Xbox media centre in the washington post

I hate it when newspapers make you signup to read content, so I'm going to post most of the piece up. If you want to read the whole thing this is the URL you need. I logged in with washingtonpost@dodgeit.com password nHWLDb8J. It may have changed when you read this so check the dodgeit mail account here. I think its quite good to see a quite balanced view on a open source project like XBMC from the large newspapers. Even if its in there Technews section. Yes I know Firefox and others have been covered to death, but XBMC is something very different. Officially there are not even any compiled binaries so you have to build it yourself from the sourcecode or of course wait till someone builds it and releases it on the net.

The most successful such effort may be XboxMediaCenter, or XBMC. This free program (www.xboxmediacenter.com) lets an Xbox connect to a wired or wireless home network and perform many more media-sharing tricks than Microsoft's Extender add-on allows.

Those kinds of capabilities normally require spending $250 or more for a separate wireless media receiver from such firms as D-Link Systems Inc., SlimDevices Inc. and Roku LLC.

For software created by hobbyists in their spare time, XBMC is surprisingly capable. As a music box, it plays a wide variety of music, including Web radio broadcasts as well as MP3, Windows Media, AAC, RealAudio and many other file types — excluding the copy-restricted files sold at such stores as iTunes, Wal-Mart and Napster. Pop a CD into your Xbox, and XBMC can even copy its tracks to the Xbox's hard drive in the format of your choice.

If you use Apple's iTunes, XBMC ties into that program's own sharing feature, providing access to all of your custom playlists.

Switching to video, XBMC supports an equally broad range of computer formats, including MPEG-4, DivX, QuickTime and RealVideo. If you have a ReplayTV digital video recorder on your home network, this software can even stream recorded shows from it for watching on the TV plugged into the Xbox. But although XBMC can play DVD movies, it can't display their menu screens. If you have a computer monitor or high-definition TV connected to the Xbox with the right cables, this software will also upgrade the Xbox's video output to high-definition resolutions.

Last, you can plug a standard computer keyboard and mouse into an XBMC-endowed Xbox (after you plug a $10 adapter into the Xbox's controller port) and browse a limited menu of Web content — not much more than weather forecasts and Internet Movie Database lookups — on your TV.

This program isn't for the technologically faint of heart, though. You can't load XBMC on a standard Xbox — you must modify one to accept this new program, either by soldering or plugging in a new chip inside the case or patching its software through arcane routines.

Such an Xbox “mod,” if you don't perform it yourself, will cost from $50 to $100 when done by a firm such as FriendTech Computer Ltd. (www.friendtech.com) or the private individuals who market the service on local forums such as Craigslist (www.craigslist.org).

More to the point, it will void the Xbox's warranty. Subscribers to Microsoft's Xbox Live service may also find themselves banned from it if their modified machines are detected by Microsoft's servers.

The company has frowned on these adaptations in part because they are often used to play pirated copies of games. “Microsoft investigates and makes case-by-case determinations as to whether specific mod chips enable piracy,” said Molly O'Donnell, a Microsoft spokeswoman.

That risk, however, hasn't discouraged Xbox tinkerers from experimenting. Among other odd achievements, they've managed to craft multiple Xbox versions of the Linux operating system that turn an Xbox into a full Internet PC. And for those who just want to play video games on an Xbox, another add-on lets it play titles for older game consoles such as the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo.

I would say its pretty fair wouldnt you say? Shame there were no pictures because its a thing of beautiful. This also reminds me that I should take some more pictures of the latest builds of XBMC

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Bluetooth vs FM Radio headphones

I was talking to Dave today and was mentioning Apple's new powerbooks which now come with Bluetooth 2.0. The idea is to make streaming audio to bluetooth headphones much higher quality, which makes sense but why they jumped from 1.2 to 2.0 who knows. I think its just going to add a whole load of confusion to the market. Anyhow, Dave was not convinced bluetooth headphones were the way to go. He offer the alternative of FM headphones. At first I kinda of dismissed it but now I'm thinking there pretty damm cheap and last a long time in battery life when compared to bluetooth headphones. Also using a FM Transmiter (which is still not sold in the UK!) its really easy to use the same pair of headphones anywhere. For example at work it would be easy to plug in my FM transmiter and use a small pair of FM headphones or headphones attached to one of those cheap FM radios to listen to my music wirefree and anywhere within 50meters. Its even better if you have one of the phones with a FM radio built in. Maybe Dave is right about this, for now while Bluetooth evolves in this area at least.

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Trackback Spam, easily solved?

