Kicking Apple TV up a notch

From The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

I've made no secret about my unabashed love for boxee, the awesome media center with a social kick that can run on your Apple TV. It should be no surprise that my first piece of advice is that you set-up boxee on your Apple TV as soon as you get it connected to your TV and home theater.


Need an invite? If you don't have a friend to ask, check out the boxee forums, hit up the boxee Twitter feed or pester me (@film_girl) and you should be able to get one pretty quickly. On January 8th, 2009, boxee will be opening up the alpha for everyone.


After you've updated your Apple TV to the latest firmware, follow my instructions or take a look the information at the ATV USB Creator project page for the the details in making a patchstick. The process is extremely easy and you just need a USB stick (1 GB or more recommended) and a few minutes to get everything up and running.


Once boxee is installed, you can enjoy Hulu (if you live in the US), streaming video from other services, last.fm and playback of other file types that won't natively play on the Apple TV; you can store those files either on the Apple TV, or that you
access from another hard drive.

Why is there no title bar when I open Task Manager in Windows XP?

From PCHell.com:

When you open up Task Manager in Windows XP, there is no title bar, menu bar, or program tabs showing. Only the running applications, End Task, Switch To, and New Task buttons show up.

This problem is easy to fix, the Task Manager is running in "tiny footprint mode". To correct this, simply double-click on the border around the window and it will return to its normal state. To place task manager back in "tiny footprint mode" again, double click again on the border around the window.

So I got a 3G iPhone...

I said I wasn't going to do it. I already had a perfectly fine 1st gen 8GB iPhone. The 3G model wasn't worth it.

What changed my mind?

GPS
On a recent trip I heavily used the map application. It was fine for locating everything-- hotels, buildings, Starbucks, etc. -- except ME. Most of the time I got a huge circle, sometimes I got a very precise location that was definitely not where I was standing.

A colleague had the 3G model, which worked just like a real GPS should. It tells you exactly where you are. I was jealous.

Now with a proper GPS in my phone, I'm tempted to offload my Garmin Nuvi. This is a sweet device, but it's one more thing to carry around.

3G
I use my phone more for email and web than I do for calls. So if there's any way to speed that up, I'm all for it. 3G coverage in the States is not great, but it's getting better. Europe and Australia have excellent 3G.

???
I wish I could say there was something else compelling pushed me to upgrade. Unfortunately there isn't. I was sitting on the fence and it just took light breeze to push me over.

I would have grabbed this phone a month ago if it had a better camera, or could do video conferencing, or could be used as a modem. The "breeze" was seeing the GPS in action.

Upgrading cost me $340 plus a slightly higher monthly rate. I just hope they don't come out with a new model any time soon.