TechLifeWeb

Have you seen Google TV Spotlight Gallery? It is a nice collection of streaming video sites on the web. It is meant to show off how Google TV works. To give it a try, make sure you are running Google Chrome and then go to http://www.google.com/tv/spotlight-gallery.html

The really cool thing about it is that it works fairly well with just a remote control. Some of the sites do require a keyboard so it is not the perfect experience but that is sure to change as more sites develop 10-foot experiences.

I decided this would be a cool additions to my Windows 7 Media Center based HTPC. The main trick was building a little app that launches Chrome from within Media Center and then returns to Media Center when Chrome closes.
Here is how to get it working if you want to try it:

Download and install Google Chrome – This is critical.  It has everything you need for Google TV Spotlight and has the wonderful ability to work in App mode so the web page appears without all the extra browser bits around it.

Download my zip file containing all the pieces you need to make this work: gtv.zip UPDATE! See the bottom of this post.

Unzip the file to a local folder and then double click the install.bat. That will copy the other included files  to the necessary folders on your computer.

Next, start up Windows Media Center and go to the Extras Library. You’ll see the Google TV icon among the others. Click it and Media Center should minimize and Google Chrome should launch maximized on the Google TV Spotlight Gallery page.

Use your remote to navigate through the icons within the Spotlight Gallery. You can take over the whole screen by pressing F11 on your keyboard.

Closing the browser should return you to Media Center.

I have tested this on 32bit Windows. I believe it should work on 64bit but I don’t have that to test it.

Now go watch some streaming content and let  me know how it goes.
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Update 20JAN11: After some discussion on The Green Button, I have created a new launcher that launches Chrome in what Google calls Kiosk mode. This is similar to starting your browser and then hitting F111. Goes full screen automatically.

One caveat is that if you have the Bookmark Bar turned on in Chrome you should turn it off before trying this as there doesn’t appear to be a way to turn it off once Kiosk mode is started. Additionally, to close Kiosk mode you need to hit Alt+F4 on your keyboard as there are no buttons on the screen to close the browser.

I think this is actually a cleaner solution but I have left the other zip file above in case people want it. If you want to use Kiosk mode, download GTVKiosk.zip, unzip and then run the install.bat. If you installed the other mode from the zip file above this one will over write that and you will be launching in Kiosk mode. If you want to go back to the other method, download that file, unzip and run install.bat from there.

One cool thing about Twitter is that it automatically creates an RSS feed of your tweets. Sometimes these can be useful to put in other places that take RSS like FriendFeed or elsewhere. However, this can be a bit ‘noisy’ especially to none Twitter users who aren’t used to self-filtering.

One of the conventions that Twitter users have adopted is the notion of hashtags. Hashtags are words with the “#” symbol in front of them. Fore example, at a conference such as Bar Camp San Diego people might put #barcampsd in their twitter post. Sometimes people get a bit carried away with them but that is a topic for another time.

These two things, RSS from Twitter and the uniqueness of hashtags, let me create this great Yahoo! Pipe. With it, you can generate an RSS feed of only your tweets containing a certain hashtag. You can then use that feed in your other applications.

Have a look at my new Yahoo Pipe. It will give you and example of how to use it.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/techlifeweb/filteredtwitter

Simply enter the hashtag you want to filter on and your twitter name and then click Run Pipe. After the pipe runs you can click on the Get as RSS button to get your new filtered Twitter Feed.

RSS is not dead. It is the glue that holds the web together.