Windows only: My Movies is a free plug-in for Windows Media Center designed to manage and play all of your movies within Windows Media Center, pulling in rich metadata for your movie collection, including cast, trailers, DVD art, and more.
Whether you rip your DVDs to your hard drive or you still prefer using the discs each time you watch a movie, My Movies 3 is a must-have. We mentioned the previous version, My Movies 2, in our roundup of eight killer Windows Media Center plug-ins, but My Movies has grown steadily since then, and with the release of My Movies 3 it also supports Windows 7. Once installed, the tool automatically indexes and downloads metadata for your movies whenever you insert a DVD.
Keep in mind that while My Movies 3 is designed specifically for Windows Media Center, other applications available from the My Movies people, like Collection Management, can work to supply great metadata to other applications, including XBMC.
My Movies 3 is a free download, Windows only. It is donation-supported, however, and you can unlock more features with your donations. Without spending a dollar, though, My Movies 3 is still a must for your Windows Media Center box.
If you have a heavy leak in your toilet, it's easy to diagnose—the faint sound of the toilet tank constantly replenishing is a dead give away. What about a slow leak? Diagnose it with food coloring.
If you have a slow leak in your toilet tank, hundreds of gallons are just slowly and silently cascading down the side of your toilet bowl every month. Fortunately you can easily detect if the uptick in your water bill is from a slow leak or not.
Over at wikiHow they share a simple test for toilet water leaks, place a half dozen or so drops of food coloring in the toilet tank. Leave the toilet alone for a half hour or more. Come back and check to see if the water in the bowl of the toilet has become tinted with the food-coloring dye from the tank. If it has, you've got a leak between the tank and the bowl.
Check out the full guide at wikiHow for more details and how to fix the leak if you find it. Have a cheap way to test for problems around the house? Let's hear about it in the comments.
Windows only: Professional writers often read their work out loud to make sure it flows well and sounds coherent. If you want to kick back and have the reading done for you, then give Speak Clipboard a try.
This lightweight, free, open-source app is designed for Windows XP, but we were able to get it up and running on Vista (and presumably Windows 7) too—just had to install the .NET 1.1 framework. To make Speak Clipboard talk to you, simply copy text into your clipboard via Right-click -> Copy or Ctrl+C, then fire up the app. You can pause and resume Speak Clipboard or change the reading direction from right to left, all with a single click.
This cool tool appeals to more than just writers. It's a great app to help people with a visual impairment, and a neat way for kids to practice their reading and writing skills. How else would you use Speak Clipboard? Let us know in the comments.
With their new mobile coupons feature, Google wants to make it easier for you to access coupons on the go when you're too busy to sit down with the paper and clip coupons.
Just in time for the holidays, we've made it easier to find discounts when you're on the go. If a business adds a mobile coupon to its Google Local Business Center listing, you'll be able to access it from your mobile device. Just go to google.com on your phone and search for a local business. When you land on its Place Page, you'll see any coupons or discounts that might be available. Then simply show the participating business the coupon, right from your phone, to redeem the offer.
It's a great idea in theory (though not entirely new), but the main stumbling block is adoption—that is, after a lot of searching, I had a tough time finding many local businesses in my area that had any coupons to begin with. That's because it's all dependent on businesses taking advantage of their Place Page—the result Google provides when it recognizes a local business. Place pages display photos, reviews, and more (like this one). It's possible I'm just having a lot of bad luck in my searches, though, so if you give the new mobile coupons a try and have better luck, share it with us in the comments.
Upcoming has been a rather neglected web application since it was acquired by Yahoo, but this week they've announced a new feature that lets you know when bands you like are in town based on Pandora, Last.fm, or iTunes.
Back in the day, before extra ads and a painful interface, Pollstar used to be the go to place to check a concert listing in your area. You still can, but other sites like Upcoming are trying to make the happenings in your town a little more user friendly. Once Upcoming loads your favorites, it stores the names and sends you an email notification when a band you like has a tour date in your area.
As long as you use iTunes, Last.fm, or Pandora, Upcoming's new feature could prove to be pretty useful. If you're only an iTunes user, on the other hand, we do love previously mentioned iConcertCal.
Think about how much of your important data is stuck in the cloud. Web service Backupify backs up all your online accounts (including Wordpress, Facebook, Gmail, and Flickr) so if a service you rely on suddenly goes poof!, your data won't.
Backupify is a spiffy service that automatically performs scheduled backups at one of the 10 online services they support. Supply the login credentials of the sites you want backed up, and Backupify takes care of the rest. Once you're up and running, if your Gmail, Google Docs, or FriendFeed account flakes out, you won't have to freak out because all your important stuff is stored safely somewhere else.
Backupify offers Twitter backups for free and three additional premium plans that range from $3.95 to $14.95 per month, depending on how much storage you need. Seems like a reasonable price to pay for the comfort of knowing the data you store in the cloud won't disappear into the ether some day.
Previously, users wanting to run Google Maps Navigation on their Android phones either needed a 2.0 device (like the Droid) or resorted to this workaround. Today, Google announced the application is now available for pretty much every Android device.
Google Maps Navigation is a GPS system with automatic rerouting and voice guidance. It uses your phone's data connection to get you where you need to be, and even churns out geographical information like nearby transit lines and popular locations, thanks to its new Layers feature.
To get the app on your phone (U.S. users only), just grab the updated version of Google Maps from the Android Market. A few features exclusive to Android 2.0 are missing, like the "navigate to" voice command, but the Google Maps forum is filled with great tips on cool ways to tweak the app.
Have you been using Google Maps Navigation on your Android 2.0 device (or your special G1)? Share your tips with Android 1.6 users in the comments.
Last week we pointed you toward a virtual machine build of Chrome OS for anyone eager to play around with (the still incomplete) Chrome OS, but if you'd rather try running it from a thumb drive, weblog MakeUseOf has you covered.
Tech blogger Jorge Sierra details how to install Chrome OS on a bootable thumb drive so you can run it like any other live OS—like a Linux Live CD, for example. Keep in mind, however, that the build is still very young (and technically it's still Chromium OS), and even if you follow all of the directions perfectly, you may still run into some problems. For example:
Chromium OS may or may not work on your computer hardware. I did successfully run it on two home-built frankenstein computers (with ASUS motherboards), but it did not successfully recognize the network adapter on my Dell laptop. All of this work may be for nothing, if it ends up that Chromium OS does not like your network adapter.
Still, it's a fun little afternoon project, especially if you're eager to try Chrome OS. If you've played with a build since last week's preview, let's hear how it worked out for you in the comments.
If you have a heavy leak in your toilet, it's easy to diagnose—the faint sound of the toilet tank constantly replenishing is a dead give away. What about a slow leak? Diagnose it with food coloring.
Windows only: Professional writers often read their work out loud to make sure it flows well and sounds coherent. If you want to kick back and have the reading done for you, then give Speak Clipboard a try.
With their new mobile coupons feature, Google wants to make it easier for you to access coupons on the go when you're too busy to sit down with the paper and clip coupons.
Think about how much of your important data is stuck in the cloud. Web service Backupify backs up all your online accounts (including Wordpress, Facebook, Gmail, and Flickr) so if a service you rely on suddenly goes poof!, your data won't.
Previously, users wanting to run Google Maps Navigation on their Android phones either needed a 2.0 device (like the Droid) or resorted to 
Last week we 
