Play all of your media files with this single, must have Windows player.

I like watching movies on the go. I take them with me wherever I go. When I do have them, I really like to use VSO Media Player to view them. It’s a multimedia player for Windows.

VSO Media Player will play videos, Blu-ray discs, DVD’s and audio files without having to install any additional, external codecs. The fact that most everything that you need is included is nice, and somewhat expected in today’s modern, multimedia age.  However, it is nice to know that it will support just about any media you throw at it, including DVD and AVCHD .ISO files.

VSO Media Player not only supports Blu-ray and DVD ISO files, but its support extends beyond that. It also allows you to plug in additional decryption support, from AnyDVD, for instance.  Its also a decent media management tool.  VSO Media Player can manage  your media collection.  It can create and edit playlists as well as Edit the settings of Text subtitles: font, color, size, etc.

VSO Media Player is extra light and easy to use. It has a lot more support for hardware and software acceleration than I thought it would, given its pay model.  While there’s a great deal to like about this player, including its Blu-ray support, its really a simple player and organizer. If you’re looking for something to get you buy, this is an excellent choice. If you’re looking for something more advanced, you might want to look at the paid version or at something else, though it does have support for multi-cored processors, an audio booster and the ability to switch between GDI and Direct3D.

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Create your own levels and enjoy four different game modes in this cool Windows game.

Gaming can obviously be a lot of fun. One of the biggest draws for some games is the ability to create your own levels. This is one of the reasons why games like Ace of Spades are cool. It’s a game for Windows that just might be for you.

Ace of Spades is a voxel-based build-and-shoot video game, similar in to Minecraft and Team Fortress 2. It features game modes such as team death match, capture the flag, base infiltration, zombie defense, and diamond mining. The best part of it is its sandbox construction elements. It enables players to construct defensive structures or to dig trenches, to achieve the goals of the current game mode.

Players can choose between four classes of player characters – the Commando, with either a rocket launcher or a mini-gun and a pistol; the Marksman, with a sniper rifle and a pistol; the Rocketeer, with a submachine gun and a jetpack; or the Miner, with an auto-drill cannon and a shotgun. Shovels and pickaxes can be used as melee weapons or to destroy blocks. Other weapons are available to each player class as well.

Ace of Spades is an ok video game. The plus sides are its multiplayer classes and its ability to allow players to create their own levels and structures. You really have to want to do this, as the game doesn’t offer much more. I’m not a big fan and it has a lot to do with the graphics style used throughout the game. If the graphics were a bit different and if it did a bit more, I might be interested, but then again, I’m not a big Minecraft fan, either.

Download Ace of Spades

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It’s not a good idea.  Well, it *COULD* be, if Microsoft did it right, but they’re not going to…

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal announced that Microsoft is planning to spin up production of a 7″ Windows based, Surface branded tablet later this year.  The tablet is intended to compete with Apple’s iPad mini and the Google Nexus 7. The question one has to ask is whether this is an RT or x86 compatible device.

I think the RT model could work for a 7″ device if the price and margins were right.  Windows RT doesn’t completely suck as an OS or even as an interface. Its usable; though not very popular.  The problem is the ecosystem is extremely immature and there’s little to no native software.  Microsoft could solve part of that if it allowed Windows Phone 8 apps to run on Windows RT, but this isn’t currently the case.

Intel’s Clover Trail processor can provide a decent x86 option in powering a 7″ MS Surface tablet providing power and battery life at a reasonable price point, but I don’t see Microsoft using the x86 platform and Windows 8 on a 7″ device.  We’ve proven over and over again that full blown Windows on a smaller device (phone or tablet) is not what we want (part of that was due to lack of horse power in that form factor, the other that the apps weren’t designed to run on the smaller screens). People would still try to run Photoshop, or similar desktop app, on their 7″ tablet in this scenario, and it would definitely [still] suck.

I think this is not so much a “can we” but perhaps more of a “[what] should we [do]” situation. IF MS has a plan, now would be the time to publish that, make it known, and then move towards it with expediency.  They don’t have much time left.  The PC market appears to actively be in free fall. Without a clear plan that all of their partners and customers can see and support, I don’t see Microsoft being relevant for much longer.

