CarltonBale.com

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution) is a great way to store (and optionally share) large amounts of data. It's cheap, fast, and reliable. If you're a casual user, you may not know that you do much more than just store and sever data of HTTP, as long as you use an advanced application such [...]

Last week, Sonos released software revision 2.0. This is the third time they've released an update in the ~1.5 years I've owned one. What impresses me most is that I've made requests in their user suggestion forum and they have implemented many of them. Customers speak and Sonos listens. Too [...]

Windows Media Center can automatically download the metadata (cover art, movie name, cast, plot summary, etc.) for DVDs. If you place a DVD in your drive, this occurs automatically. However, if you backup your DVDs to a server and access the moive via Windows Media Center, this data is not available. But [...]

I'm used to companies offering less than stellar customer care in this age of low-cost, low-margin business. So when a company goes above and beyond to take care of their customers, it get my attention.
Everyone pretty much know that the High Definition Disc Format war would end one format would become obsolete. Which [...]

I firmly believe in paying for the movies you own.  In doing so, I believe you should be able to move them to your media server and play them back however you please.  BD+ protection (DRM) prevented this with recent Blu-Ray titles, but latest version of Slysoft's AnyDVD HD overcomes this limitation.
Here is the update [...]

Update 8-Apr-2008: Chris Lanier just posted about the program MC Menu Customizer, which automates editing of the start menu. A great alternative to what is posted below!
I recently posted about automatically launching plugins within Vista Media Center. I just came across another improvement that allows editing the order and contents of the Vista Media [...]

For me, Brian Binnerup's My Movies plugin is the most important function of Vista Media Center. It's so useful that I want it to be the default start page every time I turn-on my Vista Media Center PC.
I couldn't figure out how to do that, and this I came across this post on TheGreenButton forums. [...]

I received a class action law suit notice a couple of weeks ago for my Palm Treo 650. Long story short: the settlement is worthless to the cosnumer and benefits only Palm and the Lawyers. Here's a link to the official settlement site, here is my summary:

You must provide proof that you sent your [...]

I recently needed to removed the drive from a Western Digital My Book External USB/eSATA drive enclosure. Unfortunately, this wasn't an obvious process and this excellent article by Scott Cramer didn't apply to the newer version (1 TB drive) enclosure I have. So here you go, the steps required to disassemble a new-style Western [...]

I was very excited to get my new TiVo HD DVRs due to the fact that I didn't have to hack them, add a network adapter, and install MFS_FTP to pull shows (which was a ton of work for my DirecTV TiVos.)  Unfortunately, TiVoToGo show downloads fail on almost all of the programs I've tried [...]

I received my "private beta invitation" from hulu.com a couple of weeks ago and I've been thoroughly impressed from day one. It has a great selection of shows, a near-perfect user interface, and fast, high-quality video.
For those not familiar with Hulu, it started out as a joint venture between NBC and Fox to showcase [...]