XBMC 10 on Lenovo S12 gave me joy and pain

I was very impressed by how good the XMBC 10 running on Lenovo S12 allows me navigate my media center at ease.  There's one thing that have serious problem with, though, and that is the TV Library scanning and maintainable feature.  For some reason a lot of the video that is supposed to be in my server was reported as missing.  I tried several hours trying to fix the problem, until I realized that it's just wasted on time.

The lyrics display feature is also hit-or-miss.  But it's cute that at least the feature is there.

Maybe I'll try some later version or even earlier version later.

KM Player cannot rotate my video ... until I mess with the advance setting

KMPlayer is a very interesting beast.  It allows you to amazing stuff that you cannot do in other players.  One of those thing is rotating playback.  This is extremely useful when you have video taken in portrait mode (thanks to all those video phone and digital camera with video recording feature).  However, you may need to spent some time to twist and try out all the setting before you can get it work. 

Here's some tidbit on how I made it working on my Lenovo S12:

• Make sure you select menu [Options][Advanced Menu], otherwise the rotate menu won't show up.
• Go to [Video(Basic)][Screen Rotation (CCW)] to set rotation setting.
• If the rotation didn't happen, it's possible that your machine is not fast enough to process the rotation in current setting.  One way the fix the situation is by selecting [Video (Advanced)][Preset: speed (1GHz)]  That can improve the performance up to a point that you can play the rotate video.

30 minutes of copying

I wonder if it's the external USB harddisk that makes the file copy slower than expected between  my M6400 and my Mac Mini.  I was expect that the file copy speed between the 2 machines through gigabit network to be much faster, but copying 40Gb VM from M6400 to macMini still takes 30 minutes.

VMWare Server and VMWare Workstation ... not together?

Found out tha I can't install VMWare Server since I already have VMWare Workstation running.  Really?  That's so lame ....

Cavalry Dual-Bay Hard Disk Dock - great power comes with great responsbility

I enjoyed the RAID 1 provided by Cavalry Dual-Bay Hard Disk Dock, but I also got burned by that feature today by losing a whole harddisk of content.  So the whole idea is this: be careful by DOUBLE checking the switch before plugging in your harddisk.  Otherwise your secondly inserted harddisk will got wipped and treat as a RAID 1 disk.  You don't want that happen if you have precious content in your second disk.

How to get rid of that damn Exchange setting in Outlook 2010

After setting my new Office 2010 Plus, I tried to setup the office email account on Outlook 2010.  Seemed like the server couldn't be connected, so I was like, what the heck, and planned to get rid of the setting.  That's when my hell started.  I tried to remove the account, but the Outlook wouldn't let me, and didn't even give me a UI to move on.  Instead it just exited.  Goggled a bit and found that I can run "Mail" to change the setting.  But trying to trying to delete the setting and I kept getting error message saying I should do this and that.

Finally I found the ultimate way to delete all the mess: delete the "profile" in "Mail".  Problem solved.