I have been harassing everybody I know recently about CDs. Fewer and fewer of us are using them; and no, this is not a post to encourage the re-adoption of the medium - after all, the digital form is much much more convenient all round. What I would say though, is that I can guarantee that you have a shelf somewhere with a stack of some of the greatest music you ever listened to. It is gathering dust, it is ignored, dormant.

Having moved house 6 months ago I literally threw my belongings into boxes, as is the done thing on the morning of "the move". I recently came across a cake tub of albums within one of the said boxes. I have since rediscovered music that I simply have not downloaded or looked at for what feels like a very long time. And yes, it sounds odd, but as soon as I placed the disks into the drive of my laptop I knew all of the words to the songs. What am I getting at here? The Internet, and damn I love it, makes it too easy to get hold of music, any genre, however many/few tracks that you want etc. What I only realised this week is that I no longer look forward to album releases, I do not savour hearing a great album for the first time.

It is all too easy to skip to the next track, different artist or "playlist" on the ipod. So this week, instead of skipping progressively through 4000 mp3's that I really only have for the sake of having, I've listened to a handful of albums, in full. It has been satisfying. They have tinkered along in the background, and whilst you probably will not appreciate this until you reach into the dusty corner of a cupboard, it has been a revelation.

Again, do not get me wrong here, it is a musical journey of questionable taste. I, like you probably have (or will do), been very surprised to find some utterly bad music in the cake tub. But skipping over the Best of Take That, I will instead list the artists that I subconsciously know all their songs word for word somehow, despite my complete disregard for them in recent times;

Radiohead - (OK Computer), Idlewild, Manic Street Preachers - (Everything Must Go), Travis - (The Man Who), Oasis - (Definately Maybe), Greenday - (Dookie), JJ72, New Found Glory, Garbage, Muse, Moby, Brand New, Badly Drawn Boy, Starsailor and REM.

So simply put, this is to encourage you to look on your shelves, delve into that box you have been meaning to sort out and recover the CDs you listened to when you had nothing better to do. I guarantee that you will have overlooked something utterly brilliant (perhaps just in your eyes) when downloading your "favourite" tracks for your iPOD. Nothing can quite beat finding that long lost track you loved, just never admit to your friends you were a closet Toni Braxton fan.

I am particularly proud of the post title. So proud that I am considering forwarding this post to The Sun, I could definitely take up a leading position at their 'Headline Pun' department, which certainly exists. Alas, jokes aside.

Firstly I am not pro-child labour. But I will discuss a few home truths that we in the West choose to willingly ignore. We enjoy cheap products that are produced using working standards that are illegal in our own countries. We also enjoy expensive products that are produced using child labour abroad. I have been holding my head in my hands for the last few days as the BBC hyped up the expose of Primark as being the big bad corporate abuser of the small and innocent of a dusty backstreet.

What is truly amazing firstly is that the pay is portrayed as a pittance. The narration placing all the emotive emphasis upon the pennies that are earned. Well, the reality is, that adults in these parts of the world are that poorly paid - there is such a thing as economy dictating factors such as this. Should the emphasis not be better placed on that fact? We are fortunate enough to enjoy legislation and an economy that can provide a minimum wage, but we must not lose sight that pennies/cents in these countries are effective hard currency. Again, do not mistake what I'm saying here, it is tough and it is poverty in our eyes, but pence makes a difference in these places not pounds. This was ironically shown by another BBC documentary demonstrating the conditions of Indian sweatshops recently in which totally unsuitable Guinea pigs, in the form of spoilt students, were sent to sew buttons and cry about having to excrete into an open pit all week. They earned something like 4p a day - yet there were local workers desperate for these jobs. Why? They were paid, fortunately or not, in line with what was expected. I digress once more.

I will not defer my main point of annoyance further. The public outcry by those whom for some reason believe themselves to be human friendly characters, whom show no fault and abide by all the principles by which they preach. They are the naive characters in life, who float from one room to another, eyes shut and just existing. The kind of individual who is sinfully boring to anyone with more than a single braincell and who cannot live one day of their lives without supping on fluorescent alcopop or dreaming of being rich and watching 'This Morning' all day long (like they do anyway).