Seems cubicgarden is actually getting its first hit of trackback spam. People never ever believe me when I say cubicgarden actually gets a reasonable amount of readers (mainly through the rss) but this proves its easy to find and also a target for spam bots. its really easily solved, but I'm going to hold off for a bit to see how this trackback spamming progresses. I could use the open proxy moderation plugin which is pretty harsh or the Trackback moderation plugin. Someone once mentioned somewhere that most spam bots dont leave any referer, so maybe someone will build a plugin for blojsom which ignores trackbacks without a referer, if thats actually possible?

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CSS 2 XML idea

At work recently, we've been thinking about managing CSS. It may sound quite a simple task but actually we have 43+ stylesheets and there all slightly different. They've been managed and edited by different people and we've been keeping it all logged in some kind of spreadsheet. Not great, but it will do. Well anyway i'm doing some tidying up and doing some comparisons between different styles. And I started to think about how to go about this when I thought wouldn't this be so much easier if it was all structured content? (Well yes CSS is structured but not in a form where I can consume it with XML tools)

After a couple mins of conversation with work friends, Tom mentioned a Perl Lib which could read CSS. Which lead to the conclusion that once in Perl, it would be easily serialized into XML where I could do all manner of analysis, charting and what ever else we choose to do with it. But wait it doesn't stop there, it not only allows us to manage CSS but also generate CSS using XSL. Pretty useful I would say. Anyway, I've convinced everyone involved we should open source the Perl code, XML schema and idea for anyone to use. So I'll drop some links in once we got something going… I'm highly suprised no one had already done this and opened into on to the web, I would love to see a Cocoon reader for CSS.

And at long last everything you need to get started… Thanks Tom for the great work, comments to the usual place

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Ravensbourne’s Copyright vs Community videos on Archive.org

By:non-commercialshare-alike

I have finally put the copyright vs community videos from May 2004 on Archive.org under a creative commons licence. These go with the audio versions I added a while. I have to say a big sorry to Fravia because our 2nd DV Cam kept auto switching off because we were recording over firewire not on to DV Tape. The rest of the Videos are not effected because we were able to change the camera placements after Fravia's talk. I'm hoping to upload his first lecture in 2003 to make up for this mistake. Anyway, apologies over here are the videos which as of 0120 GMT are not available but
Verification and derivations have been completed. Now waiting for a curator to approve the recordings.

Copyright vs Community: with Fravia
Copyright vs Community: in the age of computer networks by Richard M Stallman
Copyright vs Community: with Cory Doctorow

While searching around, I also found Tom's notes on the same lectures. The certainly complete, corydoctorow and richardstallman in plain text.
This also serves as a very good time to remind myself to change the cubicgarden.com/copyright site.

Update about Cory Doctorow's lecture video. I sent a email to Cory a while ago when I first posted the videos up, and just had a look at the video and saw the batting average is at 34.11% with 411 downloads since 4 days ago. So I had a look around the blogosphere and saw who was talking about it. Results from blogdigger by link, Technorati by links to the BoingBoing post. Some highlights of what I've found. Corante's Donna Wentworth picked up on it for Copyfight, which I read all the time but somehow missed. Weird how people are just copying the text directly, keep seeing thanks Ian! which freaks me out a little… shame its not linking directly to this post…

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iTunes to ipaq

WiFiTunes in action

I'm still not very happy with using iTunes but with the DAAP support and Winamp coming to a slow end I'm forced to use it. I thought it was pretty cool that the xbox media centre supported DAAP, but hot on the heals of that comes WiFiTunes which is still in alpha but is GPL'ed. Yes it doesnt support AAC but I would never encode my stuff as AAC, but I can understand why this would put some people off who have whole playlists of AAC's. Its a real shame I cant use it at work because the Wifi is locked down. Oh link came from pocketpcthoughts. I did some experimenting in the office today with Toms Mac laptop, and it works quite well. Theres little controls, so once its playing its playing and so you cant jump around the music file yet! But it will play all the playlists no problem (even recently played and top rated) and the delay in connecting is small, like 5secs maximum over 802.11b. One thing we did discover, is the wifitunes doesnt seem to register as a user, so if you shutdown itunes you dont get the usual prompt asking if you want to boot other users off. Still very usable for a alpha.

It certainly beats using a streaming server setup to listen to music or podcasts in the bathroom without copying the file to SD first. Talking of which, My house is fully FM tuned using the iTrip style FM Transmiters which I believe are still not available in the UK. My main problem is the signal doesnt reach past the kitchen which is a bit of a pain. Anyway, I hooked it all up so I can now listen to something on the FM signal and choose another thing in the living room. Real multiple room audio, so Sarah can listen to the hits of the 80's in the bedroom or/and kitchen while I enjoy the sounds of Armin Van Buuren. 88.5 if you ever go past my house and are interested in what we may be liistening to…

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High Definition and Ultra Definition

I went to the Video Forum 2005 exhibition yesterday, it was pretty boring but I did catch the BBC HD presentation which gave me a little to think about.

