Technology Insights

Record DirecTV Programs While Not At Home With Your iPhone

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If you have ever forgot to record a show on your DVR and missed a game or a show that you really wanted to see you will be happy to know that you can now record programs using your iPhone or any web enabled mobile device to record DirecTV programs. The directions below are specific to DirecTV however they are similar for the mobile web applications as well. The DirecTV iPhone application will allow you to not only browse shows that are upcoming but it will also allow you to record any upcoming shows to any of the DVR’s are your house. Follow the directions below to use your iPhone to record DirecTV satellite tv shows to the DVR’s at your house while you are traveling or simply away from your home.

Technology Insights

How To Record Skype Calls Automatically When A Conversation Starts

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I needed to record a short Skype conversation on a Windows XP computer the other day so I looked around at a couple options. There are a bunch of different applications but I wasn’t interested in paying for an application until I could at least try it. I settled on downloading and trying PrettyMay to record Skype calls and it appears to have been a good choice. Below I will describe some of the functions I like about PrettyMay and also explain how to configure various options.

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Download And Record LiveStream.com Live Video Feeds Or On Demand

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I was asked earlier to view and record a presentation being given on LiveStream.com. I figured this can’t be to hard I will just use a FireFox plugin and pull the video somehow but I couldn’t find an easy way to do it with a FireFox plugin. I finally settled on using some freeware classified as screen video capture software. This software allows you to zoom in on a specified size of the screen and capture sound, video, or both and save to an AVI file. Below are directions on how to set up and record video streams from LiveStream.com for free.

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DirecTV HR21: A Problem Has Been Detected In The Storage Device

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I was watching a television show late last night via my DirecTV account. The show I was watching has previously been recorded on my DVR and at the time two other shows were recording. When the show I was watching was over I attempted to delete it which it appeared to do but then it locked up one of the shows I was currently recording. Once locked up I was unable to use my DirecTV HD DVR HR21-700 remote to do anything. I waited for about 15 minutes to make sure it wasn’t recover since I had never had one of my DirecTV HD receivers do this before. After waiting that initial time period I decided to go ahead and reboot the receiver which I did by unplugging the power, waiting 15 seconds, and then watching it reboot through its normal cycle. The receiver appeared to be starting as it typically does until it got to the last two steps and after a couple seconds at the final step 1 of 2 the receiver got a blue screen with the message “A problem has been detected in the storage device” message as shown below.

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Adobe Photoshop CS4: Batch Resize Images With Photoshop

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I used to use a third party application to batch resize images as a certain size is required to display properly on my personal blog. Anyhow I use Adobe Photoshop to manipulate images in many other ways and wanted to see if it would do the same batch resizing which would require one less application to be installed. Sure enough Photoshop does a great job of batch resizing images to any set sizes you prefer.

**NOTE** After writing this article I discovered a different way to resize images that is actually much easier. I wrote a new article located here describing the method which utilizes the Photoshop Image Processor.

In the example scenario below I resize images based on height and width maximum size settings. The width cannot be larger than 640 pixels and the height cannot be greater than 480 pixels. Follow the instructions below to set up a batch resize action followed by automating the batch resize of numerous images at the same time.