Boxee Media Server Rocks!!!

 

Heard of Media Server mania from friends, colleagues, blogs, but I never got into using it, even though I run Vista in my laptop and desktop, may be because I don’t watch TV or movies much. After seeing the media server features recently at a friends place I totally got hooked, he was running media server through PS3. But I don’t have a PS3, did gave some thought about buying it, but I am not into video games and buying a gaming console to use as media server seemed over kill. Long time back I read a blog post in life hacker about Boxee and thought would give a try. I am still kind of in the WOW!!! state, still discovering new things and playing around with it.

Here are simple steps to get your own media server going, with a old may be unused desktop or laptop.

1. Install Boxee http://www.boxee.tv/ on the desktop/laptop and register for an account

2. Hook up the desktop/laptop to TV, most new HDTV’s come with a RCA or HDMI ports, if old TV with no RCA or HDMI, you can use one of the cheap RCA to composite converters or may be if s-video port available then s-video to composite converter.

3. Run Boxee (this will run in full screen mode), make sure turn off the firewall or add exception for the port Boxee server is taking input on for the remote.

4. One can use any PC Remote or Microsoft Media Server Remote to control Boxee UI. In my case a old StreamZap PC Remote (http://www.streamzap.com/) worked great with no additional (actually none) settings or hacks.

5. Best of all, IPhone App (http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/03/15/boxee-iphone-remote-app-available-on-the-app-store/) for Boxee, it comes with minimum buttons but does great job, its real pleasure to sit with my IPhone and browse and view my local videos, pics, songs and online TV shows. Even better don’t have to point my Phone to any PC or TV as its all over Wifi I can sit any direction any where hold my IPhone how ever and control my media content.

6. If you don’t want to engage your Phone and miss playing on it while watching TV, then there is a Boxee Remote Control app, which was build for MAC OS but runs great on windows using Kludgets, here is the link to set it up on one of your laptops or Netbooks and enjoying watching all your media content on TV controlling from your laptop/netbook http://lot49.org/dev/

a. Download and Install Kludgets on your windows

b. Download the Boxee Remote Control widget from http://lot49.org/dev/ and copy the widget to the widgets folder under your Kludgets installation directory

c. Finally Right Click on Kludgets in your Tray and open the Boxee Widget Package.

I am still discovering new things as I enjoy watching my Media in a awesome way, will keep updating this post as I discover new things.

 

 

-- Kiran Bheemarti

Re-Enable Visual Studio packages

 

I learnt it accidently, some times few packages fail to load when visual studio is started, studio sets skip flags to these packages (e.g., Team Explorer, Testing etc., packages), these packages fail to show up even after they are re-installed and repaired.

FIX : Run visual studio from command-line with a special command line switch which removes all such skip package flags and try’s to reload all the packages once again.

Command : devenv /ResetSkipPkgs

--Kiran Bheemarti

Google Contacts create/edit groups

 

As we all start using Google Voice, it has become even more important to arrange our google contacts into appropriate groups, so that we customize the phone ring (forward) feature in the Goolge voice control panel. But there is no easy way to bulk add/edit/delete contacts to groups or create groups out of the bunch of selected contacts. May be this feature will be added to Google Contacts control panel in future.

Meanwhile there is a easy solution and here are the steps.

1. Add the groups you want and assign at least one contact per group

2. Export your contacts to a csv file

3. Open the file in Microsoft Excel or any editor you like, there will be a group field, add comma separate groups to contacts easily in the editor, reason I said to add one contact at least each group was, that way the group will show up in the file and you can copy paste or follow the format

4. Now save the file and import it back to your google contacts, let the contacts be merged.

You will have your groups created easily this way.

--Kiran Bheemarti

Google Chrome still missing google toolbar, but a solution finally

 

Google’s new browser google chrome is still missing google toolbar, I rely a lot on the bookmarks feature of the google toolbar, I am surprised why google chrome is missing the toolbar still.

There is finally a solution though to get around the Bookmarks problem, you have to switch to the DEV Channel of Chrome first for that. Check the instruction in the following link below to get onto DEV channel

http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

Once you switch to the DEV channel, we will get the latest and greatest chrome builds from their DEV channel and one of the features of the latest build is import of bookmarks from google bookmarks.

 

 

Go to Tools->Import, you have to first be logged into a google account on a different tab before you can see the Google Toolbar option.

--Kiran Bheemarti

HttpHandler create and debug

Recently was working on creating a HttpHandler for PDF to handle differently the way PDF are rendered on our site, I got frustrated by the fact that the breakpoint in the Handler was hitting if path = "*" and not if I change it to path = "*.pdf". After googling around frustrated I found the answer and answer made me realize how dumbly I was hitting F5 again and again and expecting for breakpoint to hit, while the control was not even with aspnet_isapi. PDF are not by default handled by aspnet_iaspi then of course breakpoint wont be hit.

Finally after finding out that one should add a PDF custom handler in the Inetmgr under the Mappings, I found that IIS5.1 wont let me add, OK button was disabled no matter what.

Here are the two articles that helped me through this frustration.

1. How to Build a HttpHandler : http://blogs.msdn.com/nikhiln/archive/2008/05/22/httphandler-to-authorize-file-downloads-c-code-sample.aspx

In the above article Nikhil mentioned to add just PDF without dot, but that did not work for me, the OK button got enabled only after I placed a Dot (Apparently there are lot of bugs around this window in Inetmgr)

2. How to add Mappings in Inetmgr. http://forums.devarticles.com/web-server-configuration-51/iis-problem-unable-to-add-application-extension-mapping-2527.html

 

--Kiran Bheemarti

Got my IPhone finally....Playing with it currently

 

If I search my blog, I blogged about IPhone 3G, June last year, I could not get it back then, for my contract was not over, finally got it now, playing with Add-on's in Apple Store, found few very interesting add-on's, especially Google Pack which is free.

Kiran Bheemarti

Reflector Add-in

 

Have two dll's same name version yet acting differently? Want to open them in Reflector and do a code diff, Reflector Diff is really awesome in this. Recent we had a similar problem with two dll's same name version sitting in ASPNET Temporary Files and we wanted to do a diff, my friend found this and it works awesome.

http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/2005/07/27/40364.aspx

Regards

Kiran Bheemarti