The first point which hit was the thought of using digital still cameras to create HDTV clips. Let me explain, my digital camera creates pictures of 4.33 megapixels which is about 2272 x 1704. Other resolutions bellow that are 2048 x 1536, 1600 x 1200, 1280 x 960, 1024 x 768 and of course 640 x 480. The first two (2272 x 1704 and 2048 x 1536) could easily beat the highest resolution of HDTV which is 1920 x 1200 progressive. So all you need to do is take 25 pictures or even 50 pictures of the scene at these resolutions and crop or reszie them to 1920 x 1200 then join them together at 25/50 frames a second to create the clip. Only 2 major problems, most digital cameras dont have native support for the 16:9 widescreen format we enjoy in the UK and also the biggest problem. Its going to be hell taking 25 or even 50 shots a second to create a short clip. At these resolutions a attached CF card would quickly fill up and you would need some way to get the information off quickly. Anyway this method is ideal for things that dont move much aka skies and landscapes (timelapse clips). Obviously this is not new to others
, who already do HDTV quality versions. The other thing I was thinking was that you could easily achive the lower quality HDTV resolutions (480p/i and 720p/i) on a digital camera and even on a good mobile phone! My Sanyo's 1.33mpx camera is able to do 1280 x 960. Yes the CCD and lens is bad but its possible with enough time and lots of editing.
By the way Andy King also stressed the need for real digital surround sound in HDTV recordings, which doesnt seem to bother alot of the boradcasters at the moment.

And I was also alerted to the successor to HDTV which is called UHDV. Here is the camera shot I took after the presentation by Andy King from BBC HD. Let me highlight the specs, if you dont want to look at the picture.
7680 x 4320 resolution, it will be 16 times higher than HDTV and creates a 32 mega pixel image for each frame! Its also meant to run at 60 frames a second! They also havent forgotten the surround sound. Shifting to a 22.2 Surround Sound setup. Which is 10 at ear level (suspect this will be the new rumoured Dolby 10.1 or 12.1 standard), 9 above and 3 below ear level plus 2 subs.

If you do the maths, all those sound channels and image pixels add up to a massive amount of data.

In test, an 18-minute UHDV video consumed 3.5TBs of storage (equivalent to about 750 DVD’s). The data was transmitted over 16 channels at a total rate of 24 Gb/s per second, thousands of times faster than a typical DSL connection.

By the way its been talked about on slashdot twice now.

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Ravensbourne’s Copyright vs Community videos on Archive.org

By:non-commercialshare-alike

I have finally put the copyright vs community videos from May 2004 on Archive.org under a creative commons licence. These go with the audio versions I added a while. I have to say a big sorry to Fravia because our 2nd DV Cam kept auto switching off because we were recording over firewire not on to DV Tape. The rest of the Videos are not effected because we were able to change the camera placements after Fravia's talk. I'm hoping to upload his first lecture in 2003 to make up for this mistake. Anyway, apologies over here are the videos which as of 0120 GMT are not available but
Verification and derivations have been completed. Now waiting for a curator to approve the recordings.

Copyright vs Community: with Fravia
Copyright vs Community: in the age of computer networks by Richard M Stallman
Copyright vs Community: with Cory Doctorow

While searching around, I also found Tom's notes on the same lectures. The certainly complete, corydoctorow and richardstallman in plain text.
This also serves as a very good time to remind myself to change the cubicgarden.com/copyright site.

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RSS 1.1 draft available now

As mentioned in few places including Sam Ruby, Miscoranda and Cafe con Leche. There is a draft version of RSS 1.1 available on a creative commons licence. The official specification is a bugfix rather than a real change. My own feelings are the same as Elliotte except of course the very end…

As if RSS 0.9, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, and 2.0 weren't enough to deal with, now there's RSS 1.1. I think the authors are missing the forest for the trees here. While there are some small improvements in RSS 1.1 relative to RSS 1.0 (which is a completely different beast than RSS 0.9x and RSS 2.0), they are simply not outweighed by the cost of expanding market confusion and incompatibility. Oh well, maybe if we're lucky, this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and convinces the world to just move forwad to ATOM leaving RSS in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

Oh thers already a RSS Feed validator and RSS 1.0 to 1.1 converter.

