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The views and thoughts of a dyslexic british designer/developer

Archive for November 24th, 2009

Specs of old and new XBMC box

Nov 24

Posted by admin in home entertainment | View Comments

People keep asking me for the specs of my XBMC boxes. Although I thought I'd done that here (old) and here (new). I've got them line by line now.

Compaq EVO D510 Small Desktop with Intel Pentium 4 2.8ghz processor. 512meg of Ram and 13gig ATA hardddrive. 5x speed creative (no-region) PC DVD drive and GeForce 6200 128meg AGP card (low profile card with DVI output). Came with 2 full PCI slots free and one low profile AGP slot, now have a Trust 7.1 sound card slotted in the PCI slots. Power usage is 185 watts sounds silent unless playing a disc.

Lenovo ThinkCentre M55p Small Desktop with Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86ghz processor. 2gig of Ram an 80gig SATA harddrive. 16X speed DVD-ROM and Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3000 (onboard with VGA output). Came with 1 full PCI slot free and 1 weird (swear its not, some forums say its a ADD 2-R or PEG slot) PCI Express slot, now have a Trust 7.1 sound card slotted in the slots. Power usage is 225 watts but still also silent unless playing a disc.

Both machines are running Ubuntu 8.04.1 with Pulseaudio savaged to not run. The Lenovo has the latest beta of XBMC 2.2 while the Compaq is running the mainline 2.1. The main difference is in the CPU usage.

I ran the Lenovo through some of the most challenging trailers and films I own and it made mince meat of everything. The Sony Advert where the colour balls are bouncing down the streets of San Francisco, you know the one. Well I got that in sub 1080p (1440×1080) and on the old machine playback would drop to sometimes 12fps on intense scene changes. Even the audio would sometimes break up and you could see the CPU running at 100% through out. Now with the new machine its running the whole thing at 40% on one CPU! My ultimate test was the Spiderman 3 trailer which was not only the full 1080p but at a high bit rate only reserved for BluRay. The old box would give up playing this half way through, while the new one got stuck in and hit a CPU peak of 60% for both CPUs. Playback was flawless except 3 frames it had dropped the whole 2mins. On other stuff like my HD Back to the Future and Matrix collection, it was perfect, even with DTS sound. This is what Home entertainment should be like…

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Boxee's app repository, a game changer?

Nov 24

Posted by admin in home entertainment | View Comments

Plex apps store

I adore XBMC, I really do but I do rate Boxee for everything its doing. The social features are not perfect but far better that I've seen elsewhere so far. While the competition plonk twitter an facebook intergration on top of everything they do, Boxee has weaved in the social to be a core part of the platform instead of on top.

Another key thing I noticed about Boxee since my upgrade is the Apps changes. I've said for years XBMC is the best platform to demonstrate whats possible when you move away from broadcast television to ip based vision. Python supplies XBMC, Plex and Boxee with incredible scripting power and new APIs to manipulate the video and interface. So far the scripting has been all the obvious stuff like scraping websites for multimedia content but recently there's been more DVD like experiences to stuff which you may be downloaded or streamed. So maybe a menu or options to dive into more content that just what's in the linear storyline. Nothing too interactive, just options to play more linear content. But you can certainly see that changing in the near future. And unlike before its going to get very easy to see these apps deployed on your screen.

XBMC has always had the ability to download scripts from the net while sitting in the sofa but its been not very clear or popular. Plex from what I gather (I don't run plex) has a apps directory like you would expect from the Apple store but Boxee has gone one step further by including the option to subscribe to your own repository. So for example, the BBC could have not only its own apps with everyone elses but have a total repository of its own which only includes maybe BBC approved apps. This guy from the Boxxxee adult network raves on about what a game changer this could be and to be frank where the porn industry goes, others do follow.

The “open-ness” of the Boxee platform is what, I believe, will ultimately make it wildly successful. The ability for content creators to instantly distribute their creations to monitors and TV sets around the world is a game changer. Unfortunately, installing a Boxee app manually is a task only a developer (or hardcore tech geek) would feel comfortable with. Surely, for those who are using Boxee free from any keyboard (maybe with the awesome iPhone remote app?) manually installing an app is impossible.

Fortunately, Boxee has a killer little feature called the App Box. Within the App Box, users can add “Repositories,” essentially directories that house third-party applications. Once a repository is added, installing the apps from that repository is a one click process. Developers can add additional apps and they’ll show up automatically in a viewer’s App Box as soon as they are available. I love it!

He's quite right to be excited, I expect the apps will become much more mature and boost levels of interaction which will surprise most traditional broadcasters off guard. If that doesn't get them the ability to redefine the rules of TV within the stream and the media of the box will. Avner Ronen of Boxee asks TV programme producedrs to start changing the way they write programmes to fit with a audiences who don't need a cliff-hanger at the end of each show. Why is a show 22 or 44 mins, why the tricks to persuade the viewer to stay on board in stead of a solid plot?

