ctrl.altered.mind

When Google Video was launched back in June, 2005, not many could guess where Google wanted to take their new promising venture. The picture gets clearer now as Google Video has its own store where you can purchase copyrighted content such as TV shows and other video clips, that are protected by Google’s own DRM. While this initiative looks more promising than Apple’s range of offering via the iTunes Music (and Video?) Store, there are some more plusses to Google Video. To start with, you can upload your own videos, and also earn revenue from them. There is a ton of open rights content available already, and a good place to start looking is the Popular Videos section on the main page. The feature I liked the most, is the link that Google adds next to the video that allows you to put it on your own website. Some HTML code is generated, that can be easily copy-pasted into your blog page, for example, and a Flash-based embedded video interface is added. Its even easier to feature your choice of open rights video content on your page, with virtually no online storage cost (the video streams directly from Google, of course).

Here’s a video that I thought I’d propagate - the concept of a Matrix-style table tennis match is totally awesome.

And here’s a ‘Dodge this’ video, Lego style.

Then again, as Jon Lech Johansen (aka DVD Jon) says, ‘Down with DRM!’. On his ‘So Sue Me’ blog, he’s posted some code that allows you to remove the restricting feature in the Google Video Player that prevents playback of videos not hosted on Google servers (running the patch requires .NET runtime).

On Windows, I generally tend to pick my applications by typing the executable filenames in the Run window (Win+R). However, if you depend on the Start Menu > Applications menu to locate your programs, this will interest you the most. I discovered a very cluttered Start menu today, and decided to get it organized using X-Windows style context groups. Apparently, creating new folders manually within the Start menu folder does not help much, and it is a pain to drag and drop application shortcuts (especially if you have a ton of them). A quick search led me to a nicely written freeware application, called Tidy Start Menu (v2.7), that does the organizing for you in a couple of minutes. The categories are preset, but leave nothing to be desired. The application is complete with wizards to backup and restore start menu shortcuts, delete empty and redundant shortcuts, and import/export menus using XML files. Tidy Start Menu has an extended version (for $19.99 with their special Christmas pricing) if you need to create custom categories, or a context menu to easily uninstall programs, among other features.

If you average between 21 and 40 Google searches a day like I do, you’re bound to have a great deal of search history recorded in the background (assuming you are signed in to your Google account while you search). A new feature within Search History that I noticed, is a way to look at your search trends. Google can return your top ten search keywords, top sites and top clicks. Even more interesting are the monthly, weekly, and hourly search activity histograms. I just discovered that I am most likely to hit the search button at 10pm on a Wednesday in August.

Slashdot reported this morning that Microsoft has pulled Robert Fripp on to the Vista development wagon, to compose sound and audio themes for Windows Vista. This is very interesting indeed. A nice next step might be to invite guest programmers to write modules? Too bad Google already hired lead Firefox developer Ben Goodger. There’s also a 25-minute, behind-the-scenes video posted on the Channel 9 forum. Will people refrain from disabling Windows Frippertronics theme sounds now?

I have always used Bittorrent while on Windows, probably because of the high bandwidth connection at work, when I need to work on Matlab and Labview. However, I just recently tried out KTorrent - the default Torrent handler for KDE - and the experience was very impressive. KTorrent goes a step further than other clients such as ABC (Another Bittorrent Client), Azureus, and even Shareaza. The feature that I liked the most, is the ability to selectively download files within a torrent bundle. The latest version of KTorrent is 1.2rc1, and has an official SUSE 10.0 rpm for download, which was nice :-). Also, KTorrent allows integrated custom searches for torrents using your preferred engine. Google and Bittorrent.com are no-brainers, but you might also want to add sites such as OpenWares.org and Sourceforge.