Neat Stuff You Might Not Know About

After spending some quality time over the last couple months with various friends and family, I was surprised by some of the cool things people don't seem to know about:
1) Windows Home Server
This handy little box does a couple of things:
First and foremost, it automatically backs up all your PCs every day and restoring a whole PC or a single file that you overwrote or deleted is a total cinch. Way better than online backup services.
Second, it gives you a place to store all your digital photos, music, and documents and get at them from any PC in the house.
Third, you can access all this stuff remotely. Those backed up files? You can get at them from your work PC. Your family pictures? Get them from anywhere. It even gives you a nice friendly URL for the website that is running securely from your server.
I totally underestimated how useful and cool this would be until I had one of my own.
Sure you can buy one, like this HP unit, but you can also buy a copy of Home Server software and throw it on your old PC in the corner of the garage - which is what I did.
This all seems like a geeky thing, I know. But the truth is that it sets up in minutes, doesn't require you to buy pizza for that weird brother-in-law that runs Linux on his wristwatch and it will save you a lot of headaches - just from the automatic backups.

2) Xbox 360 Media Sharing
I'm really surprised at the number of smart people who own Xboxes and don't know about this.
If you turn on media sharing on your PC, you can then play your music and view your photos on your 360 right from your living room.
The experience is really good and polished. Set it up, you won't regret it.
Vista Instructions
XP Instructions
The only glitch I've seen is that you do need at least one account on your PC (guest account or similar) that doesn't have a password and can have read access to the music and photos.

3) Xbox Live Silver Memberships
With the New Xbox Experience that came out in November, there is suddenly a reason why everyone in your home wants an Xbox Live account - Avatars. And along with Avatars, friends and parties.
Of course, it is probably pretty unusual that more than one person in the house has an Xbox Live Gold account. I love Live, but at $50 a year, one will do for us thanks.
Enter the free Xbox Live Silver account.
Silver doesn't let you do online gaming, but you do get your avatar and friend list.

4) Brother HL-5250DN Laser Printer
We had a Panasonic laser printer - KXP-7100. Loved it. And we had years of trouble free use.
Most of all - it was auto-duplexing - meaning it printed on both sides of the paper.
Enter Vista.
When we moved to Vista, through no fault of Microsoft's, Panasonic chose not to put out a Vista driver for the 7100. They did for it's close business printer relative, but not the home version.
So we picked up the Brother for about $250 on sale. It is way fast. Has built in networking support (although we don't use that). And --- YES! --- duplexing. You use half the paper and it is just really cool besides.

5) Advance Wars: Days of Ruin for Nintendo DS
A couple years ago, I'd been considering getting a Playstation Portable. Then my kids got me a Nintendo DS Lite for Father's Day.
Outwardly gracious, I was secretly thinking "Man, I hope this isn't lame. Maybe I shouldn't open it so I can return it."
Those doubts quickly went by the wayside and I've invested many, many hours playing the DS on business trips, on the couch, and just about everywhere. Turns out the kids really do know what is fun!
My officemate turned me on to an earlier version of Advance Wars on the DS and I got it for Christmas and I've spent MANY hours on it already. I just can't put it down.
The writing for the story parts of the game is pretty lame, but forget all that.
It is a war game for the Nintendo DS!!! How cool is that?
I remember playing the old Strategic Simulations war games and really miss that genre. I never would have expected to see it on the DS.

6) Portrait Innovations Photography
OK guys...sooner or later, your wife is going to start bugging you that it has been too long since you got a family picture taken. Not the one you took with the self timer for the Christmas newsletter, a REAL family picture.
My sister-in-law told us about Portrait Innovations. She mentioned the quality of their work, that you get your pictures right away rather than waiting, and that they didn't give you the hard sell on buying more pictures than you could ever need. Somewhere in there, she mentioned it was cheap...and my ears are naturally tuned to that word.
So, since my oldest child was home from college for the holidays and she didn't have a driver's license when we got our last picture done, it was time to check it out.
They took a ton of great pictures for us to choose from and the photos were of the quality you'd expect from any portrait studio - they just did managed to print them in 15 minutes rather than 2 weeks.
We got their promo package for $10 (plus another sheet with a different pose we liked).