Sometimes you just want to use YouTube like a radio, an endless music player running in the background that moves from one song to another while you work on other tasks.
YouTube playlists are a popular option but YouTube does have some built-in tools as well, like YouTube Disco and YouTube Leanback, that let you watch an uninterrupted stream of music videos from your favorite artists and bands.
YouTube as a Music Radio
There’s a new YouTube mashup in town, available at appspot.com, that’s built around the same concept of “endless music” but offers a more pleasing and uncluttered UI. You search for your favorite song and the app will create an unending playlist of music video based on that song.
The app internally uses YouTube’s own Related API to find music videos similar to your base song but if the algorithms aren’t working right, you can always skip the song or switch to a different music playlist available on the right. Worth a bookmark.
Building your own external hard drive is easy to do, can save you some cash, and offers more custom options than buying prebuilt ones.
External hard drives are great for storing photos, music, videos, and backup files. Not only can they can be used with a PC, but also with media devices to add streaming storage, and with Wi-Fi routers as cheap NAS solutions.
Off-the-shelf external hard drives often contain mystery drives inside and the enclosures aren't meant to be reused. Building your own external hard drive can sometimes be a cheaper, more flexible solution. And if you already have an old internal hard drive lying around, you can turn it into a cool external drive, for as little as $10.
Choosing your internal hard drive
Internal interface
Modern hard drives have SATA interfaces and are easy to identify because they only have 7 pins. If you're buying a new drive, it'll be a SATA drive. If you're reusing an old drive, it's possible that it's a PATA (IDE) drive, with 40 pins. Most enclosures support one or the other, so it's important to know which internal interface your drive has.
Size, height, and capacity
3.5-inch drives are used in desktop computers, while 2.5-inch drives are normally used in laptops. 3.5-inch drives offer higher storage capacities than 2.5-inch drives, so if you want 2TB of storage, a desktop drive is your only choice. However 2.5-inch drives are a better pick for portable use. While most 2.5-inch drives are 9.5 mm in height, some are 12.5 mm. Note the size of your drive before deciding on an enclosure.
Rotational speed
7,200rpm and 5,400rpm hard drives are the most common rotational speeds for internal hard drives. 7,200rpm drives are faster than 5,400rpm drives, but they tend to run hotter and are less energy efficient than 5,400rpm drives. If you choose the faster, hotter drive, the enclosure's ability to keep the drive cool will be an important consideration.
Choosing your enclosure
Plastic vs. aluminum
Aluminum enclosures are more durable than plastic and inherently better at keeping drives cool. If you plan on running your external hard drive 24x7 or using a 7,200rpm drive, we suggest going with an aluminum enclosure. Plastic enclosures are generally cheaper than aluminum ones, but aren't as good at cooling. Occasionally, you can find a plastic one with a fan, but the drawback with fans is that they can get pretty loud, especially if they're sitting on top of your desk. On the other hand, if you're using a 5,400rpm laptop drive for portable use, a plastic enclosure is fine.
External interfaces
Choosing an external interface depends a lot on how you want to use your drive and how much you want to spend. A vast majority of enclosures are USB 2.0-only enclosures. Most media devices and routers only support USB drives. USB 2.0 is a good value choice and great for broad compatibility, but has the poorest performance among available interfaces.
USB 3.0 is currently the fastest available interface on enclosures and is backward-compatible with USB 2.0. The drawback with USB 3.0 is that it's not as common as USB 2.0, and Macs only adopted the format in mid-2012.
FireWire is more prevalent in Macs than PCs. FireWire 800 (EEE-1394b) is faster than USB 2.0, but slower than USB 3.0. For the best performance with a Mac, FireWire 800 is your best choice, unless someone releases an affordable ThunderBolt enclosure.
eSATA performance is better than FireWire and USB 2.0, but is the only interface that doesn't power the drive via cable; it requires a separate power adapter. eSATA drives have notorious connectivity problems as well. Unless you're dedicated to using this interface for some reason, we'd recommend against eSATA as your lone interface
Putting your external drive together
Putting an external drive together is fairly straightforward. You typically mount the internal drive onto the tray of the enclosure -- or sometimes the rear cap -- and then screw the enclosure shut.
In advance of one of the most significant waves of product launches in Microsoft’s history, today we are unveiling a new logo for the company.
It’s been 25 years since we’ve updated the Microsoft logo and now is the perfect time for a change. This is an incredibly exciting year for Microsoft as we prepare to release new versions of nearly all of our products. From Windows 8 to Windows Phone 8 to Xbox services to the next version of Office, you will see a common look and feel across these products providing a familiar and seamless experience on PCs, phones, tablets and TVs. This wave of new releases is not only a reimagining of our most popular products, but also represents a new era for Microsoft, so our logo should evolve to visually accentuate this new beginning.
