“The community that has come together to solve these problems, you are your own kind of seven Chinese brothers. Working together you have made history.” — Loki

Congratulations to the extraordinary communities at Neowin, Vanishing Point Wiki and unfiction. I’ve never seen a more self-coordinated organisation of people from all walks of life to come together in unity to collaborate on such difficult tasks and the unselfish act of sharing information and the rewards it lead to.

Hats off also to Microsoft, AMD and 42 Entertainment for organising such an opportunity to show what communities are really capable of. I’m totally in awe.

Microsoft gave away some Wireless Laser Desktop 6000s as gifts for attending the Windows Vista RTM Lab during CES 2007. I’ve always wanted a wireless keyboard and mouse set so without second thoughts, I’ve been using it since. There’s a bunch of good and bad things about it (you can find plenty of reviews), but there’s one in particular that baffles and annoys me day in, day out.

If I had covered my keyboard with tinfoil, I have no right to complain, but this is as close as I can get the keyboard to the receiver without actually wiring it together. As the troubleshooter suggested, I’ve tried changing resetting the wireless connection, changing wireless channels and even flipping the receiver upside down (simon says, Long do) without luck. The mouse on the other hand has full signal all over the table.

First I thought it might have been a software bug, but I’ve experienced keys ‘stick’ or not even respond at all. The problem becomes much more apparent and annoying in games, specifically first person shooters, where I’d be walking off cliffs and doing other fatal acts I normally do at my own discretion.

Is there something wrong with my hardware? Should I have lower expectations for wireless keyboards or something?

Update: Now I’ve put the wireless receiver on the floor, directly below the keyboard, and now it has a full signal. Weird concept, but I’ll live with it.

Microsoft’s Sean Alexander got the scoop on some select custom-built laptops by ASUS with a sleek backlit Vista orb on the casing. Apparently these were made for a select number of Microsoft partners (although more likely well-off executives) to demonstrate the advantages of Windows Vista, just in case they hadn’t seen enough marketing videos already.

It specs a widescreen (rare) Tablet PC packed with a Centrino Core 2 Duo and a bunch of extras running on Windows Vista Ultimate with Aero Glass. Sean adds, “it’s a nice example of what PC OEMs can do when motivated”. I guess the multi-billion dollar industry just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Pictures or it never happened right?

Microsoft gave out the wrong laptops to bloggers. Those executives better disclose where they got the laptops from. 😉

If you’ve ever wondered why Vista is bad, then let the legendary Jamie from C9Park show you!

If you haven’t already, check out my interview with the Flickr man himself, Hamad Darwish.

Desktop wallpapers usually meant one of three things: exotic cars, women in compromising positions, or Bliss. If you were given the job to choose only a handful of images from billions and billions of creatives available today to be part of an operating system’s desktop wallpapers, how would you choose them and which ones would you choose?

That was the daunting task appointed to Microsoft Design‘s Jenny Lam, who led the year-long search to find what would become the new set of bundled wallpapers for Windows Vista.

The end result is a stunning set of photographs and art which make up the collections of light auras, textures, paintings and vistas. You might be easily fooled to believe that these are the works of professional photographers who eat camera film for breakfast, lunch and tea, but you’d be wrong. It’s true, some of these photos did come from big stock houses such as Corbis, Getty and National Geographic, but did you also know some came from Flickr and even Microsoft employees?

Photographs by Flickr user Hamad Darwish.

Some interesting statistics on the selection process:

• About 2/3rds of the collection is licensed from stock houses.
• There are a handful from amateur Flickr photographers (which are Jenny’s favorites).
• Not only did Jenny ask the Flickr photographers if they could license their images, she also sent them on a commissioned photoshoot. You can find some here and here.
• About 5 images came from Microsoft full-time employees.
• Several that were work for hire, where Jenny art-directed a professional photographer on a shoot in Santa Barbara and NYC.
• Evaluated over 10,000 images with over 50GBs of low-resolution images during the round 1 selection process.

This new approach to sourcing and licensing creatives is exciting not only because amateur and enthusiast now have the chance to showcase their works to millions and millions of people – something even the most prestigious art gallery cannot offer, but also recognition of community-driven websites such as Flickr for the ability to deliver quality ‘products’ equal to or even better than from traditional content companies.

Hopefully Microsoft might even consider expanding the program to allow for public submissions of photographs and creatives to be included in future editions of Windows. In a way, “Show us your Wow” is already a test-bed for user-submitted content and community feedback with over 20,000 entires submitted. Of course, there will be certain licensing and legal issues to overcome, but I bet some enthusiasts will do anything to get their works displayed on such a scale.

Certainly interesting times ahead for enthusiasts like Hamad and Thomas Hawk.

Update: Raymond Chen have some other bits about the process.

Update 2: I just did an interview with the Flickr man himself, Hamad Darwish. We talked about his life, Microsoft and his passion for photography.

Most people would agree that the new user interface for Office 2007 is the best thing to happen to the Office suite since Clippy. It exposes powerful commands and capabilities already in the Office applications otherwise hidden within 4 layers of menus and dialogs. However religious Clippy worshipers still believe Clippy will show them the light.

But like everything else, it isn’t perfect. There are still scenarios where you know what you’re looking for, don’t know where to find it, and using help would be a sin. Contextual tabs actually solves half the problem by providing tools and commands in context with what you’re currently focusing on. The other half of the problem lies in situations where what you want to do is out-of-context. That’s where “Scout” comes in to play.

Microsoft is currently developing a new plug-in for Office 2007 under the codename of “Scout” (for internal uses). It creates a “Search Commands” tab at the end of your ribbon menu where inside it, you could search for commands and functions. Simple, like it should be.

For example, typing “pictur” would filter all available commands to a list of 9 which were all related to picturing. Results can then be access by either clicking on the commands themselves, or by using the keyboard shortcut as numbered at each command. More results are paginated as required.

This feature however is not comparable to applications such as Quicksilver on OSX which allows for powerful operations using only the keyboard. So far, “Scout” is a simple commands filtering tool and will probably remain so when released.

No words on release dates, but (if ever released) will probably come in the form of a free plug-in like “Save as PDF“. I think this should have been in the Office suite for release, however better later than never.

Update: Looks like “Scout” won’t be coming as a public plugin? “The Office team believes that users can find what they are looking for inside Office 2007 today, without the Scout search technology.” Sure, if you want to waste time poking around! Why not let people search for the features they already know about?

Update 2: Microsoft’s Irena Kennedy reveals the inside information on Scout. Apparently it’s been in internal beta since September 2006, still no firm plans to publically release the plugin. Or the post can be pulled also. 🙁

Update 3: Microsoft wants to kill “Scout”. I want to save “Scout”.