Category: Computer

Esca sent me a link to a Flickr image the other day and I noticed something weird with my title bar:

I was like, are my eyes tricking me? I’m seeing F*ckr… I can only attribute this to the font the Zune theme defaults to for title bars. I couldn’t find out what font it was using. Using Microsoft Word, I did however find a bunch of fonts that would result with the word looking like F*ckr. I wonder if that was intentional. 😉

Cari notes that the l and i seem a little bit too close.

So I was wondering if there any interesting new titles I could find. I ended up with these two:

So I was searching for something and ended up on this page: Have A Look At My Desktop.

I thought the skull background image was rather cute, but the author stated he didn’t remember where he got it from, besides that it was from DeviantArt. So I searched for: cute skull deviantart and the first link on Blingo returned Skull Wallpaper by ~LordZoltan. (Did I mention that I won a $10 Amazon.com Gift Certificate off Blingo recently?) Anyway, I can’t believe such a query actually worked!

Unfortunately, he only has one size for this wall paper: 1152×864, but that was easily fixed by centering the image and changing the default background color to black.

Next, I noticed that his taskbar was black. I was like, that’s rather cool. I also liked how he replaced his start button with just a windows flag. He didn’t mention if this was XP or Vista, but I’m assuming it’s XP since the recycle bin icon I believe was updated in Vista.

So the hunt for the black XP theme began. I found a couple of them.

The first one I found was via this video: Black XP Theme FREE, which points us to Zune Desktop Theme. I gave that a whirl. Turned out pretty nice:

I then found: Royale Noir: secret XP theme uncovered. Theme is very similar to the Zune Desktop. The shades of black and gray are definitely not the same, and instead of orange (for the start menu button and the arrow), they’ve chosen green. Not bad either:

I also found this one: XP Themes / Black Mesa which looks nice too, but I haven’t tried it on my system yet.

UPDATE: The Zune Desktop theme even made my download status bar orange!

So I have 2 different versions of the media center remote. My first one is the Remote Control for Media Center PC which I got from the company store. The 2nd one appears to be from the Windows Media Center Extender for Xbox (Amazon.com) package. They were giving these out for free awhile back. You can see more pictures of the 2nd remote here: Media Center Extender for Xbox Review.

Anyway, I recently swapped to the Xbox remote because it had the “My Videos” button that I really liked, since I use that button everytime I enter media center. However, the downside of that was that I lost the ability to program its buttons, since this remote doesn’t have a learning feature.

The learning feature wasn’t that useful before as the only buttons you can teach are the volume buttons and the TV power button. I didn’t really need to control my TV’s volume as the volume control on the PC itself was sufficient. The TV power button I really only use twice every time I wanna watch TV, while on the other hand, I could easily use the “My Videos” buttons 5 or 6x during 1 sitting.

Anyway, this changed after I got my receiver. Using multiple remote controls while riding my exercise bike is a difficult acrobatic task as I only have enough space to hold one remote on the display. So when I need to control the volume, and I have to bend backwards, stretch out my hand and reach for the receiver remote on the couch.

Then one day, I thought to myself, why can’t I just program one of the buttons to be “My Videos” and be able to use the media center remote control with the learning feature. I programmed my TV power button as “My Videos” button and the volume up/down buttons with the receiver’s volume up/down signals and it’s been working great so far.

So after building my new file server (yes, I know I’ve been promising you a blog entry on that), I had to remap my Vista Media Center to look for videos in a different location. However, for some reason, deleting existing “watched folders” was problematic for Media Center. It would leave random folders inside “My Videos” and other areas, which was annoying. I had unlinked my music share because I didn’t really listen to music on my media center, but none of the music would disappear from “My Music”.

When I open “My Videos”, I would see Local Disk (C:) and \\KrunkFS\Public because I used to have C:\Public\Unwatched and \\KrunkFS\Public\Music linked.

I tried searching the web, but I’ve found people hitting this problem, but never a solution. However, I have on advantage that others don’t, I work at Microsoft. Sending a email to the Media Center team was a simple as locating what their distribution list alias is.

My email:

I was wondering if there’s a way to reset the Windows Vista Media Center library. This past weekend, I moved some folders around and removed it from the watched folders list. However, remnants of the previously watched folders still exist. What’s funkier is that now Local Disk (C:) is being shown in “My Videos” when C:\Public\Videos was removed from my library setup.

