Finally I have gotten around to playing with Microsoft's latest toy, Photosynth. What is Photosynth I hear you say? well it is a very cool combination of technologies that allow you to create a psudo 3D representation of something from 2D photos.

To make this synth (as they are known) I took around 300 photos of the living room of a property that my neighbor, George has just finished building. It sounds a lot, and it was but the more photos you have the more the synth engine has to work with. They were then linked together and using the textures in each photo, the synth engine works its magic and produces a 3D work of art!

Now at the moment, you can only view the results using using Microsoft's Silverlight plugin so you will need to install that first.

For my first attempt, there are some fairly major flaws, mainly due to the initial photos that I fed the synth engine. Next time, more light!!

Don't try this at work! It seems that watching a DVD is not something Microsoft thought you would want to do at work.

Ok, so I don't tend to watch DVDs at work, in fact I can't seem to think of a time that I have ever done this but I have however watched a DVD on my work laptop in a hotel room when I am on the road.

Today, when I went to watch a DVD in bed (yes, it was a lazy afternoon and it was cold!) I have no TV in the bedroom so I grabbed a laptop (there are three in the house), I happened to grab my new vista laptop as it has the longest battery life, the others are older and suffer the dreaded laptop battery fade.

In goes the DVD and up pops windows media player - all good so far. And then a warning pops up telling me I don't have a codec for it. Now, this is not new to me, divx comes to mind but not for DVDs on a supposedly advanced OS.

So I follow the link to the MS support site that informs me that "If you are running the Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise you might need to install a compatible DVD decoder before playing a DVD" and then helpfully gives me a link to purchase a DVD decoder. Among my options, I can upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate.

Great... ok, time to grab the mac and long power cord...