Technology has came a long way from the first computer. Now you are able to interface with your computer pretty much anywhere with anything. TV has also evolved a long way from just being able to watch it to recording live tv to watching episodes online. Now you have Boxee.

“Boxee“, which is a open-soruce, cross platform social media center that works for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Boxee, a bran of XBMC, takes normal Media Centers and allows you to view, review, and share your media through social networking services. Even though it is still in early development it is a great leap forward to having a “all-in-one” media center allowing you to watch local movies, tv shows and listen to music but also allowing you to grab the same kind of content from the web.

Although it has not been relased yet Boxee is working with D-Link to make the “Boxee Box“. This product will run Boxee for under $200 dollars with all the nice high definition connections.

If you have ever canceled a print job within windows you probably had a time or two when it just froze, and it seemed like it was never going to cancel that print job. According to Ask Reddit this is because Windows is unable to to cancel the print job while the file created from printing is still in use. To fix this problem Ask Reddit gave the manual and quick batch file version that you can find below.

To manually fix the problem do these steps:

open task manager, stop spoolsv.exe, navigate to c:\windows\system32\spool\printers\, delete everything in this folder, open the run box, run spoolsv.exe again. print.

- From: Ask Reddit

Or if you are not that savvy you can create a new text document and save it as clearprint.bat with the following code below.

@echo off
echo Stopping print spooler.
echo.
net stop spooler
echo deleting stuff... where? I'm not sure. Just deleting stuff.
echo.
FOR %%A IN (%systemroot%\  system32\  spool\  printers\   \  *.*) DO DEL %%A
echo Starting print spooler.
echo.
net start spooler

Have you ever wanted to be able to update your computer or multiple computers without having to connect to Microsoft’s update site or download automatic updates? Lets say you are an IT person and you need to push updates to multiple standalone or none network ready computers. With AutoPatcher you can easily accomplish this task, and they just made it compatible with Windows 7!

AutoPatcher is a portable Windows application that will grab the latest Windows updates, and give you the ability to apply those updates to as many computers you want with the downloaded updates it pulled. One of the coolest things about this application is its free too!

Looking for a free way to serve media to your PS3 such as Movies? At my house I have a Windows Server setup and a couple TB hard drives full of software, music, movies and other types of documents. It was great for sharring them between computers but I really didn’t have a way to view them on the PS3. I looked all around for solutions and found this free piece of software that runs on Windows, Linux and MAC OS. It may not be feature packed but the best thing about PS3 Media Server is its free!

PS3 Media Server is a DLNA compliant Upnp Media Server for the PS3, written in Java, with the purpose of streaming or transcoding any kind of media files, with minimum configuration. It’s backed up with the powerful Mplayer/FFmpeg packages.

URL: http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/

Current features

• Ready to launch and play. No codec packs to install. No folder configuration and pre-parsing or this kind of annoying thing. All your folders are directly browsed by the PS3, there’s an automatic refresh also.
• Real-time video transcoding of MKV/FLV/OGM/AVI, etc.
• Direct streaming of DTS / DTS-HD core to the receiver
• Remux H264/MPEG2 video and all audio tracks to AC3/DTS/LPCM in real time with tsMuxer when H264 is PS3/Level4.1 compliant
• Full seeking support when transcoding
• DVD ISOs images / VIDEO_TS Folder transcoder
• OGG/FLAC/MPC/APE audio transcoding
• Thumbnail generation for Videos
• You can choose with a virtual folder system your audio/subtitle language on the PS3!
• Simple streaming of formats PS3 natively supports: MP3/JPG/PNG/GIF/TIFF, all kind of videos (AVI, MP4, TS, M2TS, MPEG)
• Display camera RAWs thumbnails (Canon / Nikon, etc.)
• ZIP/RAR files as browsable folders
• Support for pictures based feeds, such as Flickr and Picasaweb
• Internet TV / Web Radio support with VLC, MEncoder or MPlayer
• Podcasts audio/ Video feeds support
• Basic Xbox360 support
• FLAC 96kHz/24bits/5.1 support
• Windows Only: DVR-MS remuxer and AviSynth alternative transcoder support

This has been out for awhile but I’m pretty sure that not everyone knows about it so lets spread the word. If you don’t already know Microsoft is offering Windows development and design tools free to students of Universities, Collges and Grade schools.

Here is an interview I found with Bill Gates talking about DreamSpark so you all know it is legal and legit.

Although the title talks about Window Server 2008, they offer a lot more tools and software other than WS 2008. Some other software they offer for free is Visual Studio 2010, Server 2003, SQL Express and Developer Edition and Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 Pro Edition.

To be able to take advantage of this offer you must be a student and your school must be registered with Microsoft. From there you just login to www.dreamspark.com using your Live account (@hotmail.com or @live.com) and verify you are a student with your school. You then are able to download ISO files to burn to CDs and generate Product Keys. Although once you are no longer a student you are not allowed to use their service you can still use any products that you have downloaded.