Believe me when I say I am NO fan of ModernUI.  Windows RT/8′s ModernUI is  the most un-Windows version of Windows in the [modern] history of Windows.  It’s a complete unWindowing of Windows; and Microsoft should not use the Windows name with RT at all. It’s a huge marketing mistake that many industry pundits will attest to.

While neither you or I may like ModernUI, Microsoft could make it work, if it did a little bit of work and enhanced the ecosystem or changed their marketing, or did almost anything to right the ship. Currently, there are no signs that any of this is happening.  As such, introducing a 7″ tablet into the mix is going to do nothing for Microsoft except create an unprofitable cost center.

I think the thing that bothers me the most about this entire situation is, again, that pundits everywhere are panning Windows RT, Windows 8 and ModernUI.  Consumers are looking at alternatives, including tablets, Linux, and Macs. PC sales, regardless of operating system, are in free fall.  Windows 7 adoption is either steady or flat; and Windows 8 adoption is far below that of Vista. For Microsoft, none of this is good.

What other information does Microsoft need before it takes appropriate action?  It kind of makes you wonder if Ballmer, or anyone at Microsoft, is paying attention, or cares.  If I were a shareholder. I’d file  a formal complaint with the SEC at this point, if for NO other reason than to get Microsoft’s attention. It may not do anything in the long run, but it WOULD get press, and would likely require some sort of formal, public response.

Microsoft needs to take these issues seriously; and though they MAY be internally, from an external perspective, they are asleep at the wheel. Unfortunately, there are a couple icebergs in their direct path.  The 7″ tablet with their current marketing plans – price points, margins, etc. – operating systems and UI’s are NOT going to provide a competitive solution and are not the right choices.

Microsoft needs to act.  Based on this news, they are just throwing good money after bad. Why would MS offer an RT tablet, simple – because it offers choice.  Windows  RT doesn’t work if its comparatively priced with the iPad.  An RT tablet needs to be priced between $149 and $199 to work. Microsoft needs to find a way to get there, or they need to get out of the tablet market. They won’t do that at $399 to $599.  They have to make it crazy cheap or it will never take off.

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Microsoft Merges Windows Live Messenger with Skype and Announces that Support for Windows XP ends in 365 days

On Monday 8th April Microsoft announced that support for Windows XP will stop in exactly 365 days. This announcement came at the same time Microsoft merged Windows Live Messenger with Skype. These recent announcements are part of the new strategy Microsoft is intending to follow in order to channel customers to their latest products including Windows 8.

These updates from Microsoft are certain to affect many businesses and home users. Following we look at how Microsoft plan to funnel people towards their newer products and what you need to do to keep updated.

RIP Microsoft XP

Windows XP was originally launched in October, 2001. From April 8, 2014 Microsoft will officially cut off corporate support for Windows XP SP3, as well as Microsoft Office 2003. Once support is cut, Windows XP will no longer receive any new security, hot fixes and most importantly support.

Microsoft announced that come April 2014 any customers using XP will be doing so at their “own risk,” and that failing to update would likely be costly later on down the line. It is estimated that 40 percent of all PCs still run XP, so these changes are set to affect a large amount of customers.

Cutting off support is likely to have a much bigger impact on businesses, than it is on home users. Whereas home users can simply upgrade with little hassle, upgrading for businesses is much more complicated. Microsoft warned businesses that is can regularly take 18 to 32 months to go through the entire deployment phase for new operating systems.

The announcements have put major strains on many businesses still using XP. Many are simply refusing to upgrade to Windows 7, as there is no simple upgrade path. These changes are likely to cause major upset for many a business.

If it wasn’t obvious, Microsoft is using this opportunity to persuade customers to upgrade to Windows 8 stating that it offers cutting edge technology with a stronger interface.

For smaller companies, with one or several computers, updating their operating system will be a breeze. The problems occur for larger companies and if they’ve failed to select a new operating system by now, it may already be too late to beat the XP deadline.

Windows Live Messenger Merges With Skype

In October 2011 Microsoft acquired Skype. Ever since then, they have been working to replace WLM. And on the 8th April 2013, Windows Live Messenger, known to most as MSN Messenger, was finally retired – ending 14 years of loyal service.

The last few years has seen a rapid decline in the amount of people using Windows Live Messenger, mainly due to the success of Facebook’s instant messaging service. Microsoft will now focus on increasing the success of Skype.

If you still have an account with Windows Live Messenger, you can still use those same details to log in to Skype. Once logged in you’ll find a list of all your old contacts, which can then be merged into Skype.

