Got an iPod or similar music player?

Got Windows 7 on your PC?

(Harder question) Got a mini stereo jack to mini stereo jack cable?

If yes to all three, you can play your music player through your computer speakers. This is great if you happen to be travelling and are stuck in your hotel room (er, like I am at the moment): for the minimum extra equipment (the cable) you can listen to your music on your laptop without having to ensure your music library has been copied onto your laptop drive or carry around an external drive with it all on. OK, maybe it's just me, but I do not have enough room on my laptop SSD to fit my music on. Maybe when I win the lottery (or the pools) and can afford a 256GB SDD, or they come down sufficiently in price, all this will be behind me, but until then…

Plug one end of your cable into your iPod and the other into the microphone socket of your laptop. My hardware causes an interrupt and the driver asks what kind of device I've plugged in. I selected LineIn.

Go to the Recording Devices tab of your Sound properties dialog:

Right click on the active input device and select Properties. Click on the Listen tab (this is only available in Windows 7, note) and then click on the Listen to this device checkbox:

Click Apply and you will be able to listen to your music player through your laptop speakers (along with all the pings and dings from your email/IM/Twitter app).

I must admit this was hard to find at first. I got the hint from Larry Osterman's blog post on the topic where he calls it "Monitor capture".

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This incident just goes to show I'm the type that's always late to the party.

I finally updated my main machine last week to Windows 7 Ultimate (the last PC I have to be so upgraded) and so this afternoon happened to be the first time I wrote a blog post on Windows 7. Not only that but this particular blog post also needed to include an image from the web. Since I use Windows Live Writer (WLW), I duly went to Insert | Picture, and the old dialog had gone to be replaced by the standard Windows 7 FileOpen dialog. This dialog has no capability to insert an image from the web. What the...?

A bit of surfing later, I came across this apologetic blog post from May from Brandon Turner who's on the WLW team at Microsoft. It seems that Windows 7 had caused a bug in their custom file open dialog (viz., support for libraries) so they abandoned the custom code for the standard dialog. At the time they rationalized that practically no one used the Insert picture from web functionality and so practically no one would notice. Ha!

Anyway Brandon describes a workaround that would work until they add the Insert picture from web functionality back. In a browser, go to the page that contains the image (somewhat hard if you're storing the image on Amazon S3, but moving right along...), right-click on the image and select "Copy" (on Firefox, it's Copy Image Location; on Chrome, it's Copy Image URL). Now go to WLW and paste it where you want the image to appear. WLW will create the correct <img> element in your page to point to the URL on the web.

I will also note in passing — donning my DevExpress hat to do so — that this demonstrates an extremely good reason to avoid custom file open dialogs when writing applications (or when purchasing component libraries).

Now playing:
Waterboys - Suffer
(from Dream Harder)

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Back at PDC this year in LA, the attendees got a pre-CTP of Windows 7. Finally, I found the time to install it on my little Dell XPS M1210, using the disk I'd been using as a trash disk for my wife's PC during its travails.

So far, all I've done is install it, download and install the NVDIA Vista drivers for the video adapter on board, and play around with the beta of IE8 that comes with it. (Needless to say, this site doesn't render well in IE8 beta, sigh.) It's nice that Vista drivers work just fine in Windows 7, none of that horror from XP to Vista migration.

I also like the "drag a window to the top of the screen to maximize it" feature, and the ability to have gadgets all over the place and not in a "bar". Mind you, shock horror, my gadgets have ended up on the left hand side of the screen. Oh well.

I'll be loading some more apps on it over the holiday season to play around with it some more.

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