Sunday, February 17, 2013 at 05:09PM
If you're in the market for a new Television, here are three excellent articles discussing the difference between LEDs, LCDs and Plasma TVs.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387377,00.asp
http://hdguru.com/the-case-for-plasma-vs-ledlcd-hdtv/9373/
http://asia.cnet.com/led-vs-plasma-vs-lcd-tvs-62213538.htm
Video Friday, December 28, 2012 at 09:36AM
While compact discs (CDs) are remarkably durable, it can be impossible to prevent scratches and scuffs from occurring from time to time, especially with frequent use. The resulting damage can mean either a skip in a music track or the loss of a document.
While CD repair kits and refinishing machines are commercially available, you can repair the damage on your own with products you already have.
Note: Read the Warnings section as well as the methods before proceeding so that you are fully aware of what can go wrong when attempting to repair a CD.
Electronics, Storage, Video Monday, December 24, 2012 at 09:41AM I have so many options to stream movies online now (Netflix, Amazon, etc) that it's hard for me to figure out if a movie is available. How do you recommend I find a movie I want to watch that I can stream online?
Sincerely,
Where's Die Hard?
Dear WDH,
We understand the plight of finding a movie online. Worse still, some movie might be available for rental, but not streaming, or vice versa. Let's look at a few of the best ways to find what you're looking for.
If you're anything like us, you have a few different streaming options—maybe you have Netflix for streaming, along with Amazon for rentals, and then access to some of the free programs like Crackle or YouTube. Searching through all of them is a bit cumbersome.
We like Can I Stream It? because it searches all the major streaming options (Neflix, Amazon, Hulu Plus, Crackle, YouTube, Google Play, Vudu, Blockbuster) at once. It also shows you where you can rent movies from as well as digital purchases. Can I Stream It? also has a notification system you can set up so you receive an alert when a movie is released on a streaming service of your choice.
Can I Stream It? also has mobile apps on iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone so you can browse from your couch with ease. Basically, if you know the exact movie you're looking for, Can I Stream It? is an easy way to see if it's available.
Can I Stream It? certainly isn't the only choice—Watch It is similar, but only has an iPhone app,Watchily allows you to search for any movie across services, and the Roku has a built-in universal search option. alternately, if you're wondering what's coming to the queue in future weeks, Streaming Soon is great to see what's on tap for the on Netflix Instant.
You're not always going to know exactly what you want to watch though. Sometimes it's great to just flick through a selection of movies like you would in the video store, and while the algorithms Netflix uses to show you movies you might be interested in is great, they're also restricting and don't show you a large collection of movies. Other services, like Amazon, don't have big recommendation engines at all.
For recommendations, we like Watch It Stream. On the surface it works exactly like Can I Stream It? and you can instantly search to see where movies are available (unfortunately it doesn't have mobile app companions though). What's nice about Watch It Stream is curated lists. For example, since Bond just had a new movie in the series, there's a list of Bond inspired options like the Bourne series, and Mission Impossible. There's also a list of top art documentaries, and the A.V. Clubs 50 Best Films of the 90s. Basically, the curated lists offer a good way to discover new movies, and Watch It Stream links directly to where they're available for streaming.
Another option is Instantwatcher, which allows you to sort movies available on Netflix by review score and genre.
Video Wednesday, November 28, 2012 at 10:53AM Video chatting has never been easier. There's Skype, Facetime, Google Hangouts, even most IM clients support video chat at this point. If you want something a bit better than the camera that's probably built into your laptop or desktop though, you'll need a new webcam. Last week, we asked you which webcams you thought were worth buying. Then we took a a look at the five best webcams, based on your nominations. We put them to a vote, and now we're back to highlight the overall winner.
The Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920 stole the show with over 51% of the overall vote, taking the top spot by a broad margin. Even though it's pricey, you all praised its true 1080p video and call quality, exceptional still photos, autofocus, and built-in stereo noise-isolation microphone. Money well spent.
In second place with close to 17% of the vote was the Logitech HD Webcam C270, an affordable option that gets the job done and makes for a great Hackintosh camera. Just behind it in third with close to 16% of the vote was the Microsoft LifeCam Studio, Microsoft's high-end webcam that's notable for its glass front and adjustable neck. Behind it in fourth place was Microsoft's LifeCam Cinema with 9% of the vote, a slight step down from the Studio in features and price, and in fifth place was Microsoft's entry-level webcam, the Microsoft LifeCam HD-5000, bringing in close to 8% of the votes cast.
Video Monday, September 3, 2012 at 08:17AM by Word Team
Today's post comes from Seth Fox, the program manager on the Word team responsible for adding web videos to Word documents.
Videos are a great way to engage a reader, tell a story, invoke emotion, and communicate effectively. They are found all over the web (news articles, blogs, websites, etc.) and are a great way to enhance documents you send digitally. In the new Word, we added the ability to insert web video directly into your documents, allowing you to create rich, interactive output that pairs your words with video whenever appropriate.
When designing this feature we had a few key goals:
Allow videos to be played right from within Word, so you don’t have to switch context.
We wanted to make it easy for users to find and insert online videos from a variety of sources right within Word. You can use Bing to search for videos (similar to inserting online pictures), and you can add specific video providers like YouTube to search for and insert videos.
This allows you to quickly find the video you want, insert it, and go right back to writing your document (we’ve all been there when a simple search for content online has led to a 2 hour visit to Facebook or a marathon session of clicking through cat videos). When you search for a video, each result is shown by a thumbnail preview. Selecting or hovering over the thumbnail will show the title of the video, the provider (ex. YouTube, Dailymotion, etc.), and its length. Click the icon on the bottom right of the thumbnail to preview the video so you can make sure it’s the one you want before inserting. If you’ve already found a video online you can copy the video’s embed code (typically found by a share link) and paste it into the embed code slab to directly insert the video.
Videos insert with a thumbnail automatically, making it easy to recognize the video at glance and invites your readers to press play. When you insert a web video into a document, Word actually saves a link to the online source hosting the video. This allows you to watch the video anytime you’re online without bloating the file size of the document.
Once the video is inserted it behaves like a picture. You can resize it and position it exactly where you want in your document. You’ll even get alignment guides to help you position it in exactly the right spot. If the thumbnail of the video isn’t what you want, simply right click and select change picture to replace it with any picture on your PC. Videos also support most image features like cropping and effects so you can touch up the thumbnail to make it look just right. Videos in your document feature a large play button to make it easy to play with a single click. However, we know that sometime you’ll need to print out these documents or export them to PDFs. Whenever videos end up in a static format we removed the play button to make sure it’s out of the way of the thumbnail.
We wanted to ensure that consuming videos in Word was a simple and compelling experience. We support the latest web standards like Flash, Silverlight, and HTML5. This makes it easy to play most videos you find online. With a click or tap of the play button the reader is instantly immersed in the video.
We chose this approach over playing the videos inline because videos are typically 640 x 360 pixels or larger which takes up about 85% of the width of a typical document. Allowing the thumbnail of the video to be independent from the playback size provides the flexibility to place the video where you want while still being able to play the video at its original size.
Note that if you share a document containing a video with others and they open it in a previous version of Word, or in the Word Web App, they’ll still be able to watch the video because the thumbnail is linked to the original video source (which will play in in their browser).
Word Blog - Lights.. Camera.. Action! Adding videos to your Word documents
Video, Word Processing 