Another example would be the music I was storing in \\server\Public\Music which was mapped to Z:\. Removing that folder from the watch list now brings up a \\server\Public in “My Videos”.

I tried rebooting or leaving Media Center on for a couple hours hoping it’ll clear the cache, but that didn’t work.

I wasn’t able to find anything remotely sounding to what I wanted in the settings/tasks area.

I was wondering if there’s something I’m missing or if there’s another way to force it to reset or completely reindex the library.

Thanks in advance.

It turns out that Media Center and WMP11 (Windows Media Player) share the same library and if I had searched for how to fix library problems in WMP11, I would’ve found the solution.

Someone pointed me to this KB article: You cannot view, add, or delete items in the library in Windows Media Player 11, which gives directions on how to reset the library. It mentions that the library has entered a corrupted state and you’ll probably have to delete the entire library.

I had no problem with doing that as I just wanted to reset the library completely and do a re-index.

The instructions are:

1. Exit Windows Media Player.
2. For Windows XP:
   Click Start, click Run, type %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player, and then click OK.
   For Windows Vista:
   Click Start, click Run, type %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Media Player, and then click OK.
3. Select all the files in the folder, and then click Delete on the File menu.
   Note You do not have to delete the folders that are in this folder.
4. Restart Windows Media Player.
   Note Windows Media Player automatically rebuilds the database.

After deleting all the files, Media Center’s library was completely reset. I readded the folders I wanted and everything has worked fine since.

RayAlome shared this video with me: Advanced Photo Resizing

Don’t let the boring title fool you, this video is amazing.

Technology by Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel.

I’ve got to say, this software is rather amazing. Appears to have been presented during SIGGRAPH 2007 by Shai Avidan (Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab) and Ariel Shamir (The interdisciplinary Center & MERL). As the disclaimer suggests, I wasn’t too attracted to the title and it sounded somewhat boring. However, as I was watching the video, it never stopped to amaze me how awesome the software/algorithm they wrote did.

Image resizing has always been a problem. When you scale down an image, you lose too much important information and when you enlarge images you get pixelation. This new technique appears to be able to fix both those problems.

It’s hard for me to explain what exactly is going on, but by looking at the levels and gradients and other ways computer sees images that humans don’t, they label areas of the pictures to be high energy and low energy. When you resize an image today, you generally remove 1 vertical or horizontal line every few lines. However, that leaves you image jaggedly and funky looking, especially if you’re not resizing to same aspect ratio.

By find finding these high and low energy zones, they are able to remove a seam (non-straight line) that is the lowest possible energy as defined by the user. So as you stretch or shrink the image, the algorithm automatically calculates what to add and what to remove, leaving the image in the crispest and sharpest state possible. I also really enjoyed the ability to give positive or negative weights to area I want to remove and keep, allowing me to remove people I don’t in an image, and keeping those I want. Take that you bystander who always seems to appear randomly in my digipix.

I don’t really truly get how the algorithm works for enlarging pictures. It mentioned it find the lowest energy seam and expand that and interpolate the colors to match the area. However, I assume if you’re adding to a lowest energy area already, it’ll remain the lowest energy area. However, during the demo of stretching the image. You could clearly see the lowest energy seam doesn’t remain the same. Oh well, guess we’ll have to wait for the paper to be released to see what’s going on.

But can you imagine if browsers, photo viewers, or even thumbnail generators utilized this algorithm? That would be so sweet!

I brought up the point of apply this to video as it sounded a very cool area to apply this. Imagine watching YouTube videos without the blurriness and shrinking only removes the useless areas. Or stretching a video from 640×480 to 1920×1080 to make it HD. Haha. I would really want to see what a movie would look like then.

Anyway, another interesting SIGGRAPH 2007 presentation was the Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs by James Hays and Alexei A. Efros from Carnegie Mellon University.

Abstract

What can you do with a million images? In this paper we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user. Unlike existing image completion methods, our algorithm can generate a diverse set of image completions and we allow users to select among them. We demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm over existing image completion approaches.

Yet another really interesting algorithm. This one allows you to fill in an missing area or remove unwanted objects from a photo and have it filled in with something else. Solves quite a different problem from the former, yet I was really astonished by the results in their paper and presentation.

The algorithm scans through thousands if not millions of images to see if there’s a match that would fill in the whole in your image. I like the results. Building not match the surround, remove it. Construction vehicles obstructing the view, remove it. This is fun!