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iPodder 2.0 beta vs blogmatrix

Via Adam Curry. There is a new version of iPodder lemon edition. Its in beta but looks like a massive improvement on the old classic ipodder 1.14. There are some screenshots of the windows and mac versions here. I have downloaded the beta which is a 10.5 meg by the way… I dont know if I will try it out because I have recently switched over to using blogmatrix jager for both my rss reading and podcasting. I was tempted with Sparks! too but I installed it at work and got fed up with the lack of rss reading at the time. Now maybe a good time to upgrade?

Anyway, I may see what new in ipodder 2.0 and compare the features with Jager, if Jager wins I'll donate some money for sure, specially if the delicious linkage is going to do something like AmphetaRate, smartmobs sums it up. Maybe this could kill Digg which I like but dont have time to mess with, plus I'm using del.icio.us all the time now, so I'm glad to hear blogmatrix are using del.icio.us. Talking of Blogmatrix heres somethings which i'm crying out for in rss readers generally.

Ok subscriptions! What on earth are developers thinking about? Yes you can import and export OPML 1.1 great but what about synchronisation? Jager does sync subscriptions but you only have 2 options. FTP and bloglines. I dont have a FTP server running and really really dont want to go down that route just to keep my ipaq, laptop plus workstation at home and work all sync'ed but it looks like I may have to. The other option of using bloglines is good and I'm at the moment trying to remember my password for my old bloglines account. I really dont want to loose the cubicgarden username. Anyway back to jager, please please include a webdav option so anyone with a mac and idisk can use that for storage of opml. Another thing which my pocketRSS and RSSOwl do which I have not yet found is a real subscription method. All my OPML is online and I usually add RSS feeds to the OPML directly using Webdav or locally then get pocketRSS to update the subscription which pulls in all the new RSS feeds without effecting the others already in place. This also works in RSSOWL if you set it up correctly however there thinking of removing the feature in favour of the jager ideas. Updating the OPML in Jager seems to involve unsubscribing to all the feeds which is easy but then dragging the OPML back in again. Yuk!
Another ignoying thing for me, is there any podcast software which supports RSS 1.0 enclosures? I kinda of expect with Danny Ayers post it would start to happen.

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The service at the wireless point

I was listening to Dana Blankenhorn on The Impacts of Persistent Distributed IT at Accelerating Change. He suggests that we do not have a platform for this decade and that wireless (wimax and wifi) could be it. He states the simple but actually quite obvious fact that we use wireless to access the internet. So everyone is cramming the pipe beyond the access point and not using the actual wireless in ways we are only just starting to see.

And honestly it all makes sense. Wireless has effective bandwidth from 3meg (802.11b) to 100meg (WiMax 802.16). Why not use the wireless point as a platform? Dana suggests Linux is the key for this and he's not wrong. For example, I saw this linksys wireless router ages ago which can be hacked to put linux on it. Yes thats great but wheres the use in just having linux on it? Yes I know you could install anything you like on it but besides a webserver I've seen little else. Till a while ago when the Xlink guys released Xlink Kai station for the WRT54G. Which means you can route traffic for playing multiple player games on the free xlink network with just a xbox and one of these. (yes i have talked about it before, but highlighting whats possible when you think about wireless as a platform).
Yes limited example but a interesting none the less. I would like to see zeroconf aka rendezvous better known as multicast dns services happening at the wireless level. I mean its ideal because the automatic discovery nature makes roaming around wireless points a joy. And before I go, lets not limit wireless to one point. With Mesh networking it should be simple to extend the range and the users to the service. Lets also not forget machine to machine services would benefit from mesh technologies.

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Windows 2000 reinstall list

Ok I didnt give up, I just got a point where I had to make a decision. Yep thats right, I'm back to using Windows on my main workstation. Its dual bootable with Hard drive installed Knoppix /images/emoticons/laugh.gifebian) but honestly its pretty messed up and almost unrecoverable. Anyway, I decided that I didnt want to go back to Windows XP Pro just yet so installed a old version of Windows 2000. And spent the next few days installing this huge list… Inspired by Bill de Hora

Zone Alarm
Windows 2000 Service Pack 4
Windows 2000 updates
DirectX 9b
Tons of Hardware Drivers
Java 1.42_06 (was tempted to install 1.5)
AVG
PSI
Firefox
Thunderbird
Wbloggar
BlogMatrix Jager
iTunes
Winrar
Azureus
FFmpeg
VLC
ActiveSync
Audacity
Quicktime
GIMP
DVD Shrink
DVD Decrypter
Mpeg2Schnitt
Windows Mediaplayer
DrDivx
Audioscrobbler plugin for iTunes
Irfanview
Nero
CCXstream
Skype
KeePass
Partition Magic
Acrobat Reader
Xlink Kai Evolution
Ad Aware
Open Office
Xmpeg
Inkscape
XMLSpy
Putty
WinSCP
Resin
Smart FTP

