#“My Latest Sugru Invention”
A hook for my Skype phone. Reinforced with a paper clip. Rather proud of it I must say. I’ll upload the horror that is the back of our Sky+ controls later (3 colours!)
 |
13 Nov 2010, 12:36
12 Nov 2010, 12:38
#“Finally, an update to Swype”
via forum.swype.com
After being a complete Swype fanatic since I first got my hands on it, I actually had to uninstall it recently. It was getting more words wrong than right. It looks like they have fixed that problem so off I go to re-install now.
12 Nov 2010, 12:36
#“Greatest Cake Evah”
12 Nov 2010, 09:50
#“RTE should mark this day”
I know I know, I do the early adopter crap all the time. "Broadcast TV is dead", "Shows will all be single-purchase via IPTV in 2 years" "I don't even know who presents the News on RTE now" "Late Late What?".
But the average punter is still tuning in and watching the same old stuff, maybe a bit time-delayed by Sky+, but that's it.
So, as always, we have to look at what the kids are doing to see what's really coming next.
Last night I realised that the day has come where Early Adopter Mindset = Irish Tween Mindset and all my predictions are now going to start hitting the mainstream soon.
Why?
Because my 11 year old son said "Yeah, I saw that on the RTE Channel………..on YouTube".
I'm pretty sure he doesn't know what RTE actually is.
The end is nigh.
Oh, and the Boxee Box will be available to buy on Monday :-)
09 Nov 2010, 06:57
#“What browsing the web using RockMelt feels like”
I suffer enough distraction problems without constantly updating buttons telling me who is doing what on Twitter/Facebook whilst I'm online banking. I see RockMelt and the first word that comes into my head is Cuil.
04 Nov 2010, 18:28
#“Love it - How iPhone, Android and BlackBerry users see each other”
03 Nov 2010, 17:15
#“Sharing Family Videos using Amazon Cloudfront, CloudBerry, JWPlayer and Wordpress”
We have tons of old video going back to 1997 that I have been capturing as MPG files over the past few years with WinTV boxes. They then sat unloved on a harddrive until now. We have recently got family requests for copies of some of the videos and it prompted me to finally do something. I had considered burning DVDs but they are just going to get lost/scratched and I've always found generating them to be a complete pain.
I switched my thinking to online site which we have used before for very short school-play type snippets. Password protected Vimeo worked fine for that. But I realised it was finally an opportunity to store the videos somewhere safe for the long-term so my focus switched to my old friend Amazon S3. Some fiddling and configuring later and it is working like a charm. So these are the steps:
- Run all the video files through Handbrake to create MP4s at the quality level you want. In our case a lot of the source is Video8 so it starts pretty rough in the first place.
- Create a bucket on Amazon S3 using the very useful CloudBerry S3 Explorer
- Note that if you are an S3 noobie, CloudBerry can guide you through the account setup
- Make that bucket a Streaming Distribution. I got this wrong initially and the videos would have to download entirely before playing! See the CloudBerry instructions here.
- Use CloudBerry to upload the video to S3. CloudBerry has a throttle so you can keep working away and not saturate your broadband
- Now on your Wordpress blog, you install the JW Player Plugin and follow the on-screen instructions.
- Once the video is uploaded you need to get the streaming code for it. CloudBerry can generate the code for you but it is for generic HTML pages, not the WP Plugin. But you use the code CloudBerry gives you as a starting point (see below).
- Also, all the discussion in the CloudBerryinstructionsabout crossdomain.xml and hosting the JW Player on S3 isirrelevantif you use the plugin and are streaming
- Create a new Wordpress Page or Post. Make it password protected if it is stuff that is not for broadcast to a wider audience
- Add the following to the page: [jwplayer config="ConorVids1" file="BlahBlah.mp4" streamer="rtmp://whatever.cloudfront.net/cfx/st/mp4:/" provider="rtmp"]
- You use the info that Cloudberry gave you above to fill out the file and streamer details. The config thing is just a JWPlayer config that you create in the Wordpress settings to suit the height/width of your video.
- Save
- Done!
29 Oct 2010, 07:58
#“The Importance of Interfaces”
I've recently been thinking about how interfaces and standards are so important.
One challenge we have as a family with a huge number of kids is playing media when we visit various grandparents or in-laws. During the winter this is even more important. There are only so many DS games, episodes of iCarly or y8.com games they will play. The same is true when I'm travelling and I want to chill out with a movie in a hotel and not be gouged.
For the past year I've tried to do this with a laptop and VGA to Scart adapter. The picture quality is pretty awful but it does work.
Something like the new Apple TV initially looked interesting due to its small size. Then I saw the interface specs. No composite out , streaming only, no usb port, no sdcard.
So forget that. I then looked at some of the cheap media players on Deal Extreme. They didn't look too bad but reviews were patchy. Then I heard about the Nationite HDVP-2. http://mp4nation.net/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=60&products_id=386
Wow.
1080p playback, composite/yuv/hdmi out, LAN, can take internal HDD, USB port, Sdcard slot, optional WiFi, streams from across network or uses local media, remote control, small size. And the real killer? $79!
We've used it a bunch of times recently and it just totally rocks.
The best example of why a product like this, which only uses industry standard interfaces, is so useful, happened last weekend.
My sister wanted to show her daughter's school play which was on their very cool JVC HDCam. Unfortunately the JVC uses some idiotic proprietary connector for TV-Out and she had forgotten the cable so my usual bag of wires was no use.
We were about to shrug and give up when I suddenly thought "wait a sec, what does it use for storage? ". Aha, Sdcard! I popped the card out, stuck it in the side of the HDVP-2 and voila, my niece on the old CRT TV.
Whether it's usb for charging , sdcards, audio jacks, rca jacks, sims, Bluetooth or cigarette lighters, standards and interfaces make your life easier.
28 Oct 2010, 16:37
#“HTC Desire Playing Nice with iGo Stowaway Keyboard”
I got an iGo Stowaway Keyboard nearly three years ago for my Nokia N95-8GB and N770 at a knock-down price. I still think it is one of the greatest pieces of industrial design out there. It never got huge use but was invaluable when I really needed it. For the past few months I've used it as the keyboard for our Boxee PC.
I'm heading up to cover the Dublin Web Summit for Web2Ireland tomorrow and I'm in no mood to lug around a laptop and spare batteries. So the thought struck me "I wonder can I get the iGo working with my Android phone?". A bunch of googling showed me to be very late to the party. There are a lot of iGo fanatics and people have been trying to get this working since the G1 came out.
It appears that Google dropped the ball on Keyboard/Mouse support in Android and only barely support it now. However I found an app/driver called BlueInput which gets the iGo talking to my HTC Desire. It's not exactly perfect with lots of problems around numbers, punctuation etc, but hell, 9.99 beats the 80 that a new compatible fold-up keyboard would cost.
So I'll be easy to spot as the total dork phone-blogging tomorrow!
19 Oct 2010, 10:40
#“Has group buying jumped the shark?”
After all, if you’re a consumer, another great deal is always around the corner, so why ever pay full price? Other local businesses offering the same products or services will always have deals of their own. Just wait a few days. Further, as more and more businesses discount for the likes of Groupon, they erode their own perceived value, and destroy their own pricing power.
via econsultancy.com
This is a superb piece by econsultancy. I've been starting to have similar thoughts recently.
And this article is just about the problems on the vendor side. What about buyer-fatigue on all this deal-of-the-day stuff?