#“ZX Plectrum - The Greatest iPad App of ALL TIME”

No words needed, just watch the video. Best 79c I ever spent.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kViD9i-hSiY

Damn, the facial tics have started again.RTapeloadingerror, 0:1

#“End of an Era - Philips switches off TV production”

Whilst this story passed by mainly unnoticed, I was very sad to hear that Philips is exiting the TV business. I have a lot of wonderful memories of working with the TV guys in Eindhoven and it pains me to see everything move to a JV in China.

My first degree-related summer-job in college in 1989 was in Eindhoven. My Dad knew a Dutch businessman who had connections in Philips and he got me a job in the Overseas TV department. The people I worked with were just amazing. They made TVs for places like South America where they had to handle every crappy signal that was thrown at them. This included not just poor TV signals, but rubbish power quality too. Those Philips TVs were the Toyota Landcruisers of the television world. Where everything else curled up into a ball and cried, your Philips kept on truckin’.

I spent that summer running circuit simulations on a giant Computervision Workstation. Funnily enough, that was the summer I realised I’d never be a hardware guy and totally moved my focus to software.

Come graduation in 1990 and I couldn’t find a decent job so I went back into UCD and did a Masters in Speech Processing. In 1992, I emerged looking for a job once again. Luckily the first place I applied to was S3 in Dublin, 90% owned by Philips.

Mossie Whelan was intrigued that I had done summer work in Philips since he assumed every Irish person who did so, did it through him, as a Prof of Comp Sci in Trinity! In any case, the Philips thing must have helped and I got a job as a Software Engineer.

My first couple of years were spent working on GSM basestation software but then I landed a fantastic project, building the software for the first generation of Philips own MPEG-2 chipset. Up until then they had used SGS-Thomson chips. The work was tough as hell and we spent months in Eindhoven trying to get buggy silicon to display moving images. Finally, we cracked it and got the thing working. One of the happiest working days of my life.

I’ll never forget a meeting a few weeks later where some Sony execs came in for a demo of the system in action. They were looking to use Philips as a chipset provider, despite being competitors in the TV space. Little did they know that we were manually restarting the software every 30 seconds or so from our giant Lauterbach emulator, just to keep everything moving!

After that we kicked off a much bigger project for the next generation of silicon but I never saw it deployed as I moved to Integral Design to spend the next 4 years working on Toshiba’s MPEG-2 software.

But my admiration for Philips never subsided and the first big TV we ever bought with money from our wedding was a 32” Matchline. Still my favourite TV ever.

So to everyone in Philips TV in Eindhoven, my lifelong respect.

#“XBMC running on Raspberry Pi. I may faint with the anticipation”

The kids’ non-360 XBOX running XBMC has been an amazing piece of kit. We’ve had it for over 4 years and got it second-hand for approx 60 but it maxes out at 480p content. I had thought that getting a replacement like the Patriot or WD Live TV would cost north of 80. But some geniuses have got XBMC running on the Raspberry Pi. A streaming media player with HDMI, LAN and 1080p support for 31 including VAT and delivery? Yes please.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NR57ELY28s

Also, someone has already beaten me to the punch by getting a ZX Spectrum emulator running on it. We need someone to make cases that look exactly like 48K Spectrums, including a working keyboard, that the RPi can slot into. Do it!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkbvDO1K_-c

#“Whilst you wait for your Raspberry Pi, run the software on your PC”

As we all patiently wait for the Raspberry Pi boards to arrive, one smart individual has built a full VM so you can try out the software in Virtualbox on your PC. I’m downloading now and will report back on whether it runs on VMware Workstation and Player too. There are a few things I want to try out on Raspberry Pi and this setup will let me confirm whether they are feasible or not in advance.

Note that they are torrent links and if you are on Eircom, you won’t be able to click the first one :-)

Speaking of torrents, here is a brilliant tutorial on how to use Amazon S3 to seed files via Bittorrent. This type of distribution of popular legal material makes so much sense.

UPDATE: It works perfectly in VMware Workstation (just use the relaxed settings when it complains and asks you). Check it out. Tingles!