The issue is that today writers create artificial suspense before commercial breaks and at the end of each episode (to ensure viewers will tune in next week), and they also feel the need to remind the viewer of key plot themes (since it’s been a week and the viewer may have forgotten). When you watch a few episodes over a short period of time these “tricks” are clearly apparent and they hurt real story telling.

The on-demand experience should also put into question other axioms. For example, why stick with the format of 22/44 min long episodes? some plot lines could be longer and some shorter. A show could also be non-linear, letting the viewer follow different paths from different angles, putting new story telling tools in the hands of the writers.

Lastly If you had any doubt, you should be looking at XBMC, Boxee and Plex for game changing ability just consider the amazing things been done in the field of dual screen ability with Xmote (video). Yes its iphone only right now but there has been remotes for other platforms like Android, Symbian, PocketPC and Blackberry. Generally most of the hardwork has been about connecting the two but now that has been solved your starting to see some amazing enhancements like being able to pull up the cast and crew of the film your watching on the big screen without a break in the viewing. So imagine combining this with the ability to script and manipulate the content? Heck imagine doing this with 4 of your friends or the family. What would be possible? I don't know but rather that dreaming about it, the people working on XBMC, Plex and Boxee are prototyping the future, now! Why don't you get involved now?

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Why XBMC is the best thing on TV

Oct 24

Posted by admin in home entertainment | View Comments

When people come to my flat there usually amazed by my mediacentre setup. They never knew XBMC could look so beautiful. Problem is I can describe the experience but its never the same as when you see it in action. So here's a video speeded up of XBMC in my living room.

So people keep asking what's the specs of the machine I'm running XBMC on? Well its pretty simple, so I'll do a detailed spec sheet.

Software wise I'm running Ubuntu Linux 8.04 on the 2.6.24-24-generic kernel. XBMC runs as the default option when Ubuntu logs in under the under-privileged user xbox. So the Gnome or KDE backend is not loaded. I would upgrade to 9.04 but there's issues with Pulseaudio which I know have been solved but I don't really mess with my XBMC box too muc

Hardware wise, I'm using a slightly under powered Compaq EVO D510 which is a Intel Pentium 4 with 512meg of Memory and 13gig of hard drive space. I tried to switch to using just a Flash drive but found it was actually much slower that using the hard drive (maybe obvious now). I use Samba Shares (SMB) for everything, so the box does nothing but play back media. Other boxes take care of the downloading and storing of media. I'm holding close to 4.25 Terrabytes across my network. Inside the XBMC box, I'm using a standard PC with a old 5x speed creative (no-region) PC DVD drive and GeForce 6200 128meg AGP card. The DVD drive plays everything pretty much and believe it or not is almost 10 years old, the AGP card is simply because the machine doesn't support PCI-Express and XBMC requires a card which supports OpenGL 2.0. The GeForce card can handle most things but doesn't really like 1080p.but 720p and 1080i isn't a problem. The whole thing is hooked up to my Samsung 40inch TV using a DVI to HDMI connection and the sound to my Onkyo 7.1 Surround sound reciever from a Trust 5.1 soundcard using a single optical cable. I have gotten Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Digital EX and DTS ES 6.1 out of XBMC, without too much problem. Finally I use a Bluetooth dongle with a wii-remote to control the whole thing. It looks impressive but requires little fiddling if none at all.

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The sound of Rain

Sep 24

Posted by admin in media-and-expression | View Comments

I highly recommend listening to the first part of this with your headphones and eyes closed. The concept of making a rainstorm with the hands is fantastic and sounds excellent. Oh the singing isn't bad either.

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Time to change the record?

Aug 24

Posted by admin in media-and-expression | View Comments

The timeline of music sales

Saw this graph of the music sales over various mediums over the last few decades. Looking at the graph its easy to see why the music industry are so pissed off with the radical changes. They have been so comfortable with seeing massive profits off the back of CDs sales that their expecting even bigger profits from the next format. However thats not going to happen. The article on evolver magazine goes into much more detail, although you can imagine what it says without reading it.

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Five Eras of the social web

Jul 24

Posted by admin in xml and web 2.0 | View Comments

I caught this on the social web.tv today. Jeremiah Owyang talking about the Five eras of the social web. I missed this first time around but interesting to read about now.

Running List of the Five Eras of The Social Web
For details on this report, access the high level blog post, or if you’re a client, access the full report on the Forrester site.

Era of Social Relationships (started 1995, matured in 2003-2007)
This era is mature.

