Facebook Forums, A New RSS Feed, Netflix makes Changes, Spotify launches in the USA, Speed Tips and Cammster – HT036

Jim, Andrew and Christian are joined by Rich O’Neil for this weeks’ installment of the Home Tech Podcast.

After exploring the concept of a show, “Random with Rich” discussing random Tweets and stream items from Google+, the guys kick it off, discussing some of the issues Rich has had with his router and streaming media from his Windows 2011 Home Server, and the good and bad of Universal Plug and Play (UPnP).

After discussing the possibility of setting up some Average Guy Forums, a Facebook group for The Average Guy Podcast Network has been set up, which will allow followers of the show to interact with the hosts, and allow us to notify folks of up and coming events such as Live Recordings, Podcasts being published, and new posts to The Average Guy website.

Jim discusses the new RSS Feed for the Home Tech Podcast.  For those of you who use iTunes, you can click to subscribe to the new feed.  For other Podcast downloading applications, please click on the RSS Feed and pick your Pod Catcher of choice!

Moving on, the guys discuss the release Spotify in the US.  Spotify is an online music streaming service that currently offers free accounts (via invitation), which gives you six months of unlimited streaming (which is defined as 10 hours).  There are also subscription accounts available at $5 and $10 per month which include a PC client and offline downloads.

Netflix has announced that they will be separating their streaming and DVD services, which changes the pricing structure to $7.99 for each service.  More details are available on the Netflix Blog.  For those of you who use Netflix, be sure to check out what has changed, and what it means to you.

Rich talks to us about Songify from Khush, which is an iPhone and iPod Touch application which turns speech into a music track.  While talking about the iPhone, Rich talks about his experiences with Jailbreaking his iPhone, and the associated experiences with the phone hanging, and the fixing step of upgrading the iPhone to the current version using iTunes, in order to return the phone to its’ natural state, restoring it to stability.

Rich reminds us of Hostsman, an application that allows automated updates of the Windows hosts file to protect you from dubious sites on the Internet, as well as telling about how you can Create Shortcuts to bypass User Access Control (UAC) in Windows.

From Christian’s Corner, Christian gives us an update on his current coding projects, the first being an update to Magic Wake on Lan for Windows Home Server, as well as his latest coding project, adding an additional player to Subsonic.

The Deal-of-the-Week is the Antec Unbeatable Notebook Cooler 200 from Amazon.com, which will slip right into your laptop bag, and is powered by USB. 4 1/2 star rated on Amazon, a good buy at $48.97.

Christians’ Speed Tip of the Week is more of a time saving tip, being spell checker add-ins for Internet Explorer 9,  from Tweaks.com.  While Google Chrome and Firefox both have inbuilt spell checking, these add-ins bring the functionality to Internet Explorer.

Christian also fills us in on the latest news from Google, being the closure of Google Labs, as announced by our friends over at Information Week.  More details are available over at the Official Google Blog.

Andrew brings us PlusFeed, a website which aggregates public posts into an RSS feed for easier consumption.  More details are available over at NIRMALTV.COM.

Andrew also brings us the motion detection image capturing service Cammster, which lets you setup a webcam to act as a security camera, sending you an e-mail with their free service, or alerts you via SMS for $2 for 200 SMS events.

To wrap it up, the guys talk about some of the odd things that folks show via webcams online, as well as folks who use Twitter to allow their pets to communicate with other pets on Twitter, and some who stream their pets and other animals via services such as camstreams.

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