These citizens are clothed in GAP jeans, Nike trainers, wear diamonds in their rings and use products produced in China. Let us analyse further. GAP and Nike consistently have sweatshop problems, they are not the only ones, how can multinational corporations control every single supply chain? Still, we are all aware of it and buy the products. Why? They are good quality, reliable etc. Most of the worlds diamonds are dredged from the deepest and most dangerous pits in Africa. Our lovable Health and Safety Executive would have a field day indeed. Still, our pompous naive wag adoring citizen friends adorn them with pride. And we all have plastic crap, metal things, cars, clothes, electronics - whatever - all made in China. A nation with massive human rights issues that I am probably being patronising when reminding you of. This is not even taking into account the levels of pollution that our collective Western greed has been happy to accept as the trade off, at arms length of course.

I have no opinion one way or the other on this - this is a piece out of frustration at uninformative and repetitive "investigative" reporting I suppose. Yes child labour is wrong, but, and this could is something that is worth considering I think; does the child have access to education? Do they need to work in order to survive? It is all unfortunately very rhetorical.

It is a horrible point of consideration and I am annoyed that the shock-horror nature of this kind of reporting refuses to address the concept of necessary evils. Should it be happening; no. Do the companies want it to be happening; no. But I have no doubt that without the jobs more third world children would starve. It is just too easy to get upset about this, but we are talking about massive socio-economic problems on a scale that is literally incomprehensible. Social commentators will no doubt analyse Britain's workhouse reforms, and Lawyers will always point at positive legislation. BUT - we are naive sensitive souls on this island, and seemingly we have lost all sense of feasibility. Our population was much smaller, manageable, it's barely 60 million now. India alone is already at 1.1 Billion souls. I would bow before the man who could legislate and make workable this idealistic notion of everyone living in green bountiful grasslands, full from dinner and having maximum working hours.

If another person tells me how shocked they were at the sight of a child stitching beads onto a Primark t-shirt I will repeat this questionable dialogue in full to them. Regardless of who is stitching it, or their age, is it not reasonable to assume that they do not enjoy the same culture, rights and pay as someone in the UK? The very cost of the item is the biggest hint to even the moronic. It is amusing that Primark should be singled out, as amusing as the notion that it took someone this long to wander around the middle of nowhere and find a kid with a needle.

But still, the same clueless folk will slip into their organically grown Cotton pyjamas, after locking their Toyota Prius in the garage, having read their paper produced on recycled paper and turn off the solar night-light genuinely believing they are changing the world. Because as we all know, consumer choice has changed the world before, right?

It is not often that Microsoft gets praised. The big bad corporate entity that it is, regularly witnessed collecting multi-billion Dollar fines from the EU Competition board. And I will not pretend to be a staunch admirer of their business practices, but I will today focus upon a piece of software that has taken me utterly by surprise; Windows Media Center.

Firstly I recognise that this is nothing new, it has been something I have been using a little since I began tinkering with Vista at the beginning of this year. It was the connectivity to XBOX:360 that has really lit my interest in this software's capabilities and features. I have found it genuinely first rate and in carrying out the tasks often bemoaned by end users like myself, it fulfills the simple requirement of actually working!

Firstly I must compliment the seamless music integration. As those who used the original Xbox or 'Extender' for the 360 and streamed music to play whilst gaming, it could be temperamental in terms of the network and really offered nothing more than a folder of your music cycling through endlessly. Now though, we are presented with a seamless and very intuitive interface. It glides effortlessly, looks great, sounds nice and is just very un-Microsoft. The cynics amongst you, and Playstation 3 owners as well no doubt, will point to the PS3 interface as the reason for the emergence of a similar system. My response is that this perhaps shows the limitations of Sony's design. The Xbox being so heavily reliant upon the 'Dashboard', it certainly suffered in terms of how sexy it looked in comparison. However, instead of simply building upon the limitations of the 'Media' tab already standard within the Dashboard, the extension that Media Center allows for is a brave and quite genius move. It takes literally 5 minutes to set up and from then on allows for seamless integration to my Desktop machine.

Let me once again state my utter surprise, Microsoft, the warrior guardians of Digital Rights previously, allowing us to stream high quality audio, movie films and pictures between our home entertainment devices? I'm one who remembers when it was near impossible to free up the rights of .wmv files just to move them from your Windows Media Player library! My surprise, and delight was further enhanced when I decided to explore this further. I did a little research and noted that the streaming video is required to be in MPEG format, no surprises there considering that it is MS based. Time to test, so I raced to mininova.org and grasped the first file that matched the compatibility bill and ensured it was listed in my Media Center library on the PC when completed. Still not believing that this would work I booted up the trusty 360, browse to Media, Media Center and waited the short seconds for it to sync to my PC via the network. And there it was, located in the videos slider! A side note which interested me was that the first time I tried to run a couple of differing file formats I found that each individual codec would be downloaded from XBOX Live. Pleasingly these are held permanently so there is no repeat downloading each time you wish to watch a file. Whether the codecs would update as newer became available, that remains to be seen, my Googling returned no definite results. This is also interesting in the sense that evidently Microsoft has the ability to make a much wider spectrum of codecs available should it wish or be made to do so over time either by consumer demand or governmental (particularly in Europe) demands for fair and competitive behavior. It leads me to believe that as the XBOX becomes yet more pivotal in terms of a home entertainment unit, they will be forced to do something one way or the other.