  • AOL, 1995
  • eCircles, 2001
  • MySpace, Facebook, Twitter
Era of Social Functionality (started 2007, matures in 2010-2012)
These are prelimnary examples, but are not examples of maturity, as we’ve not seen true useful utilities to improve business.

Era of Social Colonization (started 2009, matures in 2011)
These are prelimnary examples, but are not examples of maturity when your entire digital experience is social.

Era of Social Context (starts in 2010, matures in 2012)

This era is certainly not in maturity, but we can see some early examples of demographic scraping.

  • There are no current examples
Era of Social Commerce (starts in 2011, matures in 2013)
These are prelimnary examples, such as Techcrunch’s crunchpad, but it’s not a true example of a crowd created, spec’d product.

  • There are no current examples

For the Social Commerce era, you could also place Gdgt.com but more importantly everything the VRM (vendor relationship management) guys have been working on for a while. Also got to say social commerce starts to make sense of that reverse relationship of VRM.

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Software ahead of the curve: ZOË

May 24

Posted by admin in data-and-semantic-web | View Comments

Zoe in action

I've been thinking about doing a series of blog post about software and people a head of the curve, so here's number one of many.

I got talking to Dj Adams at a recent Manchester Geekup. Dj Adams is one of those guys who I followed like jon udell and when I was getting into web development and xml. One of the things we talked about was a piece of software called Zoe.

Zoe is a web based e-mail client with a built in SMTP server and Google-like search functionality that lives on your desktop. Zoe is written in java and uses Lucene technology to provided instant searching and threading of your e-mails.

Zoe was a very interesting project but dropped development a few years ago. Looking back on it, there was some guiding principles/concepts which were ahead of the curve. Dj Adams in his blog post talks about Twitter's killer feature, Everything has a URL.

and everything is available via the lingua franca of today’s interconnected systems — HTTP. Timelines (message groupings) have URLs. Message producers and consumers have URLs. Crucially, individual messages have URLs (this is why I could refer to a particular tweet at the start of this post). All the moving parts of this microblogging mechanism are first class citizens on the web. Twitter exposes message data as feeds, too.

Even Twitter’s API, while not entirely RESTful, is certainly facing in the right direction, exposing information and functionality via simple URLs and readily consumable formats (XML, JSON). The simplest thing that could possibly work usually does, enabling the “small pieces, loosely joined” approach that lets you pipeline the web,

Zoe had this feature, now admittedly Zoe was meant to be run locally and not on a public server (there were little or no controls for privacy, it relies on other stack elements like https and certs to do that.) but it was great because every email had a addressable url. Searches and RSS also benefited from having urls which was great. At the time, this wasn't even mentioned as a feature and that might have been because one the focus was on googling email (this is pre-gmail too) and two because the urls were pretty damm ugly. If I understood Java, I would rewrite this part of the application and give it nice clean urls.

Zoe was well ahead of the curve and we're still not even there yet. Stowe Boyd got me thinking about Gabriel García Márquez's quote Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life. I like the idea that I can sometimes share some aspects of my inbox with other people. I also like the idea of being able to delicious some of the stuff I get sent. There are lots of issues around permanence, but of Zoe us just pointing the way. I can see Google adding permalinks to Gmail in the future but there needs to be a killer reason for the change. Right now I can't quite work out exactly what that is/will be.

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Wired UK, a coffee table magazine for men?

Apr 24

Posted by admin in design-and-ideas | View Comments

So I've finally read through most of Wired UK's launch issue and as you can see its sitting on my coffee table along with some other bits and pieces. Rather that going into a detailed review about the magazine I thought I'd pull up a couple of other blogs which sum up my thoughts.

Maz Hardey of the girlygeekdom blog makes a really good point that Wired UK is made for men. What is up with that? The adverts are all very much like you'd see in GQ magazine and there's little to no input from woman writers.

Skip to the front of Wired (P.15) and the 05.09 Contributors Page, of the six main contributors, one, Susan Greeenfield (Baroness no less), is the pioneer of content contributed by women. I am not suggesting that Wired is all male-to-male content. Far from it. UK Wired is, in my opinion, far better than its US counterpart in the publication of balanced, interesting and satisfyingly technology divulgent coverage. But then I flick back again through the magazine and the if the masculine led written word doesn't hit you, the masculine emphasis of marketing and advertisement will. TagHeur watch here, Sony Bravia with football coverage there, Jaguar where 'the thrill lasts much longer' and Tom Ford 'for men' set the tone for the First Edition.

A lot of wired UK is republished american articles with some bits and pieces from its UK editors. And you can tell, for example the review of folding backs without the most popular folding bike in the UK? Whoops!? Simon Waldman's lid lifting is points out mistakes like this one is generally a very interesting and worthy read, even if its slightly bias being from the guardian and all that. Simons's point about iplayer is well…. interesting. Obviously it would be foolish for me to comment.