What I'll be installing soon…
Icecast server
Zoe
Textpad or Uedit
Opera
Winamp
Mozilla SVG build
SDP
Matroska Pack
Atomix Mp3 or Virtual DJ
BS player
Blogwave
Spike
VNC
Remote Desktop server/client

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The Evolving Personalized Information Construct

Its back again, freaky Epic future. Just in case you missed it before, its about the future of news media and is a look back from 2014 where the New York Times has gone offline and Google is the number one news provider. All presented in a Museum kiosk style.

But in addition to my post last time. This weeks show web talk show has a detailed discussion around the ideas in the flash movie, as well as the audio of the movie. Well worth the 43mins of listening. Links to the Windows and Real Streams as well as Mp3 download.

Even though the movie is a work of fiction, its actually very freaky and not that far fetched. I mean a place where every participates is something the internet community has been pushing for quite a while. However the devil is in the detail, participating should always be something you choose to do, not just automaticly pushed into. Some interesting points in the movie, which I wanted to talk about more.

Googlezon finally checkmates Microsoft with features the software giant cannot match. Using a new algorithm, Googlezon�s computers construct news stories dynamically, stripping sentences and facts from all content sources and recombining them. The computer writes a news story for every user.

Even though this is very hard to imagine in practice, I can see how this is possible if were expecting even more structure news content. The set of technologies which help make this ver possible is XPointer, Xlink and Xbase. With Xpointer for example, it would be easy to pull paragraphs of a certain criteria out of a xml stream and recombine them into something more interesting, with a different slant or even out of context. Talk about disruptive technology?

2006 � Google combines all of its services – TiVo, Blogger, GMail, GoogleNews and all of its searches into the Google Grid, a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds. Always online, accessible from anywhere. Each user selects her own level of privacy. She can store her content securely on the Google Grid, or publish it for all to see. It has never been easier for anyone, everyone to create as well as consume media.

Dont even need to go into depth with this one, just look at what Gmail has done to webmail. There were lots of concerns for privicy but it seems google have got away with it. Blogger is another stratagic placeholder for the googlegrid. Microsoft are really playing catchup just launching msnspaces recently.

The �Evolving Personalized Information Construct� is the system by which our sprawling, chaotic mediascape is filtered, ordered and delivered. Everyone contributes now � from blog entries, to phone-cam images, to video reports, to full investigations. Many people get paid too � a tiny cut of Googlezon�s immense advertising revenue, proportional to the popularity of their contributions.

Amazon and Google have been in the micro advertising game for so long now, people actually make a ok amount of money off google and amazon advertising. Honestly they may have saved the online advertising world back in 2001 with there simple and effective adsense and amazon associates thing.

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At long last, a new style for the garden…

Just incase your one of the 50% who read cubicgarden.com through RSS only, you might have missed the style and layout change of cubicgarden.com. I've adopted the popular Asual theme and tweaked it into something more tasty for myself. As I write this, I am not finished yet. I need change the fonts and the sizes to fit with the cheq background. I'm also planning print and presentation stylesheets for myself, so I can easily do a presentation of an idea from my own blog entries. I'm hoping to push out a stylesheet switcher for those who do not use Firefox or Opera browser. So at least you can change the background to something more readable (sorry I have excellent 20/20 vision and can read off the cheq without a problem). This also gives me a chance to get much more creative with CSS and maybe play with Aural stylesheets which should work in Opera 8? Talking of which, its interesting Opera is following Apple by trying to win over the education market first.

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Some new manifestos….

A couple of manifestos which I've been reading recently…

From the gaping void blog

[The ChangeThis blurb:] “You've read the Cluetrain, now Hugh MacLeod brings you The Hughtrain. A manifesto on brands, blogs, and the now of advertising and marketing.”

P2P manifesto Via Howard Rheingold's Smartmobs.com

P2P is unstoppable
P2P is positive for companies
P2P is positive for the market
P2P is good for users

All the readers can create their own P2P Manifesto, free to edit this original P2P manifesto.

The idea is to then collect on the blog all the different P2P Manifesto's releases, to create a good knowledge base point about P2P issues.

Howard Rheingold's own Mobile and Open: A Manifesto

Only a cockeyed optimist would forecast an open, user-driven, entrepreneurial future for the mobile Internet. This should not prevent us from trying, however. Sometimes, envisioning the way things ought to be can inspire people to work at making it that way. That's what manifestos are for.

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