The Microsoft brand is about much more than logos or product names. We are lucky to play a role in the lives of more than a billion people every day. The ways people experience our products are our most important “brand impressions”. That’s why the new Microsoft logo takes its inspiration from our product design principles while drawing upon the heritage of our brand values, fonts and colors.
The logo has two components: the logotype and the symbol. For the logotype, we are using the Segoe font which is the same font we use in our products as well as our marketing communications. The symbol is important in a world of digital motion (as demonstrated in the video above.) The symbol’s squares of color are intended to express the company’s diverse portfolio of products.
Starting today, you’ll see the new Microsoft logo being used prominently. It will be used on Microsoft.com – the 10th most visited website in the world. It is in three of our Microsoft retail stores today (Boston, Seattle’s University Village and Bellevue, Wash.) and will shine brightly in all our stores over the next few months. It will sign off all of our television ads globally. And it will support our products across various forms of marketing. Fully implementing a change like this takes time, so there may be other instances where you will see the old logo being used for some time.
We’re excited about the new logo, but more importantly about this new era in which we’re reimagining how our products can help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.
This step-by-step tutorial will guide you through setting up an email account in Microsoft Outlook 2010. If you have upgraded from Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 your email settings will automatically be configured. If you are installing Outlook for the first time please use the instructions below.
Step 1
Click on the “File” tab, then click “Info” and “Account Settings“.
Step 2
Click: “New” to add a new email account. Select “POP3” as your mail account and click “Next“. Select Email Account and enter your “Name“, “Email Address” and “Password“. Outlook will then try to automatically configure your account.
Step 3
If automatically configuring the settings doesn’t work try Manually configuring the server settings. Here are the settings required:
Enter your “Name” and “Email Address“.
Incoming Mail Server: mail.yourdomainname.com.au
Outgoing Mail Server: mail.yourisp.com.au (Whilst your outgoing mail server will normally bemail.yourispname.com.au, check with your Internet Service Provider for the name of their outgoing/SMTP mail server.)
Your “Username” is your full email address.
Congratulations, you have now setup your email address with Outlook 2010.
A new modern SkyDrive.com, updated apps, and Outlook.com at 10 million users
SkyDrive.com - New, modern design for desktop and tablet browsers with instant search, contextual toolbar, thumbnail multi-select, drag-and-drop organization, and HTML5 sorting
SkyDrive for Windows desktop & OS X -Faster uploads for people around the world and tons of bug and performance improvements under the hood
SkyDrive for Android - A new app that lets you access, upload and share from Android phones
SkyDrive for developers – Apps built using our SkyDrive API can now store or access any type of file in a person’s SkyDrive, plus there's a new, easy-to-use file picker API for websites (similar to our file picker for Windows 8 apps)
With these updates and continued improvements to our back-end infrastructure, we’re excited to leave preview and unlock new possibilities for a billion customers with the upcoming releases of Windows 8, the new Office, and tons of devices and apps that connect to Sky Drive.
SkyDrive: unlocking possibilities
Why is versatility in cloud storage so important? We believe that your files are not just bits to be synced—and they're certainly not to be scanned to serve advertising. Your files represent possibilities. The unfinished term paper that stands between you and graduation. The family vacation pictures that may find their way into a photo book for your grandparents. The brilliant (or not so brilliant) business plan ideas that you jotted down at the coffee shop. For each person, the possibilities are different. And so is how you capture, organize, access and share across devices and apps. If you're a student, you might organize homework and notes from each class into subfolders. If you're a real estate agent, you might keep photo slide shows and documents for each listing together. Or maybe you’d rather just see your recent Office docs or camera roll without worrying about files and folders.
And when it comes to the devices you choose for work (or play), you might be a journalist who's inspired to write (at home or work) using Word on your Windows PC or Mac. But when you’re out on assignment, you may only have your phone to take notes on, and an Internet café to finish your write-up and share it.
We think personal cloud storage should create new possibilities, not limit them. So no matter who you are, or what you do, we’ve designed the new SkyDrive for you.
New, modern design for SkyDrive.com
As you've seen with the preview of Outlook.com, we're bringing a fresh approach to how we design our web experiences. With the update to SkyDrive.com that's rolling out over the next 24 hours, we've taken the same DNA from the SkyDrive Windows 8 app and brought that to the web. We've updated nearly 100% of the SkyDrive UI to provide a fast and fluid web experience on all browsers and devices.
It all starts with the SkyDrive home page, where we now default to a tile-based layout of your folders and files.
However, some of you prefer the details view, and that’s just a click away (details view is also the default view for Recent docs and Shared).
In addition to the new design, we’re introducing a bunch of new features.