The front cover carries the strapline “How the iPlayer saved the BBC”. Sounds interesting. The headline to what is flagged a “Wired investigation” is “The man who saved the BBC” (that's a big difference) with a picture of Anthony Rose “the renegade South African licensed to upgrade the BBC”. Now, I happen to know that Rose is the BBC's head of digital media technology (because I looked it up on Google), but I've read the piece three times now, and asked someone sitting next to me to read it, and I'm 99% certain they don't actually mention his job title in the piece.

I realise details such as job titles can probably be filed under “Tired” – but it matters, if you are telling a story about how something happened in a business. It's one thing if the chief executive makes it happen, another if it's the marketing director and another if it's the security guard.

And anyway, at least half of the piece is about Ashley Highfield. Why not chuck in Erik Huggers and call it the men who saved the BBC. And while we're at it – please could you specify exactly how it has saved the BBC? Like, it would have had to shut down without it?

So with all my moaning about the magazine, will I be buying the next one? Well yes, its a neat coffee table magazine. Full of super styled graphics, overblown photos and enough substance to pick up and read for 5mins.or so. Everyone whos come over so far has picked it up off the coffee table and had a flick through it. So between buying some gadget mag like T3/Stuff, a men's fashion mag like GQ or a lads mag like Nuts, Zoo or whatever else. I do pick Wired UK. But there is a question of do I really need to buy a magazine at all?

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AdaLovelaceDay09: Marie-Louise von Franz

Mar 24

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I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same…

That's how it started a, Suw Charman-Anderson's vision to do something special for Ada Lovelace day has become huge with a sign up rate and more being added still a few days before.

Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers (mother and daughter) created the psychological test better known as the MBTI (Myers Briggs type indicator). Although not exactly in the technology field, this has a profound effect on the technology field and this was also a field run by super intelligent males such as Sigman Freud and Carl Jung. However the lesser known story is Carl Jung had a lab partner called Marie-Louise von Franz. It was Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz's work which Katharine Briggs read and studied then passed on to her daughter Isabel Briggs. Marie-Louise later worked with Carl Jungs friend Barbara Hannah, who Carl Jung actual set up together. She later went on to publish first the mathematical structure of DNA and a series of essays, books and videos. I found out about Marie-Louise by accident while reading Into the Dream by William Sleator which sounded like a film I watched sometime later called The way of the Dream. Marie-Louise's intelligence pushed her forward and although not the only woman drawn to Jung, she was the only one not to have a affair or get mixed up in all that. Instead she worked hard and paved her own way, linking psychology and physics. Before she died she lectured all around the western world and became known for her own thoughts and theories instead of Jung's. Shes not as well as known as than Myers-Briggs but her influence in psychology has been huge, and its great to see hard work pay off.

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Hearing the Bristolian accent in Skins

Jan 24

Posted by admin in just-plain-life | View Comments

Pandora

Yes I know Skins is made for 30 somethings who want to believe a teenagers life in 2009 is just like this. But you know what I kind of like it. Part of my enjoyment is it being set in Bristol and boy oh boy those 'cut your throat down after a bottle of cider at chasers' accents. Yes there really rough and some very ropey but they do remind me of home, specially now living in Manchester.

What I love about the Bristolian dialect is the interesting usage of words such as.

  • A'write me Lover.
  • Right you are my love.
  • Gurt lush
  • Smittin

There's a shop in Bristol where you can buy T-shirts with the interesting phrases on it. Actually looking at Wikipedia.

A dialect of English is spoken by some Bristol inhabitants, known colloquially as Bristolian, or even more colloquially as “Bristle” or “Brizzle”. Bristol is the only large English city with a rhotic accent, in which the r in words like car is pronounced. The unusual feature of this dialect, unique to Bristol, is the Bristol L (or terminal L), in which an L sound is appended to words that end in an 'a' or 'o'.Thus “area” becomes “areal”, etc. This is believed to be how the city's name evolved from Brycgstow to have a final 'L' sound: Bristol. Further Bristolian linguistic features are the addition of a superfluous “to” in questions relating to direction or orientation (a feature also common to the coastal towns of South Wales), or using “to” instead of “at”; and using male pronouns “he”, “him” instead of “it”. For example, “Where's that?” would be phrased as “Where's he to?”, a structure exported to Newfoundland English.

Stanley Ellis, a dialect researcher, found that many of the dialect words in the Filton area were linked to work in the aerospace industry. He described this as “a cranky, crazy, crab-apple tree of language and with the sharpest, juiciest flavour that I've heard for a long time”

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