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Keeping your movie collection together can be a challenge at times. You want to play them where you want them, and sometimes, that’s difficult. This is one of the reasons why having an application like Full DVD Ripper is really cool. It’s a multimedia tool for Windows and best of all, its free.

Full DVD Ripper rips DVD’s to just about any format you could want or need including AVI, MPEG, WMV, DivX, MP4, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, RM, MOV, XviD, and 3GP. It also rips DVD audio into MP3, WMA, WAV, RA, M4A, AAC, AC3, or OGG files, making them fit iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, or your mobile phone or other digital device. This software also lets you edit and clip video size, change image effects, and add watermarks/ subtitles/ soundtracks.

Full DVD Ripper’s editing options are cool – you can cut clips, merge clips with transitional effects, crop selected scenes, add subtitles and soundtracks and attach watermarks. You can also set the target file size before conversion and even run Full DVD Ripper in the background to save resources.  It can even shutdown, exit, standby or hibernate your PC when it’s done with its specific set of tasks.

The best thing about Full DVD Ripper is that you can now enjoy your DVD collection on the multimedia player of your choice.  The app supports formats for your iDevice, PSP, PS3, BlackBerry, iRiver PMP, Windows Mobile phone, or Xbox.

download Full DVD Ripper

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Smartphones, smart watches… how much smart tech do we have to have?

I don’t know of any peers that don’t have a cell phone. Of those that do, I don’t know of anyone with a clamshell or candy bar phone any longer. It’s all iOS, Android or Windows Phone from what I can tell, with a smattering of Blackberry flavors here and there. Recently, Ars Technica got their hands on a Pebble Smart Watch, and this sparked a bunch of debate among my friends –

• Is this the next big thing?

• Do I need one of these?

• Why do I need one of these?

• Where’s the value for something that costs almost $200 after tax?

These are all good questions. Here’s my take on the whole smart watch deal.

Checking the time on your phone is much like using a pocket watch. the same actions and paradigms apply in that regard.

The big deal with smart watches is the notifications your smartphone receives. A smart watch sitting on your wrist is going to vibrate or notify you of the incoming event. It’s not as easy to miss as the buzzing of your silenced phone might be. However, the thing I have to ask myself is where is the MUST have functionality. There’s a reason why smartphones are everywhere – they provide an essential piece in the new, always on, “I’m [tweeting] from the toilet in the new edition of my house,” totally 150% accessible, communications paradigm.

It used to be that if the person you were calling wasn’t home, the phone rang 10 times, you hung up, and you called back later. Then answering machines took over and my mother-in-law could fill up an entire 30 minute tape with messages. Then paging, two-way paging, email, text messages, occasional phone calls and then the “checking in from the potty in the new edition…” thing. Awesome.

the difference between the smartphone and the smart watch is that the phone provides the critical yet portable communications hub that most everyone has or feels they need. The smart watch may enhance that experience, but it doesn’t do much more than that; and I’m not certain that its design will support much more than JUST that.

getting your notifications may be important, especially if you’re talking about mission critical, work related emails, but you have to ask yourself, “do I REALLY need to know [someone's] exact location every time they do their business (what EVER that may be)?” do I have to get every text message, every email; or is it ok if I miss a few and pick them up later?

there’s something here… However, I’m not entirely certain what it is yet. But I’m not convinced that insuring that notifications are received/viewed is the primary reason or need for this type of device. Telling time – even an approximation of time – its [about] “a quarter after 5pm,” I can really live without.

Anything else it might do – like the Johnny Sokko video watch thing might be cool, but it’s not a must have feature. In fact, there’s not much else that a tool like this could do, aside from function as a remote for my iPhone while it plays audio (so I don’t have to pull the phone out of my jacket or bag), but even that can be handled by headphones…

Where are the must have uses, applications (not apps/programs) that a tool like this provides? That’s what’s going to make a tool like this successful. Unfortunately, I just don’t see the gaping hole, and just don’t know if this has any real staying power.

