I’ve spent a lot of time the last 3 days pimping out my XBMC Eden setup and organizing my movies and tv shows so they 100% identify and have all the poster, banner, logo and fanart images.

I’m pretty happy with XBMC its very customizable, but I do miss some of the features and apps Boxee had.

I made a video demo’ing my XBMC setup
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eepxM3K3tc

Here is a pic of my TV setup, my HTPC is a horizontal case under my receiver.

Many of these extensions no longer work and there isn’t any in the official Chrome Extension directory. This one currently works great though, the one I was using before stopped working.

http://www.chromeextensions.org/music-videos-photos/download-youtube-videos-as-mp4-flv/

You want to download the MP4 versions for best video offline playback, if you run a Windows prior to Windows 7, you may have to install a codec pack to play MP4 files.

I just finished adding a new statistics page that tracks the sentiment of tweets mentioning MPs. The results are grouped by party and interesting charts are shown.
http://politwitter.ca/page/sentiment

I created a page listing all the Twitter hashtags for House of Commons committees and will now index all tweets using these hashtags.
http://politwitter.ca/page/committees

I created a list of all 308 federal ridings http://politwitter.ca/riding
You can click on any riding to view that ridings social media page, showing all related content for that riding.

I also started a federal riding hashtag format based on the riding EDID number for people to tag their tweets about local riding issues. To help people find your EDID hashtag I created this lookup tool http://politwitter.ca/page/edid_lookup

I remade the main menu using a multi-column dropdown format, allowing for much more links in a user friendly format.

I created a system to collect the total number of tweets each parties MPs make each week then to automatically tweet out those stats for each party using 4 Twitter accounts I have for each party. So people can follow which ever twitter account they are interested in. The stats can also be viewed on this page: http://politwitter.ca/page/statistics_weekly

I remade the “election fever” page updated for 2011 and switched the charts to use the new interactive Google visualization.
http://politwitter.ca/page/election_fever

I did some major backend work to allow the site to start tracking MPs & MLAs that are not on Twitter but do have other social networks. Previously everything was tied to a twitter username, so I wasn’t able to add MPs without Twitter.

Along with that I started creating new directory pages to list the politicians on other social networks than Twitter
Facebook: http://politwitter.ca/directory/facebook
Youtube: http://politwitter.ca/directory/youtube/mp/house

Also related are the new ‘profile overview’ pages for tracked users, which give a summary of all their social media content indexed by Politwitter. Example: http://politwitter.ca/profile/joycemurray
I’ve also added ‘Klout’ score to all MPs profiles.

I started populating the stats page on MPs profiles, here is an example: http://politwitter.ca/page/userstats/user/MinJK

There is now a “Bills & Votes” landing page http://politwitter.ca/page/bills and I’m working on indexing all tweets relating to any bill in parliament, then listing all the bills with related tweets.

The MP & Riding search was also improved. You can enter an MP or MLAs name, riding name or a postal code and get a list of MPs and ridings that match.
Example: http://politwitter.ca/mp_search.php?search_mp=Peter

————————————————————————–

And finally I added a new blog post asking for Donations to help fund the continuing development, upkeep and hosting of Politwitter.ca

Read the post here: http://politwitter.ca/blog/14/call-for-donations
Donate here: http://politwitter.ca/page/donate

First there is the issue with saved games, there is no standardized location to store saved game data. It seems like ever game stores it in a different place. You would think that a company like EA would at least have a standard across all of its own games, but no! Here is a list of some of the locations saved games are stored.

• The saves in a folder within the game install folder
• The “My Games” folder within the “My Documents” folder
• The game creates its own folder in “My Documents”

Windows 7 even has a special folder in your user account called “Saved Games” but it seems no games use it, not even a Microsoft game! The result is a complet mess of your “My Documents” folder, making it pretty much useless for actual documents. I have resorted to creating a separate “Documents” folder and removing the default “My Documents” from the Windows 7 Documents Library.

Why can’t their be a standardized location to save games! the formentined “Saved Games” folder would be excellent. Maybe Microsoft needs to dictate that game publishes use a standard in order to get the “Games for Windows” or any Microsoft certified Windows logo. Obviosuly we cna’t rely on the publishers themselves to form a consensus.

Game Data & Settings

The saved game issue is an annoyance of organization and aesthetics, the issue of Game data & settings cane be more troubling. Many games store game data in places they shouldn’t as well, in the My Documents folder, or more commonly the “C:\ProgramData” or “C:\Users\[username]\AppData” folders. This is a good practice in general for game settings and profiles. For example if I have a bunch of video and custom keyboard commands set in a game, it can make it easier to transfer and keep those commands if I migrate Windows users accounts, or upgrade me OS. It also allows different users on the same PC to have their own settings.

The problem is when a game stores more than just settings files in these locations, many games saved large files such as game textures, large reply files, cache and so on. For example I have a couple games that have over 2GB folders in the “My Documents” folder full of crap. Or take Dirt2, it has a 2GB folder in “C:\Users\All Users\Codemasters\DiRT2\DataCache“. Even some games installed through Steam are not immune to this problem. Even worse is I’ve seen some games store large amounts of data in the users “Roaming” folder! If your on a domain network, the contents of the Roaming folder are transfered over the network when you login and off from the network.

Why is this an issue? Well many people don’t have large C: drives, which is actually becoming more common with the use of SSD drives. I for example have a fast Raptor drive which is only 74GB for my system drive. I have 4TB of other drives in my computer, but the C drive is small. I install all my games to the D: drive, but so many of them spill over great amounts of data to the system drive which is constantly filling up. I have resorted to creating folder “junctions” or “Symbolic Links” to redirect these problem folders from the C drive to the D drive. If your interested in how to do this search for a command line tool included in Windows called “mklink”.

</rant>

So 2 years ago I tried a whole wack of programs and decided I liked Pidgin the best. Pidgin is a open source cross-platform multi network IM client http://www.pidgin.im/. It worked very well, its a super clean interface. It didn’t have functionalty for Facebook and Xfire out-of-the-box, but there were 3rd party plugins to allow this. There were other IM clients that did this, but Pidgin was the only one that would allow me to combine or merge contacts on multiple networks. See the problem is many of my contacts are on Facebook and Windows Messenger at the same time, so my online contact list grows too large. So I wanted to be able to combine contacts. Now Pidgin worked well for a time, but the Facebook chat over the past year has stopped working or it works very poorly, mostly due to changes on the Facebook platform and security I would imagine.

So tonight I decided to look again at the options, and came across the new Trillian 5 beta. I had used Trillian way back in the 90′s as an ICQ client alternative, boy has it changed! They are billing themselfs now as a universal IM client, which supports MSN, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and much more! Trillian in the past always had a butt ugly interface, the new 5.0 is a very nice minimal interface with a fair amount of customization.

But the BIG thing they’ve added that I want is the ability to COMBINE CONTACTS! I can hold CTRL and select “Bob” in Facebook and Windows Messenger, then right click and select “combine”. I then can choose the network priority, so say I want Messenger to take priority over Facebook chat if he’s online on both. This is awesome and works great.

If you want to try this out, one thing I had to do 2 years ago with Pidgin is rename all my groups in Windows Live Messenger and Facebook to be the same! If you don’t then you will have a messy contact list with duplicate groups. if you don’t use groups then thats fine, but when you have over 300 Messenger contacts groups are a must!

Now only if it could integrate Xfire and Steam!

You can download and try out Trillian here: http://www.trillian.im/learn/tour-trillian5.html