#“Android 2.3 Details Announced”

#“Oh here we go again with Android ebookstore and country-specific crap”

Google launches new ebookstore with millions of titles:

Paddies can stick with paper:

p.s. Amazon, I’m still waiting to be allowed to buy MP3s in Ireland. You’ve heard of Apple, right? If they can figure it out, why can’t you?

#“Could Bond Traders use Twitter?”

I was also reading about "Bond Vigilantes" earlier and that dovetailed into reading Gladwell's piece from 2002 onNassim Taleb and Victor Niederhoffer. In it he talked about the traders being glued to instant information and news. I guess that's how Bloomberg made all his money with the terminals. I then just wondered if [a] anyone had built a Bloomberg-type app for Twitter that only looks at financial related news and more importantly [b] If anyone has built a sentiment analysis engine for financial opinion on Twitter to help direct their trades?

#“Streaming Videos to your Android Phone”

Big hat-tip to @micflan for pointing me in the right direction on this recently. I had tried and failed several times previously.

I did a post a few months back about getting streaming media working on both old Nokia N770s and iPhone from an Easy Peasy based EeePC netbook running MediaTomb. The idea was that it could be the ultimate in-car media center. The one massive annoyance was that I couldn’t get it working on Android due to it having only one crappy non-functional UPnP client.

In the meantime, people have been busy on Android! Streaming using UPnP now works perfectly. Having said that, I bloody hate UPnP, give me bog-standard Samba file-sharing any day. Works perfectly on XBMC, Boxee and every PC/Mac. Given that the Astro File Manager has an SMB add-on on Android, the absence of network media playing using SMB has nothing to do with lack of oomph on the handset.

Anyway, I digress, the setup is very simple for this. If you have one of those Iomega or WD etc NAS media boxes then I’m pretty sure UPnP is setup already so you don’t have to do anything there. If you have a PC that holds all your movies and other media then you just need to pop over to TVersity and install their free UPnP Server on the PC. Once installed you just tell it what directories to share out. Job done at that end.

Then on the Android phone you just need to install UPnPlay to browse the remote media and a decent media player to display it. The two I’ve been trying most recently are RockPlayer and VPlayer. Both have their own positives and negatives depending on the media source (particularly around A/V sync) so if you have problems with one, try the other.

Another huge advantage that both RockPlayer and VPlayer have over the built-in media player (and others) is that they don’t require local files to be transcoded to MP4. They are perfectly capable of playing all the standard AVIs, MKVs and anything else you can throw at it, without even needing to be downsampled to a smaller screen resolution. RockPlayer has the added advantage of using the built in h.264 hardware decoder if you are using MP4s to reduce the main CPU load (and therefore improving battery life I’m guessing)

I’ll do another quick post soon on the HDVP-2 media streamer I got recently. Whilst is works with TVersity, I’m having AV Sync issues there too.

#“Starting important downloads when out and about”

See the full gallery on Posterous

If you have an Android phone, you can now sort that problem out with Transdroid. It’s a little fiddly to get going but works perfectly once it does. What you need is:

1. The aforementioned Android phone
2. With the aforemention Transdroid installed on it from the Android Market
3. uTorrent installed on your main PC back at base
4. A router with the ability to do port forwarding and dynamic DNS

The steps are as follows:

1. Go to dyndns.com and get a dynamic DNS like myfantastichomerouter.dyndns.org
2. Give your main PC a fixed IP address
3. In uTorrent, go to Preferences->WebUI->Enable WebUI. Also setup a username/password in that panel
4. In uTorrent, go to Preferences->Connection click “Random Port”. Record what port it says.
5. Login to your router
6. Give it all the dyndns credentials required (most routers do dyndns nowadays)
7. Go to the port forwarding section on your router and setup a forward from the Random Port selected in uTorrent to that port on your PC’s IP address
8. Launch Transdroid on your phone. In settings, tell it all about the setup you have just configured above
9. Search for what you want e.g. “Ubuntu Maverick” (You can also download the initial torrent file from the source site in your browser and open it locally in Transdroid.
10. Long press the correct file that is listed. Select “download now”.
11. The file will now start downloading on your PC at home and will be waiting for you when you get there!

#“Dear Posterous, please fix media upload from Chrome”

It’s been broken for nearly two weeks now. No other site has this problem. Works fine from Firefox on the same PC.

Thanks

#“Sony Ericsson LiveView = Calculator Watch 2.0”

#“I need Boxee for Families”

I've been a Boxee fanatic since I first discovered it as a replacement for our old XBoxes+XBMC which can't handle H.264 video. The app gets better and better and I'm thrilled they have launched a standalone box. Quick aside: Any chance they'd sell the Boxee remote for us PC owners? I bloody hate the generic MCE one we have.

#“Virtual hurling with the xbox kinect”

#“I had to buy Cracking Contraptions today”

I was in Waterstones in Cork with my 7 y/o daughter today and I spotted Wallace & Gromit's Cracking Contraptions Manual. I squealed with glee when I saw it. Done in the style of a Haynes manual with obligatory tea stain and repaired ripped cover, it is a work of utter awesomeness.