Scott Hanselman

A friend asked me what they could by their geek for US$50. I emailed them this list, compiled from ThinkGeek.

These are pretty slick: http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/avcards/7e3e/

As are http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/8a0f/

This is fun from Office Space: http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/gear/61b7/

This personal area network fleece is nice, but $60: http://www.thinkgeek.com/apparel/hoodies/7c64/

I’d love to have this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/8928/

If you really liked me you’d get me this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/8193/

These are VERY useful for traveling professionals: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/89d1/

I want two of these http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/6a4b/

This is excellent for the price, and unusual: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/706f/

This is topical, useful and CHEAP: http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/avcards/8837/

Hm...my birthday is coming up in 12 days...

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Due to popular demand (as opposed to unpopular demand) there's now a master feed of Hanselminutes shows. It contains every show we've ever done.

Before, our feed had only the latest show, because of bandwidth constraints as well as really stupid podcasting software that would continue to re-download shows that folks had listened to. Now, not only are podcast-downloaders more respectful, but our kind sponsors are helping with bandwidth.

Here's the master Hanselminutes Feed with all shows in MP3 format.

Again, do thank our sponsors for making it happen. Carl and I couldn't possibly afford the bandwidth, equipment, or editing costs without them. I try to put on a quality show (mostly) each week, and I appreciate the sponsors helping to make it happen.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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We came back from Tanzania with over three gigs of photos and looked forward to having friends and family over to watch slideshows. We usually run the slide show on the Xbox360 talking to my main PC running Windows Media Sharing Service.

I chose to setup our home network using wired 100Mbs Ethernet, rather than wireless as our main "backbone" as I find even the fastest wireless totally unacceptable for large file transfers. Small things like the ReplayTV and a few other appliances are wireless, but every room is has plates in the wall with at least two drops, and there's a formal wiring closet in our linen closet with a punchdown block so I can rewire the house. Maybe one day I'll post on all this.

Anyway, back to the point. The pictures are 7.2 megapixels so they are 4-6 meg JPEGs depending. For last year the Xbox360 has been able to pull down a picture in less than 3 seconds, but just this last week it's taken 10-20 seconds, sometimes longer. Of course, this has significantly cramped our slide-showing style.

I'm a firm believer, when debugging, that something must have changed. So I sat down and puzzled on what's changed on my machine.

Then I realized that the only thing that changed was the addition of the Zune. I puzzled when I installed the Zune why it'd need another 'Sharing Service' - It installs the Zune Network Sharing Service. I didn't think too much about it, but I remember wondering Why do we need another uPnP service? Is the Zune THAT different that it can't just talk to the regular Windows Media Sharing Service.

Long story short, I ran "services.msc" on my Windows Vista machine and set the Zune Network Sharing Service to Manual, and stopped it. Lo and behold, the Xbox360 suddenly could pull images down as fast as before. Your mileage may vary, but if you have a Zune, you might consider just disabling that service all together. It certainly has a problem with the Xbox, or the Xbox has a problem when it sees two seemingly identical uPnp servers on the same machine.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My forty-fifth Podcast is up. In this one, Carl and I discuss how the Iron Phython guys used a hook into No-Compile ASP.NET pages to enable better support for dynamic languages in ASP.NET. We also speculate on Microsoft's plan for Ruby. I hope you enjoy it.

We're listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory, so I encourage you to subscribe with a single click (two in Firefox) with the button below. For those of you on slower connections there are lo-fi and torrent-based versions as well.

Subscribe:

Links from the show are also always on the show site, although this show had no links to speak of. Do also remember the archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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We went to lunch at the mall with my dad, and there's a "low budget" photo place in the food court, and there's no sitting fee. They aren't digital, but you can buy the negatives and copyright for the whole roll for US$70. What the heck, we said.

Turned out that the mall shop photos were all gold, IMHO. They shot in 120mm, rather than 35mm, so the negatives are a medium format, so I'll need to find a negative scanner that'll take them.

I scanned the pictures at right on my Canon Pixma MP500 Multifunction with no color correction at 600dpi. The photos on flickr are 1280pix, but the scanned ones are of sufficient detail to create borderless 4x6 photos on the Canon that are nearly indistinguishable from the original prints.

Once I scan the clean negatives (and do some decent cropping, my cropping at right is lousy, I can see now) I'll be able to make 8x10's no problem for gifts and such.

This is our first (yearly) portrait with Z, and I'm looking forward to the next seventeen.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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