Category: Tech

Microsoft has created one of my favorite new websites: www.theie6countdown.com. The site is dedicated to the eradication of Internet Explorer 6. What’s funny is that Microsoft created internet explorer 6 and now they’ve built the website counting down to it’s death. If you remember, McBlog used to promote switching browsers if you visited on anything besides Firefox. With Chrome coming in and being a very capable competitor, we took down that campaign. Although I’m happy to report that our latest stats show 0 McBlog readers using internet explorer 6!! Good job readers! Now remember if you have to use Internet Explorer for some reason, upgrade to the latest version. Internet Explorer 9 is slated for March 14th. If you don’t care, I would grab Chrome or Firefox still.

WE LOVE OUR KINECT!! If any McBlog readers are looking for a great birthday present or new workout program, we would recommend checking out the kinect. We have been having so much fun playing sports, working out, and getting high scores. After we borrowed Jessica and Casey’s kinect over the Christmas break, we were pretty hooked. I easily justified the cost by saying, I could join a gym for 10 months OR I could buy a xbox and kinect. I get just as much workout, if not more, I can do it in my own home, and it’s a ton of fun. Plus I can play other games. If anyone else out there has one, lets play!

For those who don’t know yet, kinect is a new xbox addon that tracks your entire body and sends data back to the xbox. Currently it can track most basic movements and direction. In the future it will be able to detect individual fingers and facial gestures. Here’s another main reason we love it, watch Chase play video games for a few minutes, he actually gets tired!

UPDATED WITH VIDEO
Here I am playing track and field. Each game captures you while playing (you can turn that off) and makes a fun highlight clip for you at the end.

And my favorite so far, beach volleyball

If you are shopping for a new tv, moving to a new place, or looking to change your entertainment bills around, I wanted to make sure you knew about this: Logitech Revue With Google TV.

Many of you have been over to our house and seen in our nerdy glory a computer hooked up to our tv. We use Windows Media Center to record over the air tv, access movies, and watch hulu, etc. It’s GREAT and we love it. One downfall is, we have a computer hooked up to the TV. That computer doesn’t last 10 years, and parts of it sometimes don’t last 4 years. So you have to make sure to baby it.

Well Google TV is coming out this fall, aka at the end of the month, and it looks pretty stinking good. If Microsoft had released a box that ran Windows media center and was cheap, I’d think of getting it as well. This logitech box, and many other devices will have Google TV on them, and allow you to do lots.

I really think Google TV will be great and super and cool. Next time our media center computer kills a HD or a video card, I’ll be diving deep into the Google TV world.

OK first and most important! If you are a blogger… and I know there are lots of you who are, I will tell you right now what you should be using to blog. Use Microsoft’s Window Live Writer 2011!! It’s by far the best blogging tool available today and it’s FREE! It will allow you to blog to almost any blog framework, has AMAZING image handling and image preferences setup. It’s what I set Joy up with to blog with and look at how much she loves it! It’s only for PC, mac peeps, sorry you’ve got NOTHING close to this. The best you’ve got is MarsEdit (sorry).

Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer 2011 – Go download it now for FREE!

P.S. Did you here that all Microsoft Live blogs will be imported over to wordpress.com!?!?! That’s HUGE!

UPDATE: As Nathan pointed out, it’s out of the evil beta. So now everyone can get it. (well except mac peeps still)

Next, I saw this and had to share it.

“If you use video chat in Gmail, you might be interested in a new Labs feature we just rolled out that allows you to preview new video chat features before they’re turned on for everyone. Visit the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, turn on “Video chat enhancements,” and right away, you’ll see higher resolution video and a bigger video chat window.

The higher resolution video uses a new playback mechanism which enables widescreen VGA and frees up valuable resources on your computer. For it to work, both you and the person you’re chatting with will need to have the lab turned on. Remember that you can always revert to standard video chat by disabling the lab.”

How do you do that? Login at gmail.com, look for this, , in the upper right hand corner of the screen, click it. Scroll to the bottom and click enable next to “Video chat enhancements”.

Lets chat!

Wow, I’m not sure why you would have a land line anymore, there are so many options, and I had this little guy pop up today.

Google is now allowing free, yes FREE phone calls to be placed domestically via gmail talk. So if you lost your cell phone, or you want to ditch the landline, get your contacts in order in your gmail, and start calling away. Might be time to invest in a USB wireless headset so you can roam around the house while talking for free.

Anyone else seeing this update? Using it?

I am SO excited for this: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/. It’s a visual app builder. Instead of learning code and figuring out how to package and install your apps for Android, now google is providing a visual building block tool. This is GREAT for me since I tried to jump into the java world and failed, lack of attention span. This should make it easy for me to create apps for Chase and Charlotte to play, or to whip up something fun. Now only if I can get past this darn sign up form… what’s the deal Google!?

For those people who love building relationships with AI, you should be running to walmart to get your xbox360 with bundled Kinect (natal). Check out this freaky video. (Can’t you just imagine people reclusing into their homes to hang out with their “friends” who can’t leave the TV and have British accents)

And finally, this is a marketing campaign that should win every possible award: http://www.youtube.com/user/oldspice
They even had him do responses to comments and twitter posts, AWESOME: http://www.youtube.com/user/oldspice#grid/user/484F058C3EAF7FA6