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Unless you’ve been living in a box you’ve probably heard about Joost. It’s coming.

What is Joost?

Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.

It’s like tv and the net all mashed together. Not only can you watch tv, but it comes with the benefits of the net built in. Things like search, chat and instant messaging, built right into the program - so you find shows quickly and talk to your friends while you watch. The coolest feature is that you don’t have to wait to watch what you want. Unlike you’re easy to use cable tv box with DVR, you don’t have to wait until a program is scheduled to play to watch it.

The inteface looks slick (as it should), they have screenshots of the display over on their site aso you can check them out. Joost is not yet open to the public, but they have a widespread beta going on. You can request signup for the beta here or ask someone who is already a beta use to send you an invitation (if you have one send it to me!).

This isn’t just another web 2.0 experiment. The guys who created this also made two programs that shook up their respective industries…. Kazaa changed P2P and made it widespread and usable (tho I never really liked it) and Skype which really brought free voice over IP outta the realm of geek toys into the hands of everybody.

Joost will be advertising supported. I wonder if that means no skipping over commercials? If it does, then I fear it will be of limited use to me. If they just display ads on the side, or perhaps a 30 second clip at the beginning than I don’t see how this can fail.

I ran across a cool site today, TLBox. The site is a toolbox for developers and has a section dedicated to web design. The web design section contains links to color scheme helpers, icons, fonts, CSS, widgets, tutorials and more. The main site focuses around programming in general and has sections broken down into .NET, AJAX, C, C#, C++, Flash, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and Ruby just to name a few. Definetly worth a click:

 TLBox for programmers

TLBox for web designers

System restore is never anything I found particularly useful… in fact I don’t know that I’ve ever even used it. However, I’ve always left it enabled just in case. In Windows XP you could configure the amount of drive space System Restore uses via a slider control. No such control exists in Windows Vista and by default the sucker is configured to use up to 15 percent of your available drive space! Ok… 15% for something I don’t think I’ve ever used… I don’t think so.

To store restore points, you need at least 300 megabytes (MB) of free space on each hard disk that has System Protection turned on. System Restore might use up to 15 percent of the space on each disk. As the amount of space fills up with restore points, System Restore will delete older restore points to make room for new ones.

My laptop currently has a 60g drive and it’s allocated 5.136g of space. Of course this isn’t visible via the interface but to find out you can open a command prompt. Click on the start menu (or the orb as it seems to be called nowadays) and in the searc box type ‘command’, right click on the Command Prompt icon and select Run as Administrator. You’ll then see a DOS command prompt open up… type the following to see the current settings:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

What you’ll see is something like the following:

The command to set the amount of space used follows this syntax:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size]

So to configure your drive to only use 2 gigs of space on your C: drive you’d to the following:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=2GB

That’s it! You’ve recovered some space. If you find system restore useful I’d recommend not touching this setting, or at least not reducing it too much. But if you’re somebody like me who’s never used it you can easily reclaim some space.

“People everywhere complain that Wordpress is slow, or that they can’t survive a digg. They die if they get more than 10,000 visitors a day, their hosting providers ban them for using too many resources, and they cry because they have to purchase expensive hosting plans. If this describes your plight, before you run over to Survive Digg hosting and plunk down even more money, take a look at your Wordpress setup and LAMP stack. You can make them better.”

I’m not running a LAMP setup, but there’s still some great information in here even for those not running LAMP.

read more | digg story

How many auto updates have you received since you installed Vista? I bet it’s not anywhere near 100! TheHotFix.net has what THEY call Vista SP1. Pay attention here because this is NOT Microsoft’s Service Pack 1 release. In fact I bet this package pisses MS off to no end. I’m suprised they haven’t been slapped with a court order to take it down. But if you’ve got an issue with Vista check the site out, they may have the fix you need.

If you travel over to TheHotFix.net’s VistaSP1.net page you’ll find a listing of 86 different Vista fixes. They also have what they call their Vista SP1 Preview pack which contains over 100 fixes.

Here’s the linkage: VistaSP1.net