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A bird’s-eye view on a nation’s health issues through searches made on Google

The online magazine Das Cloud and the interactive agency X3 are launching Macroscop, the first data journalism project in Romania. The experimental project brought together a team of journalists, designers, and programmers that analyzed medical searches made on Google, from Romania, in the last 3 years, and made a visual interactive representation with the top 14 high volume searches. The terms are ”medical tests”, ”mite”, ”colon help”, ”swine flu”, ”helicobacter pylori”, ”hepatitis C”, ”lupus”, ”meningitis”, ”mite bite”, ”pancreatitis”, ”measles”, ”rubella”, ”scoliosis”, ”shingles”.

What can be said about a nation’s state of health based on the evolution of the most searched-for terms on Google ? In some of the cases, there are large similarities with the reports of the medical institutions. For example, when a rubella epidemic was starting in Romania in November 2011, the number of searches on Google for this term increased with more than 88% month-over-month in October. In the following month, both the National Center for Surveillance and Control of Communicable Diseases of Romania (CSCCD) and Romanian mass media were scoring larger than normal activity on the topic of rubella. CSCCD saw a 33.3% increase in the reported cases of rubella and Romanian media produced 68.63% more articles with the subject of rubella.

See the chart below:

In most of the cases, the media has a large influence on what people are searching on the internet. It can either stimulate a large artificial interest for a disease by only reporting on a few cases (e.g.: a mite byte can give Lyme disease or when a public figure was diagnosed) or act as a resonance box when citing medical reports of a disease. This is why we have overlapped data from Romanian media monitoring tool Media IQ on Macroscop. The Google searches made by the whole population of a country could theoretically match the results made by health institutions, but faster, if one could extract the external elements influencing the searches, such as media articles or online advertising.

“In a digital world, journalists now have huge amounts of information at hand that they can use to obtain a bird’s-eye view on a topic and pursue data storytelling. Even more, if they put the data in the form of an interactive chart, the journalistic endeavor can be continued by the readers. Macroscop is a tool that anyone can use to discover things that we, at Das Cloud, didn’t see,” said Bogdan Pencea, project manager of Das Cloud.

The data from Google searches can be used as a complementary cheap surveillance tool for monitoring the health state of a nation, to detect when and where medical services are needed. In Romania, the number of physicians is the lowest in the European Union, except only Poland, due to brain drain towards more developed countries. 42,000 physicians have to keep healthy a population of 19 million people. The relevancy of the Google medical queries grows as the number of internet users is growing. About 50% of Romanians were using the internet in 2012. One of their popular activities is searching for medical advice on the internet. The largest medical portal had 2.6 million unique visitors last month. So, Romania needs either more physicians, or more users with internet access. In both circumstances, the population could more easily get access to information that can teach them how to prevent illness or when to go see a doctor.

“An educated patient is a better patient and a better partner with the caregiver.  And in areas where the health system is weak, having access to information for people to take more charge of their health  is an important factor to strengthening  healthy communities and limiting the spread of contagious disease,” said Christopher Bailey from World Health Organization, questioned by Das Cloud.

Das Cloud is an online magazine of the community of developers, designers, and entrepreneurs in the field of technology in Romania whose mission is to bring into the public eye the latest releases in the world of high-tech, deciphering their practical impact. Through articles and creative special projects, Das Cloud tries to imagine how technology could change people’s lives for the better.

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• Clean, protect and maintain your PC with Ashampoo WinOptimizer 10

Everybody knows that the best way to keep your data safe is to back it up in some way. Having an extra copy is likely the best way to keep the data you need available. However, you have to have a disk, or some type of media to put it on, and sometimes that media gets damaged. Situations like that are made worse when the bad media in question is your backup drive, and your primary copy has bitten the dust. Its at times like this when you need tools like EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard. It’s a data recovery tool for Windows that just might be able to save your bacon.

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard is free, a one-stop data recovery too that can recover up to1 GB data. It can recover deleted files or folders even when they’ve been emptied from Recycle Bin. It can also recover data due to format, lost partition, system crash, virus attack, etc. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard can restore files with their original file names & storage paths.

The app was designed as a wizard, making the data recovery process easy even for a beginner. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard works with just about any rewritable media, including hard disks memory cards, and USB flash drives under Windows 2000, to Windows 8. Itt supports dynamic disks and all file systems including FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS/NTFS5, and EXT2/EXT3.

Free, easy-to-use, and powerful, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free Edition is a must-have too to combat data loss. No matter how you lose data, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard will likely recover what you’re looking for. At the very least, it’s a convenient first stop; and the price is right, so its very difficult to go wrong here.

Download EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard

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