So the other day I acquired a Tablet PC, been wanting one FOREVER. The great thing about having the tablet is now I can do my math on the computer and no more paper.  I also am taking a Japanese class at college to better help my cultural influeances in the world, heh not really I just want to understand anime I watch better.  Anyway one thing about taking the class is I am learning to write kana.

Well it is easier to learn kana when you can write it so I got the wild idea to do it on my tablet. I spent a while online looking for programs to let me write kana and recognize it. Then a friend showed me a link to someone using Vista and writing Kanji. That got me thinking why can't I write in Vista using the default settings. So i set out to figure out how and spent another hour looking online for a how-to. Unfortunately, I didn't find one, but I got very annoyed and just decided to figure it out myself and figured out how easy it was to actually do it. Just add Japanese keyboard to Vista. Its just that easy.

Here are the steps.

1) Open Control Panel.

2) Go to the “Clock, Language, and Region” section and click on “Change keyboards or other input methods”

3) With the new dialog box click on “Change Keyboards…”

4) Click on “Add…” to add the Japanese keyboard to the list.

5) Find “Japanese (Japan)” and select Japanese checkbox. Then OK.

6) Now you should see English and Japanese in the installed services area as an available keyboard to use.

7) Next is to make sure you can write.  Click on the flyout, if available, for the tablet pc writing area on the left side of the screen.  And you should see English and Japanese from the langauge selection.

7) Select Japanese and you should be good to go to start writing Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.

That is it. That is the process for getting support to write in the Japanese language. I also note stroke order does tend to matter. I found that out trying to write ki in Katakana. I kept getting really really weird results when I got the stroke order wrong.

I have been wanting to watch my videos that I have on my hard drive on my TV for a looooong time, but never seemed to have the right equipment that actually worked. Well yesterday a friend finally hooked me up with the right equipment and I have been playing with Vista Media Center since then.

First off, Vista Media Center rocks. I am loving it. I used to have to get up every so often and switch videos on my computer to watch from my chair or bed, not to mention mess with rotating the flat panel monitor. Well, now with media center and the IR Remote that is hooked up to the computer I basically have a TiVo like system going, minus recording tv.

Now along the way I ran into a problem, was user error. If you hit the power button on the IR remote it would send the computer to sleep mode. Not to big of a problem except the setting for windows was to prompt the user for a password upon resume. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem for I couldn’t seem to login or even get anything to display on the TV or my computer once I hit the power button on the remote again. So, I did the one last thing I could think of. Hard turn off of the computer.

That is when the problems started. Once I got it back up apparently some db got corrupted that no longer let me view the videos. So after reading for a few hours on the internets I came across the solution, and with a bit of guessing, to just delete the db’s. Only problem is I didn’t know where they were located as no where explicitly said where. After some searching I found out 2 things that are kind of important.

1. Media Center information and stuffs are stored in “Microsoft\ehome” folder
2. The media library database is stored in the “Microsoft\Media Player” folder

You can find the main stuff for Media Center at “C:\Windows\ehome”. That is where the executable and other things are located. Other stuffs are in “C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\ehome” that will be important for other things besides this problem. Just letting you know file locations.

What is the most interesting though is that the media center library is stored at “C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player”. I was amazed because I figured they would store that info in the ehome folder.

Anyway, the problem specifically that I had was when I would go to the videos area of the menu in Media Center it would try to display all the folders, but wouldn’t. I could actually get it to do anything. Once I decided to delete the database information it reset everything back and I could finally add files through the monitoring folders of settings. Well once I did that it still didn’t work properly as the videos would only display in the “Date Captured” view.

So what was my solution?

1. Delete the database files at “C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player”
2. Unmonitor all video locations
3. Install 3rd party MCE application called Video Browser

That is it. Now I just use video browser app that I installed into Media Center as it works a lot better, but a bit different.

Install and Use Video Browser

Installing Video Browser is super simple. Just visit the site “http://code.google.com/p/videobrowser/” download the installer and install it. After that go to the Pictures+Video section of your Media Center menu and you should see a tab to the left called Video Browser.

Now the most important part to not is. VB only monitors your “C:\Users\\Videos” folder. So to add videos from other locations just simply create a shortcut to that folder or file and it will work. This works out great for me as I have a lot of things I need to watch so I only put shortcuts to my “To Watch” videos.

I suggest giving the Media Center stuff a try in vista it is a lot of fun. So much fun in fact if I am not careful I might make an app for it.