MP Blog

To all the know about & use Internet TV you may already be aware of the many Internet TV software available on the marked, most are around $20-$50 & give you some sort of streaming software to watch & search.

Now its getting better for all, joost is here

Check them out, they are currently in beta testing & should be going live very soon (we hope).

Joost is rumored to be one of those things that makes something notice (mainstream & well known), sure the technology has been around for ever & you can watch TV on win-amp & other software but joost seems to be making it easier than ever.

You can view their Blog Here or check out some cool screens shots here.

I was installing gentoo (harder to install than I thought necessary) on my Virtual PC (VPC) & I wasn’t sure if that was the distro I wanted (or best suited for my senario) so I did a quick search & found a “Linux Distribution Chooser“.

That helped out alot, my top results were Ubuntu & Mandriva (previously mandrake).

I had already tried most flavours of Ubunto installs on the VPC which didn’t work so I decided to check out Mandriva. To my delight the latest version was bosting a 3d desktop! YAY!!!

I had a quick look at the demo videos & it looked great,
now how come there isn’t anything like this for windows?

Again a quick search sorted that out, I found a few “virtual” desktop
managers wich just gave you more of the boring 2d you already had.

Then I came accross 3DNA WOW! now thats more like it!

A few seconds later the download completed & I was up and running (If you are a gamer you will pick this world up very quickly if not it
may pay to take the intro).

The 3D Desktop by Gnome as it had many great features & the one from Mandriva was insanely cool. When is the Microsoft world going to catch up?, I want full 3d desktop with file/folder browsing & interaction with my pc.

The one from 3DNA is great but as usual it close (close enought) but not exactly what I want, great work 3DNA!

After writing this I discoverd a few more cool 3d desktops.

Spaces replaces your desktop with a 3d one, when you minimize a program it goes to spaces. Its hard to discribe without images (may post some later) but give the free trial a go its got some cool features, shame about the 14 day trial though.

The other interesting one I found was SphereSite, this software gives you the feeling of being in the center of a sphere whith all you icons, shortcuts & minimized programs around you.

There were a whole different set of results when you serach for “3D file browsers” the best I found was Tactile 3D. Tactile fully represents your file system in 3d & you can preform all actions you could with windows file explorer; it even goes as far to allow you to customize the layout & position of items in 3d space.

If anyone know of any great 3d desktops please add a comment to this blog

Wednesday 28 March:

I found a few more, there are a number of 3d desktops for linux as well

FreeDesktops .org

Project Lookig Glass (Linux)

I was browsing the web (ignoring all the adds & pop-ups) when I saw a reference to Linux XP Dexktop! whats this?

It turns out that this is the closet thing to a windows OS I know of & its FREE!!! (or you can optionally sign up for a small $20 fee for more features etc).

So this caught my attention so I wanted to try it out, but where?

I really couldn’t be bothered pulling out my old Linux box, reformatting it, setting it update again, finding monotor etc. So I decided to just burn the iso to disk & put it in the pile of “things that will gather dust“.

The next day I found out that Microsoft put out a Virtual PC Emulator for free!!! WOW!

It was a tiny (less than 20mb) download, install was so easy & fast I wondered if it would work.

After a while I had a linux OS running on my Windows XP Pro box!

Linux XP Desktop does what it ways, a very close match to windows, the best for migrating from windows to Linux (thats OpenSource power for ya!)

So natrually a while later I had DOS, Linux & XP all in virtual machines, now I can test, Develop & Debug in multi evnironments without leaving my man pc or buying more hardware.

I see the merge comming & its all good, everything that runs on anything.