Metabrowser is a low cost program that handles all aspects of media metadata management, from scraping content to downloading trailers. It handles both TV shows and movies with equal efficiency. It can also handle automatically sorting your TV episodes into the proper directories by monitoring folders. This makes it a near-seamless process to record or rip your media, convert it, and then have it sorted to the proper directory and have the metadata downloaded.

There are quite a few advanced features that this program has including batch renaming your episodes so that they all have a uniform naming scheme. It handles both XBMC and Mediabrowser metadata formats, and it can pull the metadata from most major sites, including the TVDB and IMDB.

It’s an incredibly simple program to use, making it easy to quickly fetch metadata for groups of media. There are batch functions to update all metadata, or you can just select specific fields to update. If you have any questions about the program, their community is quick with answers and assistance.

I highly recommend Metabrowser to anyone who’s using XBMC or Mediabrowser to manage their local media.

Here enters MediaBrowser. Mediabrowser is a free program that handles organizing your video files complete with online metadata. It is incredibly simple to setup, quite stable, and practically essential for anyone interested in having the ultimate home theatre experience on their computer.

The amount of data that it can display for your collection is astounding. It can handle trailers for movies, episode plot details, and it even lets you search for actors in your collection.

For those of you who want to take the time to generate the metadata locally, there is a great program called MetaBrowser that can handle that for you. While it’s not free, it is definitely worth the $20 to help keep your collection permanently organized.

I highly recommend MediaBrowser to anyone who uses Media Center as a front-end for their home theatre systems.

Windows MCE 7 doesn’t support that out of the box, however, that’s where Remote Potato comes in. It installs a small webserver onto your MCE system so that you can add and remove recordings. It also supports streaming your media anywhere where you have access to a browser. It is password protected, so you don’t have to worry about someone logging on and deleting all your recordings, which is good. If you have a large number of channels, you can select which channels you want to show to the guide, so you only have to scroll through the channels that you actually use.

All in all, it’s a great free program that is highly recommended if you want to be able to add recordings from anywhere.

Hopefully I’ll have a chance over the next few days to update with some more games.

If you like the iPhone way of displaying messages, there is an option for that, complete with the chat bubbles. Or, if you prefer the default android look, you can do that too. Since everything can be toggled on and off, you can have almost any mix of a theme that you’d like.

There is an option for a popup notification of new messages that lets you reply to them without even having to open up the app. It also includes a widget that displays the number of unread messages, however I’ve not found much of a use for that as I use the notification bar for that.

Stability is not a problem, as I’ve yet to have any crashes or lost messages in the 3 months that I’ve been using it.

I would recommend Handcent to anyone who uses Android for messaging a lot, as it gives much more stability and control to your messaging.

Just posted the latest beta of FuryBand 5.1. It makes massive changes to player start.

See this forum thread for more information.

For those of you who use it, it can sync with Remember the Milk, which makes it much more convenient to keep track of things on your computers as well. It also has a widget for the Android background that works pretty well too.

Astrid is free, and you can find more information about it here.

NPPAngband 0.5.0 has been released, and the Mirror has been updated, including the spoiler files.

Mirror page is here.

Official site is here.

It acts as a remote control for most media programs, with start/stop/next/previous and volume buttons. It also lets you lock your computer, and handle shutting down and restarting.

Now, the coolest feature is that it lets you use your Android phone as a keyboard and mouse for your computer. If you have a phone with a physical keyboard (like the droid) you can use the screen as a touchpad and the keyboard as a keyboard at the same time, otherwise you have to bounce between the two applications. It’s pretty responsive and very quick at updating on the screen. There’s a fraction of a second of lag on the keyboard, but it’s not too noticeable.

It connects to your computer via bluetooth, and requires a small helper application installed on the computer. It’s pretty useful if you want to control a computer that’s not easily accessible or watch movies across the room.