Trevor May.ca

This is a very silly bad use of twitter and the kinda thing that people mock twitter about. But I wanted to try this media centre plugin that tweets what you’re doing on media centre. So it will tweet what tv show your watching, movie your watching or what music your listening too. Since this is rather useless info, I didn’t want to spam my real twitter account so I made a separate twitter account just for this http://twitter.com/trevangie_tv. You can follow it if you really wanna know what tv shows we’re watching, you will see the 50 kagillion wedding shows Angela watches

If your crazy like I clearly am and wanna try out this plugin, you can get it here.

When I download torrented movies I like to rename them so the folder and file names are all neat. I need all my movies in a sub folders because this is the way the “Media Browser” Media center plugin in the post below requires. The AVI file needs to be named the same as the folder as well. This can be rather tedious, so I wrote a PHP script to automate renaming downloaded movies. I then used a tool called “bamcompile” to compile the php script into an executable that can be dropped into any folder and ran.

The script will scan through all the folders in the loation the exe is places, it will rename the folder all nice, format the data in the title and delete anything after the date. It will then rename all the files inside the folder to match, along with deleting any nfo and txt files.

For example a folder named “Tropic.Thunder[2008]DvDrip-aXXo” would be renamed to “Tropic Thunder (2008)“.

Most torrents you download the movie is already in a sub-folder, but if they are not, or if you have a ton of old movies all in one folder, you can use this simple DOS batch script my friend made for me to move each file into a sub-folder. movie_folder_tool

I also see someone recently made a batch file that does the same thing available here.

This is a great plugin for Vista Media Center that i’ve been using for a couple years. I has gone through a couple developers and several names, it is now known as “Media Browser”. Each new release gets better and better, the new version has the cool 3D reflective list mode. It also dynamically fetches attractice backgrounds when viewing a movies info.

Developers Blog: http://blog.manghera.com
Download here: http://code.google.com/p/videobrowser/downloads/list (MCE_Media_Browser_2_0_8_0.msi)

I decided it was time to overclock my CPU to get some extra performance. I have an Intel Q6600 which is a very overclockable CPU. But i was using the stock heatsink/fan so i had to buy a better one. After a bunch of research i found that probably the best combination for performance but not too loud was.

Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme Heatsink
Scythe S-Flex Sff21F 120MM Fan

This heatsink was a bitch ass to install and its always a pain to rip out the entire motherboard to install the backplate, but it was done. For the fan layout I decided to have the heatsink fan push air upwards towards the outtake fan at the top of the case, rather than the usual setup of pushing air out the back. I figured hot air rises so might have a bit of a difference going up. The other back fan is also an outtake fan, so I am creating a low pressure environment.

I then proceeded to overclock with the help of this good guide i found, and it worked perfectly. And after much stress testing things seem stable and heat acceptable. I did think this heatsink would lower my ambient cpu temperature more than it did. But the big difference is when I did overclock the heat didn't rise that much, where as my old heatsink it did.

So the Q6600 stock is 2.4Ghz x 4 cores. I overclocked to 3.0Ghz x 4 cores. A good 600Mhz with little rise in ambient temperature. I think i will leave it here for awhile, I could certainly go further, getting into changing the multiplier and voltages. But I am happy with this for now.

I did decided to try and lower the timings on my RAM a bit though, stock they are 5-5-5-12, so I tried 4-4-4-12 and after doing some stress tests it is still stable. The memory bandwidth went from 5.89 GB/s to 6.00 GB/s. So not a large increase but what the heck.

The strange thing is, this…

[ Continued ]

Various video footage has been making its rounds on various tech news and forum sites this week of Microsoft's Touch Table technology. Well I just saw a video that show an application for the technology that I never saw in the first videos I saw.

Could It be the solution to the problem and hassle of splitting up large bills at restaurants when you go to dinner with large groups of friends??? I have been saying for years someone needs to come up with a solution to this. With this Touch table, it could be possible for everyone to put their credit card on the table, then drag over the items you ordered to your card. Checkout the following video on the below link to see a short example, the credit card example is near the end of the video.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/sticker-shoc … 264453.php