The giant plastic continent swirling in the mid pacific is a fav topic of mine.  Now evidence suggests, rather than just compelling penguins with fidgety feet to embark on exotic quests before they choke to death, it’s actually decomposing and leeeching chemicals into the oceans.  Forget global warming, this one is really going to hurt…

Schneier talks about dealing with customs computer searches by encrypting your data with a random key.  It occurs to me that having Windows Home Server provides an easy alternative : don’t take your data with you in the first place.  Bring a throwaway netbook instead, and connect back home over the SSL VPN that is WHS remote connect, to get your data.  Save your data back over the VPN and if the Netbook gets impounded, just buy another one.

“It is embarrassing for one of the most scientifically, technologically and medicinally advanced nations in the world to base advice on how to prevent one of the leading causes of poor health and premature death (obesity) on a 200-year-old numerical hack developed by a mathematician who was not even an expert in what little was known about the human body back then.”

From the Article - “Those with normal flu-like symptoms should not seek care in hospitals unless they have certain “warning signs” of severe infection, the former Hong Kong health director stressed.

Adults with a high fever that lasts for more than three days should seek help, and children who have difficulty waking up, are lethargic or are no longer alert may also need extra care, Chan said.

“For a pandemic of moderate severity, this is one of our greatest challenges: helping people to understand when they do not need to worry, and when they do need to seek urgent care,” she told the conference, also attended by Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova.”

I’ve installed Windows 7 and now it’s time to get down to using it. Unfortunately, for all teh promises of ease of use, somethings are way harder than they need to be. Since one of the things that makes it hard is lack of real documentation, I thought I’d help by sharing a somewhat simple task that has been obfuscated in the pursuit of making things simpler.

Firstly, before we do anything, you have to download Windows Live Suite from the windows live site. Windows 7 doesn’t actually come with any of this software. I’m sure you can thank the US anti trust courts and their crownies for forcing this amazing decision on all of us. MS has made it a bit easier for us that get stuck with Big Brother making decisions on our behalf, by linking to the DL site directly from the Start menu when you first startup your new install. (Thanks for that Bill, or whoever you left in charge)

Once you’ve got the software, to capture video in Windows 7 from a direct connect video source, you must use Photo Gallery, not Movie Maker. Yes, I agree : this is counter intuitive. From Microsoft’s point of view however, movie maker is an aggregator of source materials and Photo Gallery is the storage and catalog of source materials. You put it into the catalogue before you use it. I will digress for just a moment to share a recommendation - change the name of Photo Gallery to Media gallery, or put a link to the Video Acquire Wizard from Movie Maker - or (wild idea here) do both!

With your Camera already plugged in and showing up in Printers and Devices, from Photo Gallery, click File -> ‘Import from a Camera or Scanner’ to start the wizard. You will be given a list of connected devices to choose from. Choose your camera and click Import. Now, in the Import dialog, give your clip a name and choose how you’d like to import video. For my purposes, I chose “Select Parts of your Video to Import” Your default location for video footage will be your My Videos folder. If you have redirected this folder to your WHS Users directory as I have, you will have to click More Options and set a new directory on the local hard drive. Once you’ve got your settings done, click next.

Ok now for the tricky part. For my setup I am using a Canon ZR65 Mini DV camcorder. The benefit of this setup is that it has a AV input and DV pass through capabilities make it a convenient Analog Video firewire capture device. Unfortunately, Windows Acquire Video Wizard, in a bid to be extra helpful will try to control the tape playback of the Canon or any firewire connected deivce for you. This is great if you’ve read this far and only have Mini DV to capture from - congrats - you can stop reading. For this rest of us though, this will cut off the analog video playback. There is however a simple solution.

Eject the Mini DV Tape

This disables Windows wanting to be helpful, as it detects no tape in the device, however the signal is still active and thus you can playback the analog video source plugged into the camera. Simply hit play, then click import and Windows will begin recording. Once your all done importing clips (Cataloging video) you can then go to Movie Maker to assemble the clips. I’ll leave that one for another day…