I've started seeing quite a trend in blogs that have just too many widgets installed on them. The content of these blogs may be great but the amount of widgets, movies and music playing when you enter the blog page really slows it down. Sometimes your browser starts to hang as it tries to download all those plug-ins and widgets, before long you've got frustrated and just closed the browser window.

It makes me wonder if people actually visit the front page of their blog often or just post to the blog with a publishing tool.

Having spoken to friends who have read my previous post about MyBlogLog traffic trailing off after users where forced to sign-up for a Yahoo account after MyBlogLog joined the Yahoo network. I have discovered that many of them have noticed much the same stem in the flow of traffic. I am not entirely sure why this has happened but they still appear to be getting traffic from BlogCatalog so it must be a MyBlogLog thing, maybe people are taking a while to change accounts to Yahoo or they just don't want to?

To be honest I can't remember the last time I used my Yahoo account this has been the first time I have used it in ages in order to use MyBlogLog again. I think the reason I don't use Yahoo that much is that I mainly used it for its messenger program that started to get incredibly bulky my friends realised they were having the same problem with it and moved onto Google Chat. Yahoo Messenger takes up about 55 - 60megs of memory when it runs which is bigger than MSN messenger (only just). A number of my friends prefer to use Google Chat because it is just so simple and lightweight I think all the other messenger programs out there have tried to pack just too much into their applications. When ever I had a problem with my machine running slow I would usually kill Yahoo Messenger, ICQ and keep Google Chat running some of my friends have removed them all together and just use MSN and Google Chat. Maybe if makers of these messenger programs optimised their programs so they took up less space on peoples machines they'd stay on machines longer? I think Google has the right idea here producing something that is lightweight, so easy to use and just plain simple is definitely the right move.

I just have too much information to take in every day. At work I have about 50-100 e-mail's a day to cope with, then I have a constant feed of RSS traffic from just too many blogs coming into my RSS reader, Facebook traffic comes in at a constant stream and then my ISP email account and my GMail account never end.

You would just say I could turn off the RSS reader? The problem is the current project I am working on uses a Wiki for everything so every time people make changes or tag things for your attention my RSS reader goes nuts bringing in traffic. My work email account I have had for such a long time that I get all kinds of spam now and company emails going back and forth. As it takes me so long to read everything I just glance at it and use the Outlook flagging tool to mark it as important to read later. I don't think I could cope with another social network or information source and ironically enough when I want to get any work done at work I actually turn off all of these information sources. Its funny that all these information sources that are supposed to be such a "boost" and help in the workplace are actually a hindrance. Every hour at work I will start up Outlook and begin deleting the messages that are not important. Another interrupter at work is MSN messenger which we use for communicating across sites, I will also turn this off when I need to get work done and turn it on every now and again if I need to bother a colleague for help.

I realise a lot of organisations have blocked many of these "tools" and social networks on their firewalls to stop their staff from being distracted, I like to think I am good at self policing myself, but I realise why companies do this. Sometimes people just can't help themselves and I have friends who admit they have a weakness not being able to leave Facebook, Beebo or what ever social network they belong too alone while at work. I personally never use social networks while at work, as I know how distracting they are. Although one of things I say to people is while you are using them look at the clock on your PC when you first start and write it down. Then look at it again every now and again, you'll be quite amazed by how 2 minutes turns into 30minutes.   

It looks as though Google has started off something the industry has coined as the "Google Dance" again. Basically every now and again Google does a full update of its index on all of its servers. This usually has several side effects either the ranking on your site goes up, or you start to loose rank as Google works out less higher ranked sites are pointing at you than there used to be. I've lost 1point on my page rank however my wife has several blogs which have all gained page ranking points.  Maybe I just don't blog enough?

Is it me or has MyBlogLog traffic started to drift off a bit? It all seems to be ever since people were forced to sign-up for a Yahoo ID to use the service...

Just to recap on my last article about how to watch BBC iPlayer content through your Xbox without using Media Centre I have now tested it with Sky Anytime PC and it works like a charm.

The best way to make this work is to log into Sky Anytime PC and click on the "Account & Settings"  button from here you can find the "Default Download Location", copy this and then open windows Media Player 11, click Library > Add To Library and click add to add the folder location you just copied from Sky Anytime PC. Now next time you download a file from Sky Anytime PC it will automatically be added to your Windows Media Player library. If you followed the steps in my previous article to share your library with your Xbox you should be able to now watch SkyAnytime PC content on your Xbox withut having to drag the downloaded movies into the My Movies folder.

Having recently bought an Xbox 360 I heard there was a way of streaming content from your Windows XP machine to the XBox, the reason I was particularly interested was that I had started using the BBC iPlayer and Sky Anytime PC service for watching TV programs on demand. It was great for catching up on shows I had missed or forgot to record on my Sky Plus box. The only problem I had was that it wasn't much fun watching these shows on my laptop screen when I had a 42inch LCD screen with surround sound sitting around being unused naturally the Xbox filled this chasm.