#“With acquisition of Instagram, Facebook reveals all-new look”

#“Fuji Finepix 4200 + iPad + USB Adapter = Fab”

So far I really love the Fuji Finepix 4200 bridge camera. Barely scratched the surface of it but it’s like being in a different century to our old point n shoots.

One obvious drawback of a non-cameraphone is that you lose Instant Upload to the web. It’s a bit of a kerfuffle to remove the SD Card, power up a laptop and then upload.

Recently I got a dirt cheap USB adapter for the iPad on Deal Extreme in Hong Kong. I loved that you could stick a USB stick or similar into it to copy stuff into the iPad.

Today I had a brainwave. I took the camera’s USB cable, plugged it into the iPad USB adapter and taa-daaaa, the iPad offered to import all the pictures on the camera.

That’s a really really slick setup. Once I find out what the best photo editor is for iPad, I have the perfect mobile photo taking/editing/upload/blogging setup.

The only practical improvement I’ll be making in the coming months is to get a sub-$100 7” Android tablet to do the same. Without needing an adapter of course.

#“Jesus Skype, don’t scare me like that”

I got an email yesterday from Skype telling me that our account auto-refresh had been suspended. When I logged in, I saw the number above.

Panic.

A bit of checking and I realise that’s 1 euro and 84.9 cents.

FFS, who the hell uses that format for currency, Latvia?

#“If VT-220 terminals had been invented in the 80s”

I’m not doing this meme right, am I?

Next up, if the printing press had been invented in the 1430’s instead of the 1440’s.

#“Microwriter should sue Google for GMail Tap”

Google’s April Fool was my dream of the future of typing in the 1980s

GMail Tap:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KhZKNZO8mQ#!

The Microwriter:

Some day I’d like to try its successor, the CyKey

#“Unofficial Mario Kart 64 on Android and an $89 Tablet”

Two completely separate stories joined together nicely this morning.

First was the news that Mario Kart 64 now runs on Android. I initially thought [a] it’s an official port and [b] therefore it’s an April fool. But I installed and ran it perfectly on a HTC Sensation running ICS.

Then I got an email from MP4 Nation in Hong Kong offering their Herotab C8 Android Tablet for $89. Yes, that’s 66 for a 7” multi-touchcapacitivescreen tablet with 512MB RAM, 4GBstorage, Wifi, HDMI, USB, USB OTG, microSD, 1.2GHz CPU and (sadly) Android 2.3.

Now this tablet is entirely generic and they even warn that it will probably have cosmetic nicks and marks on the body but it’s 66!

My daughter was looking at the Nintendo 3DS in the Argos catalogue yesterday and it was 182. As for the PS Vita pricing, are they all on crystal meth in Sony? Not a hope.

Which do you think your kids are going to go for? An overpriced clunky web-clueless 20th century device with games that cost upwards of 44 a pop. Or a web-enabled handheld computer with hundreds of thousands of apps and games where most cost less than 5?

The perfect example of this is Scribblenauts which is 21 on DS and 79c on iPad. None of our kids play it on DS any more, as the 10” screen on the iPad blows it away for playability. Yeah yeah I know Scribblenauts isn’t on Android yet. But you get the point.

I know they won’t do it, as they (like Apple), make a profit on their hardware, but at some point Nintendo is going to have to bite the bullet. The Sony Experia Play is the sort of thing they should be looking at but for a younger audience and with really great gaming controls.

It’s time for the Nintendo Andro-DS. It would offer the absolute best playability for DS games. They might go the route of locking the games so that they only play on their Android device and they also give owners access to the full standard Android market. But if they were really brave they would make the games available on all Android devices for 4.99 each. They should still make an Andro-DS as it would be the best way of playing the games.

Scribblenauts has sold 1m units on iPad. Mario Kart Andro-DS would sell 20m units easy.

Back to that el-cheapo tablet. Android 2.3 is horrible on tablets so it really needs to have ICS before I’d consider it, no matter how cheap. There are some community ROMs out there but they all look very early-stage. If I could be sure ICS was coming, it is a no-brainer at that price. Still I’m very tempted to take a flutter as it’s a 1-day deal only.