Back to the Future–the hover board lives!

We all love the 80’s but is there anything better than a Back to the Future hover board.  No.  So here one is.  Working.  With laser guidance.

Dornob has the skinny: The Future is Back: Real-Life, High-Tech Hoverboard Design

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The largest photo on earth care of Silverlight, Azure and Sony.

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I love my Sony camera and I’m intrigued that Sony made the only kit up to this job.  Just like Microsoft Made the only software up to the job.  Above is a still taken from the unbelievably deeeeep and immersive panoramic photo from Budapest that broke all records.  It’s amazing, go look.  Also it’s hosted on Azure and delivered in Silverlight.

70 Billion Pixels Budapest – The largest photo on Earth – created by 360world.eu

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Apple boo boo? Try a band aid

 

Antenn-aid for iPhone 4, 6-pack

Or plaster for us British folk.  Simple solution, fun.  Not compatible with Windows Phone 7 (or any other phone on the market)

[via: Apple Bumper | The Office Stylist and available to buy from Antenn-aid on Etsy]

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Kinect for Xbox 360

I’ve seen this a few times now, including live, un-encumbered by a Microsoft employee in a white labcoat in a Mall in Atlanta.  It’s stunning watching the smiles grins on peoples faces when they play.  I can’t wait till Christmas.

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Why VHDs are ace

Andrew Fryer, my team mate and fellow IT Pro evangelist has posted a great article on why he likes VHDs.  I have to agree with him and I’ll add something else…

VHDs are a file based format as opposed to the traditional sector based format.  This is very cool because it allows “offline servicing” for the OS, which means that you can service the VHD without it being booted.  This is cool because say you have a demo environment and you want to update a driver all you do is mount the VHD and use DISM like this:

DISM /Image:V:\ /Add-Driver /Driver:M:\Drivers /recurse

to add the driver, then on next boot it’s done.  Simples.

More complicated is what’s going on under the hood, but essentially a VHD will consume less disk space than the same disk in a sector based format as each unique file is only stored once in the VHD format.

Throw your brilliant VHD tips our way in the comments…

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Bring on the wooden phone

How would you like a phone made of wood?  How about a PC?  How about anything, like this helmet?  Technaro a German company that makes plastics from a wood has a product called ARBOFORM that is made from  100% renewable materials and works just like a plastic.  So even wooden components like printed circuit boards are possible.

[via: Dornob]

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Microsoft Certification Videos

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When I first started out one of the things that I did to get real world understanding (as opposed to at an Academic institution which is invaluable too but very different) was to get stuck into getting Microsoft Certified.  Back then MCSE was my goal and I did it entirely through self study, reading and doing.  That was on NT4 and I upgraded everything to 2000 through a single (and really hard!) exam.  Since then I’ve been doing BETA exams, 254 questions in one sitting was a bit much though, and kept things current.  Things have changed a bit now but getting certified is really valuable. 

The videos we’ve produced and put up on landthegig.com are very extreme but I’m pretty sure I’ve interviewed a couple of these guys….

Microsoft Certification Can Open Doors

How do you view certs?  Nice to have, essential or something entirely different…

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Weekly wrap up – July 19th to 25th

 

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As usual this is my weekly wrap up of all the stuff I’ve posted to my blogs over the past week, a week where I was at a massive internal conference that was super awesome Smile (you won’t believe what this picture is)  All the following were pre-posted, so nothing overly topical but some fun stuff, like mad-as-a-bag-of-frogs coffee and some really good pointers to great office resources.

What’s on the cards for this week….InTune (hopefully), more on Windows 7 deployment and a little BPOS and probably some random stuff as well as some Atlantan thoughts and the usual helping of off topic fun.

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Tools to help you deploy Office 2010

The Office 2010 Engineering blog posted a great roundup of the tools that you can use to help deploy Office 2010 this week.  It’s a powerful tool set and I honestly can’t see a blocker to deployment that it doesn’t help remove. 

  • You don’t know what addins are out there…there’s a tool for that. 
  • Don’t know if you VBA code is compatible it 2010…there’s a tool for that. 
  • Want it in your standard image…there’s a tool for that. 
  • Want to customise what lands on a client…there’s a tool for that. 
  • Want help planning deployment…there’s a tool for that. 
  • Want someone to get your coffee whilst you deploy Office 2010…you might have to do that yourself!

Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Tools

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Have you ever seen a cooler watch?

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I’m pretty sure this is the coolest watch ever created….more so than the TAG Monaco…

Horological Machine No4 Thunderbolt on Cool Hunting

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