Midspot

Technical insanity at its best!

Free Windows Media Center Software

MediaPortal is an Open Source application ideal for turning your PC / TV into a very advanced Media Center. MediaPortal allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch and store your videos and DVDs, view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder and much much more. You get MediaPortal as Open Source software. This means you can help in developing MediaPortal or tweak it for your own needs with lots of innovating plugins from our great community.

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Skype Worm on the Loose

Internet security firm Websense has discovered a worm that uses Skype to propagate.

Skype is best known for allowing subscribers to make free telephone
calls over the Internet. The company has more than 7 million
subscribers and was acquired just over a year ago by online auction firm eBay for $2.6 billion.

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Vista does not have an SMTP server

Where is my SMTP server on Vista?  I’m not sure why more developers haven’t asked this question. 
Simple, it is not included

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Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying

I think this is a pretty good list. There are lots of questions that need to be addressed but these are the fight-starters…

1) Have we discussed whether or not to have children, and if the answer is yes, who is going to be the primary care giver?

2) Do we have a clear idea of each other’s financial obligations and goals, and do our ideas about spending and saving mesh?

3) Have we discussed our expectations for how the household will be maintained, and are we in agreement on who will manage the chores?

Read the rest

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Person Pays $450+ for Wii Receipt!

A fool and his money are soon parted

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Vista Cannot Run SQL Server

Vista, its long-awaited update to the Windows operating system, can’t run the current version of SQL Server. The company is working on a SQL upgrade that is compatible with Vista – called SQL Server 2005 Express Service Pack 2 – but it’s in beta and can be licensed only for testing purposes. Microsoft hasn’t set a release date for the new SQL program.

Ouch! Full Link

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Taco Bell Meat Recipe

Ever want to make your tacos taste just like those from Taco Bell?

Now you can!

Taco Bell Meat recipe

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Illegal Border Fence Firm Snared for Illegals?

The company that is building the fence to keep out illegal aliens has been charged with employing illegals.

Go figure…

A fence-building company in Southern California agrees to pay nearly $5 million in fines for hiring illegal immigrants. Two executives from the company may also serve jail time. The Golden State Fence Company’s work includes some of the border fence between San Diego and Mexico.

After an immigration check in 1999 found undocumented workers on its payroll, Golden State promised to clean house. But when followup checks were made in 2004 and 2005, some of those same illegal workers were still on the job. In fact, U-S Attorney Carol Lam says as many as a third of the company’s 750 workers may have been in the country illegally.

Link

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Drupal 5 release candidate

Rejoice fellow Drupalites! After just two betas we present you the first Drupal 5 release candidate (RC1).

Download it from: http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-5.0-rc1.tar.gz.

You can read about the new features in the beta 1 announcement. In contrast to the beta’s, most debugging has been done and, should no more fatal bugs emerge, this version is release worthy. A list of all the bugfixes since beta 2 can be found on the release page.

Link

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Great Example of Web 2.0

UTube took advantage of all the traffic that resulted from users trying to reach YouTube.

A while back, UTube.com
(“the number one supplier of used Tube Machinery in the world,” they
claim) complained that people were mistakenly arriving at their site
when they actually wanted to land on YouTube.com.
Well, I guess the wave of laughter erupting after that didn’t go by
unnoticed, and UTube has now reconsidered… and is trying to monetize
all that traffic, it seems (70,000 people per day, according to them),
despite having gone to court suing YouTube earlier. Quote Mambo in the forum:

<<[U]tube.com has taken advantage of the extra traffic, and
has created an advertising-dominated search engine box, on the top of
their main homepage.

The sponsored links are laid-out to look like videos, some with their own “ratings”.>>

There’s a couple of search suggestions to get you started, like poker and ringtones. And when you click the UTube logo, you’ll end up on a “what’s hot” listing linking to searches for britney spears, nintendo wii and what-not. Here’s the top search result for poker, along with the unrelated web cam girl and the fake rating (both appear on other ads, too):

Link

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