When is Vista Sideshow not Vista Sideshow? When it does the same thing as Sideshow—display little widgets on an external device—but doesn’t use Vista’s Gadgets. The USB Gadget Display does look like a little 2-inch LCD display, which shows clocks and various other things like CPU and RAM usage (but mostly clocks) outside of your machine, but it works with Windows XP, something Sideshow can’t claim. Though, looking at the quality of these widgets, it might be worth it for you to upgrade to Vista. [Everything USB]
The Vista feature you pretty much forgot about is back: ControlThink’s got a new remote control platform for Windows Media Center and other devices called ThinkRemote that leverages Vista’s oft-touted-but-rarely used SideShow. That’s right, you can get SideShow information and gadgets anywhere in your house since the platform uses the Z-Wave flavour of wireless for communication for home automation tricks like turning lightbulbs on and off. Logitech’s big remote was supposed to do this last year, but it failed to, um, work as promised. So is this the first? Maybe.