Having looked around the net many people who do not have the Media Centre edition of Windows XP do not seem to be able to stream DRM protected content to their Xbox. Well the solution to the problem is pretty simple and you don't need to use TVersity (great free program by the way).

The Solution

1. Ensure you have Windows Media Player 11 installed you can download this from Microsoft's web site. Chances are if you have the BBC iPlayer or Sky Anytime PC installed you will already have the latest version of Windows Media Player.
2. Click on the Library tab and select the option Media Sharing. From here tick the checkbox "Share My media to:". If you click on settings in this window you have the option to select what type of content you wish to share. Click OK to close this window.
3. Now after you have downloaded some content from BBC iPlayer first select to watch the content. What this will do is get the licence (DRM) to allow you to view the video. No need to watch the video you can close the BBC iPlayer window.
4. Copy the movie into your movies folder (found under my documents) and then drag it into Windows Media Player. This part is quite important I couldn't get this to work unless I carried out this step for some reason it has to be inside the Movies folders located under My Documents.
5. On your Xbox select the media tab, select Video and then select computer. If all goes well you should see your Windows XP machine. Select your computer.
6. Back on your Windows XP machine go back to Windows Media Player select the Library > Media Sharing over here you should see your Xbox. Select it and then select Allow and then OK. (Don't worry you only have to do this once).
7. Go back to the Xbox and press the backup button and select the Video option again as in step 5 you should now see the video's you had placed on your Windows XP machine. Select the video and enjoy!

Now don't panic you don't need to carry out the steps above all the time. Every time you want to add a new movie try to watch it first to acquire the DRM licence then place it into Windows Media Player and then watch from the Xbox. This seems to have been the only way I could get this to work. I see no reason why the above will not work with SkyAnytime which I will be testing shortly. If you are not able to see your Windows XP machine from your Xbox backup to the media tab itself and go back in. If this doesn't work ensure your Xbox is connected to your network.

If you know of an easier way of doing this I'd love to hear from you.

Every now and again we do a few drastic things or have a few spending urges and its going to sound a bit hypocritical regarding my past posts about saving money but I splashed out on an Xbox 360. Now I am a pretty big Sony PS3 fan but the PS3 is still just too expensive for me right now and I really wanted to play the game Gears of War ever since I saw it. What was the result? Well I am very happy with my purchase Gears of War was better than I ever thought it would be and its nice to have a device that take advantage of my High Resolution TV at 1080p I really hadn't realised how good the picture could be especially how the Xbox upscales DVD movies it was a nice surprise.

The other thing I like about the Xbox and I know the PS3 is capable of this is actually streaming movies from your PC to your Xbox this pretty neat as you don't really want to watch movies on your PC right? The only thing I haven't tried yet is streaming my Sky Anytime PC or BBC iPlayer content onto it. I'm hoping the DRM content is not going to be a problem.

Gears of war is excellent and my wife loves playing it with me in split screen mode, only problem is she thinks she's better at it than I am...pah!

I have watched so many documentary's on TV about how many people have been forcibly evicted from their houses in China to make way for the Olympics and for new developments. China is growing at an amazing pace and are taking every opportunity to try and amaze the world in its capitol Beijing to try and show to the world "look we are an advanced nation with modern buildings and you can bring your big business here!". The horrible truth is that in order to put on this show China is doing what it does best and that is shoving people aside for the "greater good of the state".

I think China needs to learn an important lesson and that is if you are going to put on a show for the world you'd better do it right and that doesn't just mean the show, it also means how you do it. The rest of the world shouldn't tolerate it, an Olympic games that have been put on at the expense of people being evicted from their homes, beaten and forcibly evicted. Its probably time to start boycotting China's Olympics and there are many ways this can be done if China does not change its ways such as.

• Not watching the Olympic games on TV affects advertising revenues
• Athletes and countries can pull out of the games
• TV companies can refuse to broadcast the games.

There have already been many articles on the Internet about it.

http://www.reuters.com/news/video/videoStory?videoId=68106

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/264131_olympics24.html

http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=174

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6668485.stm

My parents in law had a problem with their machine where they had lost all the icons on their desktop. Puzzled I looked everywhere for them and could not find them, not even in the recycled folder. So naturally my next stop was Google to see if anyone else had had this problem and kept on coming up with the same old things

"Run a virus scanner and search for viruses"

"Is your screen resolution correct"

"It happened to me and sadly I found no solution to it so used other programs from the task manager"

Solution

Funny enough the solution was incredibly simple. Right click on your desktop on the menu that appears click on "Arrange Icons" then hover down the second menu that appears and ensure the option "Show desktop icons" is ticked and like magic they reappeared!