Wednesday, February 4, 2009

A couple of quick notes...

Kinoma Media Player

I just installed Kinoma (the free version) on my Sprint Touch phone. It is the coolest thing yet!

What it is...it is a media interface...it will play all (most?) the media on your device...it has a number of built in plugins to play Youtube videos, Shoutcast radio, etc, etc, and even an ORB plugin.

It is just a much better experience than trying to use WMplayer and IE on the mobile for that kind of thing. It also seems to do a much better job of buffering and streaming video than WMp does.

The ORB plugin does everything on your ORB server except view live TV or have anything to do with recording/program guide/etc. So it will play the media if it is in a share, but that is it...you will still need to log in using IE and WMp to access live TV.


Windows Vista Firewall

A different note is that the built in firewall (run WF.msc to access it) for Vista is a pain. By default it is set to block incoming but allow outgoing. So to be more secure you can set it to block outgoing also. It is also supposed to let you know when it is blocking something...ah but it doesn't.

I have been having trouble accessing certain things on the internet...like Windows Update...or trying to install the latest GoogleEarth.

After much wailing an gnashing of teeth (and adding all sorts of rules to allow programs to access the internet through WF) I found that the only way to punch a big enough hole to use WU was to turn the WF back to the default settings...block incoming and allow outgoing.

I never saw a single message that WF was blocking any traffic, nor is there any log/log entry detailing that (even though logging is turned on, and notification is turned on). So more reason to skip Vista, and hope for the best with Win7.

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