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I commute between Seattle and Redmond every work day. It takes anywhere from 17 minutes to 45 minutes to get home depending on the condition of traffic, so I used to check our local traffic site regularly to determine the best way and time to head home.

It became repititious to go to the Seattle traffic Web page and click on all of those traffic cams. I discovered a great solution to quickly assess the traffic situation and in near real-time.

Here's what you need:

• URL for local traffic map (like this one)
• URL for local traffic cameras (like this one)
• Konfabulator for Windows
• Web Images widget for Konfabulator

Load up your Web Images widget with the URLs for the traffic image and traffic camera, set them all on for Konspose mode only, and position the traffic cameras around the traffic map.

Press F8 and you can get a near real-time snapshot of local traffic without having to load up the browser and it just fades in over your desktop-

Before:

After:

Came across dCut, an application that plugs into Media Center 2005 (MCE) and can cut DVR-MS files for editings. Picture your favoriate prime time show and- Voila!- Commercials no more.

This shows the strength of MCE as a platform. Do you know what a pain it is to do customized things like this on my ReplayTV box at home? I have noticed the 'Online Spotlight' options already growing within MCE, I am hoping to see more apps like this developed by the MCE community.