Scott Hanselman

Here's an action item for you, dear reader, and finally a decent reason to put your USB key to work other than just holding family photos.

Download and install the PortableApps Suite from PortableApps.com. It's free, released 1.0 a few days back, and it's a collection of totally portable apps (they don't touch your hard drive) and an integrated menuing system that can run automatically via Autoruns.inf.

• Standard Edition - 90MB, includes ClamWin Portable (antivirus), Firefox Portable (web browser), Gaim Portable (instant messaging), OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Sudoku Portable (puzzle game), Sunbird Portable (calendar/task manager) and Thunderbird Portable (email client) and runs comfortably from a 512MB drive.
• Lite Edition - 30MBs, Uses AbiWord Portable (word processor) instead of OpenOffice.org Portable and runs comfortably from a 256MB drive.
• Base Edition - 1MB, If you'd like to pick and choose exactly which apps to include, you can try Portable Apps Suite (Base Edition). This is a stripped down package with just the PortableApps Menu, PortableApps Backup utility and custom folders, icons and autorun. It's less than 1MB installed, so it's a great option for smaller drives.
  [PortableApps]

This suite also includes a backup application that will backup your apps, settings and documents (on the drive in a specific location) to your local hard drive.

I use this Suite on a tiny 2GB drive (that Omar turned me on to) that lives in my wallet (The best wallet I've ever owned, only US$5.50 from Umbra). On the drive is a 1 GIG TrueCrypt disk - my "getaway drive" - and the other gig is for Portable Apps. I run the standard suite, plus Notepad2, uTorrent and TorPark. There's lots of additional apps you can add.

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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I'm stoked about this new (and inexpensive) add-on. The Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver is a USB receiver, modeled in the style of the receivers many already have for keyboards and mice, that let's you use your existing Xbox Wireless stuff like the controller and driving wheel with existing games.

I've always been a little underwhelmed with Joystick support in Windows, but DirectX 10 (only took 10 tries) tries to rectify that. Additionally, the new "Games for Windows" branding insists that all games that receive the label must:

• Support the XBox controllers and wireless receivers (specifically, support the DirectInput stuff)
• Support DirectX 10 (check out this screenshot from Crysis)
  
• Support the Windows Vista parental controls. That means Z only plays "E" rated games if he's by himself.

Basically, Windows gaming works like Console gaming. The Windows machine is just another Console - as it should be. I stopped PC gaming altogether (except for Guild Wars) because it was a hassle. Anything that makes it less of a hassle is a Good Thing™.

ASIDE: A few corrections and comments for this weeks podcast (that was on gaming.) A listener pointed out that:

• The Wii supports WiFi out of the box, but to support Ethernet, you need an adapter.
• While Nintendo has said in the past that you'll be able to download "any Nintendo game" that my have been hyperbole, as certainly there is a small subset of classic games currently available for the Wii "Virtual Console," which is Nintendos brand for the Classic Gaming stuff. It's a 'trickle' so far.
• He also comments that the podcast was leaning a little towards Xbox360-fanboyness, and a little against Sony and Nintendo, both from a commentary point of view, but also from a content perspective. Valid points, all.

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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If you've upgraded or are planning to upgrade to Office 2007, don't forget this important (and silly (that it is separate)) additional post-installation step:

Download the "2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS" that lets you, gasp, save as PDF in any of these Office programs:

• Access 2007
• Excel 2007
• InfoPath 2007
• OneNote 2007
• PowerPoint 2007
• Publisher 2007
• Visio 2007
• Word 2007

Sure, there's a million free shareware printer drivers that let you "print to PDF" as well as the glory that is FinePrint that I still continue to use, but sometimes you just want to Save As, you know?

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-second Podcast is up.  In this one, Carl and I chat about what it means to be a "Next Generation Game" and discuss the latest innovations in gaming (graphics is only one) as well as the new Microsoft XNA platform for gaming. Are you getting a Wii, Xbox360 or PS3 for Christmas?

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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In the past I've had a significant number of carpal tunnel like symptoms, and typing grows increasingly uncomfortable.  I doubt that it's carpal tunnel per se, but typing as fast as I do will no doubt eventually break the body down.  In the past I've used Dragon Naturally Speaking as an alternative to typing. In fact, most of my chapters in the ASP.NET book were dictated with Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Of course I was excited to hear that Windows Vista would include lots of new speech recognition features, and today I finally got to try them out.  I plugged in my Logitech USB headset and ran through the tutorial.

You really have to try it to fully understand the improvements that have been made to accessibility in Windows Vista.  While this entire blog post was dictated using the Built-in speech features in Vista, the dictation features, frankly aren't that impressive.  To be clear, they work, and they work well.  But it's the interface, the user experience, that's so amazing.

You can tell that BillG is very much not kidding when he says speech is going to be the way we will interact with their computers. Notice for example in the image below that while I've just been using voice recognition in vista for only 5 minutes, the system has scanned the documents in My Documents and my Desktop and determined that "Wii" (as in Nintendo Wii, a video game system that I recorded a podcast about yesterday) is a reasonable and valid homonym to "we."

But these are speech-specific things, what was really interesting to me is how easy it is to interact with the entire system, the shell, without touching your mouse.  This is going to be Huge for people who CAN'T touch the mouse.

One of the most clever user interface experiences is the "show numbers" interface. When you're using Windows Vista voice recognition and you tell it to "show numbers," the current window has numbered regions overlaid on a user interface elements, so that they can be easily selected just by saying a number.

For example, notice the interface of Windows Live Writer as seen below.  Even though the default interface will click when I say - meaning if I simply say "insert picture" the system will click the Insert Picture user interface element just because it's on the screen - if there's a user interface on it like a toolbar button or something that is difficult to express verbally, I can click it easily using show numbers.

The same feature is used when selecting words that appear multiple times within a chunk of text.  For example if a paragraph contained the name 'Hanselman' four times and I said "Select Hanselman," each instance of the word would have been numbered overlaid allowing me to quickly indicate the one I meant. 

I'm not familiar with the Windows Speech API, but it'll be interesting to see how vendors like the folks at Dragon Naturally Speaking are meant to integrate their speech recognition algorithms to the existing interface experience provided by Vista out of the box.

As the one who fortunately does have the use of both my hands, I find speech to be the most valuable when I can have one hand on the keyboard, one hand on the mouse, and be speaking simultaneously.  It's certainly true that I can talk faster than I can type, and it's very very difficult to beat really good speech recognition software by just typing. 

It's worth noting that they've removed all of the speech recognition features from Office 2007 and there are a number of people who were considerably torqued about that decision.  That said, if you're into speech recognition or you use speech recognition software in your everyday life, the improvements in a speech in Vista are reason enough to upgrade your OS.

And sure, it's not perfect, but I'm using a crappy microphone in a noisy room on a slowish machine while speaking quietly so as not to wake the baby.  Not too shabby.

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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