piece of software screwed this up. But I wish that Vista could have helped me out here.

Update: Now I remember how this happened. I installed Photoshop Elements 5, tried it out, didn't like it, so I uninstalled it. Cruise on over to Adobe and you will read all about Upper and Lower Filters and that some kind of install process corrupts these keys rendering the drive useless.

Background information

The UpperFilters and LowerFilters keys in the Windows registry store information about CD and DVD burning drivers. When you add or remove CD and DVD burning applications, these registry keys are altered and they can become corrupted. When you remove the registry keys and restart the computer, Windows refreshes the keys. Some applications may use a different burning driver than the application you reinstalled. If the other CD or DVD burning applications installed on your computer cannot access the drive after Windows refreshes the registry keys, you will need to reinstall those applications before they can access the drive.

Wonderful. I love software.

The OS should not be this fragile IMHO allowing a device driver to stop working so easily.

Did you know that you can control-click non contiguous days in the Outlook mini cal? I had no idea, a co-worker told me the other day. Not sure why I didn't discover this, but it allows you to do neat things like see Saturday and Sunday for two weekends in the calendar view.

I'm guilty as charged... I do the note pad paste a few times a day.

Here is a neat trick. When you are in Word (or WordMail in Outlook), select a bunch of text and enter control-space. This will clear the formatting and set it to the default style. However, it's a bit buggy because some times it thinks the default style is Times New Roman rather than Verdana or Calibri. This is probably due to some legacy code from when I was in diapers.

I guess this is an example of software trying to do too much. Most of the time when I cut-and-paste, I just want the text, not the formatting. I know the software is trying to do the right thing, but I usually don't trust it anyway. When I paste from Word to Powerpoint, say, I have little faith that the data is really the way it appears. Even if it LOOKS right, I'm suspicious that there is some magic code embedded in there such that when I do something unexpected (like, say, hit delete at the end of the previous line) the whole thing is going to turn purple. Yes, I know Ctrl-space is supposed to remove formatting, but I don't really believe that either. And I don't want to hunt around for the little icon with paste options, only to find that it is not offering "Paste text only" as an option.

So I do the "notepad paste". You probably know what I mean. You run notepad, copy the data in the first app, paste it into notepad, reselect it in notepad, and paste that into the other app. It works because notepad is so simple that all it provides in the source data is the text itself. So the paste operation automatically takes on the formatting, bulleting, fonting, etcing of the target document, which is what I want. It works perfectly every time.

Hopefully the next version of Office will make it a goal to eliminate the notepad paste. If not, they should make it a standard keyboard shortcut. Ctrl-N could be "notepad paste". Ship it.

Source: The Annoying Need for "Notepad Paste"

Mark Russinovich, who now works at Microsoft, has a great post on why there is a delay when opening the File->Open dialog in Vista.

When I read posts like this I think "I can't believe that in all the man hours that went into Vista, no one caught this bug". But then I also think, this is a classic example of why bugs exist. The developer who wrote the feature that grabs the user name for the bread crumb bar had no idea that some other piece of code deep in the bowels of the OS was going to choke when your domain joined machine wasn't connected to the network. And the fact that the system caches the name for 30 min makes this bug one of those hard to reproduce bugs that usually takes an extremely patient tester to persevere and find the repro case to prevent the bug from getting punted as "not repro" so that the developer can clear his bug queue.

I bet Mark opened a bug in the Vista Product Studio Database and some poor developer is going to be assigned this bug and he is going to be like "How the #$%! did he find this".

I totally 100% agree here. I LOVE the Samsung Blackjack commercial. It's on TV all the time and it's very cool. Who knew Cingular could be this cool? 

So many folks at work are snapping up this phone.

"One thing that Verizon does well is marketing. Cingular does a decent job, but not good enough in my opinion. The new Blackjack, that is so good that I bought one to keep for myself, has a nice marketing campaign starting up. There has been commencials and I have seen prominent web banner ads already."

This is one great and creative commercial. It makes me want to get a BlackJack. Oh wait, I already have one. ...

Source: Cingular Blackjack TV Commercial