Posted By: Sarah Perez | May 29th @ 12:03 PM | 27,480 Views | 80Comments
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On Thursday, Hulu announced a new desktop software program for watching videos on your PC without a web browser. The software, simply called Hulu Desktop, was designed to operate with Windows Media Center remote controls. So now, instead of having to choose from a ton of add-ins in Media Center, you can use the official software provided by Hulu themselves to see videos on your desktop.
The folks over at Missing Remote have put together a guide on how to add Hulu Desktop to Media Center as a shortcut from the main screen. This isn’t the only way to get this done, but at least it’s well-documented! Thanks guys.
Note, the following steps assume you installed into the default Hulu directory, which is C:UsersYOURUSERNAMEAppDataLocalHuluDesktop. If you changed the directory, simply replace the directories in the ini and xml files.
Unzip the folder into your Hulu directory (which default is C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataLocalHuluDesktop)
The files should result in a HuluMCE folder (C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataLocalHuluDesktopHuluMCE).
IMPORTANT STEP: Browse to the above HuluMCE folder, and Right Click on the HuluMCEreg.xml file and select EDIT
Replace the username "Mike" from the following line with YOUR USERNAME: imageUrl="C:UsersMikeAppDataLocalHuluDesktopHuluMCEicon.png"
Still in the above folder, right click on the InstallHulu.cmd and select Run as Administrator
A dialog box will appear with the message Success
Close all your windows, launch Media Center with your remote, and the shortcut for Hulu Desktop will appear under the TV+Movies row, as well as in the Program Library
*NOTE: If you prefer to have the shortcut appear in the TV+Movies row, you will need to edit theHuluMCEreg.xml file (Right click > Edit). On the line which says , replace TV with Pictures. (eg., You can visit the followingMSDN Webpage for a full list of category entrypoints you can launch from.
I was perusing the contents of the Script Menu bundle, and I saw that it had bundled icons for, of all things, shell scripts and perl scripts! So on a whim, I tried dropping a shell script in my ~/Library/Scripts folder. Well, it shows up in the menu with a nice shell script icon, and runs fine when I choose it from the menu, without opening up Terminal.app. I'm going to use this to run my X11 apps.
[robg adds: After some email conversations with discordantus, we've figured out why this worked for him and wouldn't work for me, hence the following qualifications on this hint:
You absolutely must include the #! line at the top of your script, ie #! /bin/sh. If you don't, it thinks it's an AppleScript applet. It depends on this line to tell it what shell to run the script in.
If you don't set the executable bits (chmod a+x filename), it'll show up, but fails to run (completely without notice) when you choose it from the menu.
When the script menu reloads itself, it seems to just scan its folder for any new or missing files. It doesn't check to see if the actual contents of the files have changed. So you may need to remove the menu and relaunch it to see some changes.
When you run a script via the script menu, it seems to effectively redirect the STDOUT (standard output, ie the Terminal window in most cases) to /dev/null. So all that output just flies out into the ether, and you don't see anything. So you'll need to redirect the script output elsewhere in order to see the results.
As a real-world example, I started with the script in the random fortune from thinkgeek hint, and modified it to dump its output into a new TextEdit document:
#!/bin/sh
#
# fetch a fortune from thinkgeek
#
curl -s http://www.thinkgeek.com/fortune.shtml |
sed -n '/(refresh for another)/,/table>/p' |
sed -n '/<p>/,/</p>/{/[.]/p; }' |
sed '{/^<[/]*p>/d; s/<[BbRr]*>//g; s/<;/</g; s/>;/>/g; }' >
/tmp/output.txt
open /tmp/output.txt
I then copied this script from my ~/bin directory into my ~/Library/scripts directory, and ran it from the menubar. The end result was a new TextEdit window containing a random fortune from thinkgeek.com. Hopefully, you'll be able to find more useful applications of this trick, but it does demonstrate that it works!]
Logon passwords are often a necessity because of all the personal information people keep on their computers. Windows XP gives you the option to log on to your computer automacially when your computer boots up. This is convenient as long as you don't mind that any sensitive information on your hard drive or in your network will be available to people who have access to the computer.
Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK. In Windows Vista, simply type regedit in Start Search and hit Enter.
Double-click the DefaultUserName entry, type the user name to log on with, and then click OK.
If DefaultUserName registry value name is not found, create the new String Value (REG_SZ) with value name as DefaultUserName.
Double-click the DefaultPassword entry, type the password for the user account under the value data box, and then click OK.
If there is no DefaultPassword value, create a new String Value subkey (REG_SZ) with DefaultPassword as the value name.
Note that if no DefaultPassword string is specified, Windows automatically changes the value of the AutoAdminLogon registry key from 1 (true) to 0 (false) to turn off the AutoAdminLogon feature.
In Windows Vista, DefaultDomainName has to be specified as well, else Windows will prompt of invalid user name with user name displayed as .username. To do so, double click on DefaultDomainName, and specify the domain name of the user account. If it’s local user, specify local host name.
If the DefaultDomainName does not exist, create a new String Value (REG_SZ) registry key with value name as DefaultDomainName.
Double-click the AutoAdminLogon entry, type 1 in the Value Data box, and then click OK.
If there is no AutoAdminLogon entry, create a new String Value entry (REG_SZ) with AutoAdminLogon as the value name.
