20th September 2006

Ok, this can’t possibly be real…

Chris Angel the illusionist swallows a coin that is marked by an observer and then cuts it out of his arm.   What devilry is afoot here?

I think fake skin and rare earth magnets are definitely involved, but how does it get from inside his mouth to inside the fake skin pocket?

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12th September 2006

MS TFS Administration Guide: It’s Updated, but what changed?

The Visual Studio team has updated the TFS (Team Foundation Server) Administration guide as part of a great commitment to keeping the documentation up to date.   My biggest concern with these updates is that there is no simple way to see what has been revised beween releases.   In the meantime, I am going to try the file comparison tool in Visual Studio to see if I can determine what has changed….   What do you think?

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11th September 2006

Audio Mixer.. The best Vista feature you’ve never heard of …

Unlike all of the highly touted features of Vista like UAP, Glass, IE7, and Speech recognition, one of my favorite and IMHO most useful features is probably staring you right in the face and you may not have even known it.   Its called the Vista Audio Mixer and it allows you to customize the relative volume of every application running on Vista.  Before you can use it, however, you have to turn it on as the default in Vista is for sound to work just like previous versions of Windows.  This is easily done just by clicking on the volume icon is the task bar and select the box that says use audio mixer.   Once this is done, the next time you lick the volume icon you will see a separate slider for each application that it currently running.

What does this do for you?   Well if you are like me you run many application and some might have annoying sounds (like a game) and not give you an easy way to control the sound level (other than the general windows volume).   With sound Mixer you can turn down those annoying sounds of cards shuffling in Hoyle’s card games to a whisper and still hear the general effect while listening to Baroque Guitar in Media Player at full volume.

It may not seem like much, but it is a great little feature that make Vista a pleasure to use and explore.   Now if they could just make the user interface consistent, and get more complete and available drivers for 64 bit all would be right with the world.

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1st September 2006

A pair of very cool dance/music videos

My daughter showed me two videos by a ban called Ok Go on YouTube tonight.   An interesting band..,   I couldn’t get too much information on the band, but they were on Letterman on August 29th and the Video Music Awards last night.  If you’re interested the band has a website.

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