Smart Tech Tips

If you have your computer hooked up to your HD TV and would like to view youtube videos directly from your couch, this is for you.

http://www.youtube.com/xl

This is a version of youtube that includes large buttons and easy navigational markers for people to see from far away. If you have Microsoft Media Center, point the built-in browser to this address and enjoy youtube content from your couch.
Read more…

If you ever have problems with windows 7 crashing in a constant loop once you put an avi or any movie file on the desktop, then you are the victim of thumbnail cache error. There are many ways to fix this but the quickest and easiest is to disable thumbnail preview all together. A side benefit of this operation is your windows explorer will be much faster loading up. You can individually enable thumbnail view for a folder if you want in the future, but keep it off system wide to avoid the aforementioned problem above.

Here’s how:

The browser space is getting really crowded. On the Mac your default browser is Safari, but you have many choices to pick. Now you can add Google Chrome to that mix. it’s available here http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/sub-rel-mac/. Warning! It is still under development so you should be aware it may not be stable. If you have to try the lastest and greatest, this is definately worth a try. Early reviews in the windows world says that it is very fast due to an optimzed javascript engine.

From early reports on the net, it looks like the new iphone will be called the iphone 3G S. It also is revealed that it will come in many colors. Black, White, Orange, Blue, Plaid, Green, and yellow seems to be the new flavors it will be available at launch. Also in unrelated news, Steve Jobs will be returning to work this month.

I know this years WWDC will have many things revealed. I am particularly excited about OSX Snow Leopard and Iphone SDK 3.0.

This is a little late in writing but if you have an iPhone and you make lots of international calls, Skype for iPhone is a great fit. The application is free from the Appstore. It only requires your iPhone to be connected to a wifi to make voice calls. When calling from Skype to Skype, the call was clear and in some instances better than the average cell phone call. Calling to a landline was not so great but functional. When I first used this app, I thought it was broken because I did not put a ‘+’ in front of each number. The test call would work great but anytime I called anyone, it kept saying the party was not reachable. I could not find that issue anywhere on the net. It finally hit me that I needed to add that prefix. After that everything was great. If you purchase Skype’s monthly rate for unlimited calls then theoretically you can use your iPhone to make calls without a contract!