On the subject of Home Entertainment and syncing multiple items it is now very easy via your home network to share from your Media Center, to other PC's or XBOX's you might have connected to it. With Vista, it detects when another 'Extender' has been discovered connected to the network - Extender refers essentially to a device which you could share media/resources with, and is simply a case of opening the firewall to allow that device exclusive access and then confirming an 8 digit code that will be churned out by the connecting device. Very easy, very useful and like I said very unlike the Microsoft I know. Needless to say, we now have 2 PC's, a laptop and 2 Xbox's each sharing from one anothers' Media Centers which gives access to a true array of audio and visual options let me tell you! I am still particularly surprised at the fact that from both Xbox's you can pick from the Media Centers of the PC's hooked up to the networks. Essentially you can pick a source, browse and stream what you want. The beauty being that with most modern wireless networks, they have such bandwidth is makes no impact at all, and I've noticed nothing detrimental. This raises an interesting future benefit perhaps, sharing with neighbours' wifis or by opening up the 'Shared Folders' to the Internet whereby you could allow friends etc to stream from distance and vice versa. A potential P2P minefield in terms of legality of audio/video, but you could in theory pool from a massive well of photos between family members etc which could rotate on your desktop/Xbox randomly - without request - and without any hassle.

It has massive potential in my opinion, and it is a fantastic product already, and the reason I'm writing about it is because it isn't widely used or adopted by many Vista users. It sits there relatively dormant for most people, and that is partly Microsoft's fault for not demonstrating its capabilities and simplicity to the wider "everyday" user market. Secondly it is probably down to the fact that MS products have previously been so well packaged but ultimately not nearly as good as a rivals. Which brings me to another point; this product is not original in the sense of media presentation and sharing, but what it does do is allow you to share it easily, impressively and with total ease within a single program. There are competitors, web based and applications you can get but nothing I've had had combined my media, other media I can get at, and sync it seamlessly to other home entertainment units in my house.

And now to the part I had been building up to. Now that I have finished polishing Microsoft's crown! (Who would have thought?).

Xbox users; what is the one thing missing from your dashboard? The one feature lacking? An Internet Browser! Again this may not be something new, but I once again drift onto my favourite hobby which is dissembling things I own to make them better, so if you want to browse the net from the comfort of your Xbox read on. If not, do something worthwhile and start syncing via Media Center!

First of all you need to have Windows Media Center on your PC and have it ready synced to your Xbox, obviously really. The you need to Google or hit the link for a program called MCEBrowser. This is a tiny little app designed by a chap called Anthony Park, he also does fine woodworking, bizarrely. Next I suggest ensuring your Media Center is not loaded on your 360, when I did this the first time I had left it running in the background and it failed to update, so jump back to the Dashboard for a few minutes. Once the MCEBrowser has downloaded to your PC, run it and install it as normal. This will have linked it into your Media Center, under 'Online Media', scroll left to 'Program Library', MCE Browser will be listed here. It is a simple case of launching the application and browsing the net from there. This is a half decent plugin, it is not in my opinion perfect. I have the Messenger addon hardware keyboard which makes entering things like URLS or typing into forms much much less laborious. Without it, it becomes tedious as anyone who has used the onscreen type-pad will know. It has a few decent functions and is pretty user friendly, other Media Center features such as music playing continues in the background whilst you browse and appears as a nice icon in the bottom left for skipping/pausing etc. The MCEBrowser does not provide any audio though, that's the only drawback, perhaps deliberate, but who knows. It is a useful little application if you are desperate to get yet more functionality out of your machine. A final concern I should put to bed is that of compromising your Xbox to viruses, Trojans etc. This is a non issue as far as I can see as the browser is run through Media Center which is based on your PC - it is still in essence streamed content. Therefore you cannot be putting your 360 at risk as what is displayed is done so remotely and not locally, and in any case the same security settings you have applied on your host machine will be applied so our antivirus and firewalls are still in place.

Fin!