Instant search
You can now quickly search for a file anywhere in your SkyDrive, including the content of Office documents such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
For example, here is a search I did in my SkyDrive for documents and photos of “Olympics.”
Contextual toolbar to make common actions and commands easier
With this update to SkyDrive, we simplified how you interact with your stuff, by moving many of the common commands into the toolbar at the top of the page. For example, creating folders and docs, sharing, and common file operations are more easily available.
Folder operations:
File operations:
Multi-select and drag-and-drop
Now you can select multiple files in thumbnail view, rearrange your photos the way you want, and drag and drop files and folders.
Sorting improvements
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on sorting over the past year, and we’re happy to provide quite a few new sorting options.
As many of you know, Windows Phone users can have all the photos they take on their phones automatically sent to the SkyDrive camera roll folder. I have 1411 photos in this folder, and it used to be a pain to get to the most recent photo. We now default to sorting by newest to oldest, which should make viewing your camera roll much better.
Similarly we introduced a feature that allows you to customize and save the sort order for any folder
And we’ve built rearrange directly into the viewing experience so that you don’t have to navigate away from your photos to arrange them the way that you want.
Update to SkyDrive for Windows desktop & OS X
Withthis update, which will gradually roll out over the course of the week, we’ve made SkyDrive faster and more efficient for a couple of key scenarios, based on your feedback. We focused on photo uploads and looking for changes in your local SkyDrive folder. As with any performance discussion, “your mileage may vary,” as actual performance depends on a variety of factors including hardware, connection upload/download speed, network congestion, content type, distance to the service data center, and other factors.
Photo upload
You love syncing your photos to SkyDrive. After any great event, you end up with a bunch of new photos you want to share with your friends and family. So, we streamlined the photo upload path resulting in a faster bulk photo upload experience. Using an example from my home PC, I tried out a before and after with the 388 photos I had on my camera. I dragged these photos into my SkyDrive folder, let them sync, and measured the completion time before and after the change. In this case, the photos uploaded 1.7 times faster with the update.
Looking for changes
When you add files or make changes in your local SkyDrive, you want them picked up quickly for upload without impacting other apps on your device. If you have a lot of files or older hardware, this can take time. So, we focused on minimizing CPU time while looking for changes, which has significantly reduced the total work that we do on every scan—meaning a much faster sync experience and more time for your CPU to tackle its other tasks. For this one, I synced about 40,000 files and restarted SkyDrive to kick off a full scan. As it started up, I measured the total CPU time of the scanner before and after the change. In this case, we were able to reduce the total CPU time by 165 seconds.
For a visual example of the performance improvement, take a look at the following charts. And remember that actual performance does depend on a number of factors and everyone’s setup is different.
A side note on “choosing what to sync”
We’ve heard feedback that some people would like to specify which folders in their SkyDrive sync to their PC. This can be due to space constraints on their laptop or tablet, or because they don’t want personal files syncing to their work PC. We’re working on a solution to this problem but can’t give specifics yet—stay tuned!
SkyDrive for more mobile devices
Back in December 2011 we released the original versions of our SkyDrive apps for Windows Phone and iPhone. Since December, almost 4 million people have used our mobile apps to access their SkyDrive from their mobile phone—and we’ve released a number of feature updates as well as fixes and improvements over that time.
Today, as part of making sure SkyDrive is available to all Windows customers, we’re excited to announce thatan official SkyDrive app for Android phones will be available in just a few weeks. The Android app is similar to our mobile apps for Windows Phone and iOS and allows you to browse your SkyDrive, upload files to SkyDrive, as well as share SkyDrive files with “Send a link.” You'll also be able to open SkyDrive files from other apps, as well as upload, save, and share to SkyDrive from other apps.
Watch our Twitter feed (@SkyDrive) for a notification when the app becomes available in a few weeks!
SkyDrive for developers
It’s been almost a year since we first announced the revamped developer platform for working with SkyDrivewhich made it easier to integrate SkyDrive into mobile and web apps. Since then we’ve gotten consistent feedback on two key places where we could improve our developer story.
No more file restrictions and full control over photo upload resolution There are no longer any restrictions on the types of files that your application uploads to SkyDrive. Additionally, you can now upload images in their full resolution.
Open and Save pickers Our API now includes a SkyDrive file picker for opening and saving files to SkyDrive by adding a few lines of JavaScript to any website.
With these changes we’ve addressed a few of the top items of feedback from our developer community and can’t wait to see the interesting innovations that our customers will get to enjoy, now that this functionality is available. We’ll cover these changes in more detail in a follow-up blog post.
As always, we hope you enjoy all the updates and improvements to SkyDrive across the web, desktop, mobile, and developer support. And keep the feedback coming!
