News

Boxee, XBMC and AppleTV 3.0

Did you loose your menu options for Boxee and XBMC when your AppleTV updated to the pointless 3.0 version. No worries! The patchstick you made awhile back will still work.

Where is Radio going next?

On December 24th 1906, the world heard its first extended voice radio broadcast.  It was from Massachusetts and the broadcast was received by “sparks”, otherwise known as the communications officers on merchant ships in the Atlantic.  Since then it seems that radio has made a few technology advances in how we receive their product but since the onset of FM has been stuck in a technology black hole and refuses to accept that the world around them is changing.  Technology is changing and the method to deliver their broadcasts is going to change.  I will admit that the radio industry has made a few attempts to leap forward with the times but have been run over with a truck much like Frogger.  These are my views on some of the mistakes that have been made and where radio needs to advance too.

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Hava Platinum HD

Hava HD is a Ethernet device for streaming your TV signal across your network to your PC. Don’t have a TV in your kitchen,  drop your laptop on the counter and fire up your Hava Player.  The software gives you full motion video and audio along with a software based remote control to control your Tivo, Sat box, or VCR (who has one of those still).  I have played with this some over the past 3 weeks and so far I am pleasantly surprised.  Video and audio on the local LAN is superb and set-up was fairly straight forward.  The kicker for this device over the popular Slingbox is that Monsoon is developing a client for the Nokia Internet Tablet (N800/810).  The software is out for beta testing this week.  More on that later.

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Ubuntu Hardy Heron Available Today

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron is available today for mass consumption.  Fire up your favorite bit torrent client and get to work.  What are you waiting for.

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DIY SSD hard dive.

There is a new Century Compact Flash to SATA adatper coming out May 1st. We have all seen these before but, what makes this one unqiue, is its support for three CF cards. That’s up to 96GB of RAID 0/5 love for half of what the current crop of 64 GB drives are going for. […]

Intel announces price cut of up to 50% on desktop parts.

Intel has tweaked its processor price list, cutting up to 50 per cent off what it charges for desktop CPUs.

The big reduction came to the 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700, which now costs $266, down from $530. The 2.4GHz Q6600 is also cheaper now: down 16 per cent to $224. For those of you not […]

IBM’s new racetrack memory, makes old RAM seem like another elderly driver.

IBM has come out with RAM that has data running along a path no larger than a human hair. The result is very very fast RAM. IBM researchers are suggesting that this technology could be available in around a decade and could enable users to store substantially more data at a lower cost. It also will be able to use much less energy because of it’s size. If you ask me, (and nobody ever does so I just talk anyway) ten years is too long cause there will be something even better by that time, I’m guessing. Still, new and faster technology is always welcome.

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Asterisk and an interview with Mark Spencer, it’s creator, made forbes.com

Asterisk, my favorite VOIP PBX for Linux, and an interview with it’s creator, Mark Spencer, has made forbes.com. I’ll admit I’m posting this for selfish reasons. I have personally installed serveral Asterisk systems for small businesses around town and it is always hard to convince them that the system is for real and in […]

Microsoft gives Yahoo a deadline… Yahoo gives Microsoft the finger

If you haven’t heard, Microsoft has been trying to acquire Yahoo for a while now and recently they gave Yahoo a 3 week deadline to come up with its decision. In response by a letter signed by Jerry Yang (CEO) and Roy Bostock (chairman) they state
“we will not allow you or anyone else to […]

Record HDTV from component inputs.

If you arrived here through a google search to find out how to record an HDTV channel from component inputs all I can say is the wait for a device capable of doing this is nearly over. Hauppauge’s much-anticipated HD-PVR looks close to being released.

Hauppauge debuted their HD PVR, which can take a HD signal from its component inputs and transcode it to H.264 in real time for storage on your computer, at CES this year. What this will really allow you to do is bypass any restrictions on recording HDTV programs to your selected device. For me that finally means my full digital cable lineup will be available to my MythTV DVR. Granted this device will sit in the analog hole between your cable / direct tv receiver and your HDTV so, there will be a slight loss of quality due to that and the compression to H.264 but, this should still provide a quality picture. Even with this slightly loss of quality, the promise of opening up all HDTV channels on cable or satellite to any type higher quality recording, has been the holy grail for HTPC for a long time.

Hauppauge had planned to release this unit in Q1 of this year but, like all good things, it will come to those who wait.

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