The Media Player war just got hotter

To be honest when ever I see my friends Popcorn Hour box, I can’t help but laugh a little. The interface to the Popcorn Hour Box is just hellish and although it does technically provide a experience close to XBMC and others, it was never a real runner. It always felt like it had been beaten with a truly ugly stick then left out to die. Even the name Popcorn Hour Media Tank, conjured ideas of something ugly as sin.

Well finally the design message has gotten through and Popcorn Hour has now spawned off the PopBox, which actually to me looks like a direct rip from Boxee Alpha to tell the truth, but looks far better than its previous outings.

The Popbox also now supports Apps (is there anyone who doesn’t) But instead of adopting someone elses approach, they have decided to build there own platform called DAVID. Hummm, sounds like a bad idea personally. Anyway the Popbox is going to be closer to 100 dollars that Boxee Box which is 200 dollars.

How ever thats not where it ends. I heard today that not only is the Boxee box coming out in maybe March but also you can buy the RF remote by its self. Which means someone like myself who has a custom box running boxee or xbmc can also benefit from the slick Boxee remote.

Nice you say, but there more. Up till now theres been this category of media players who just do streaming and nothing else. Roku is one and a popular other is Vudu. You connect them up and pay a subscription for like a VOD experience over your internet. Well Boxee just announced support for paid content. If content producers can make this revenue model work, it would be great. I do wonder however if that means we’ll see DRM content in Boxee soon? Really hope not…

Boxee is now my mediaplayer while at work

Boxee on the desktop

I’ve been playing with the beta version of Boxee and I’m more and more enjoying it. During work, its got the perfect interface for playing back tunes but I also discover I could also connect to my shares at home easily using Hamachi VPN. Simply pop in the ip address of your remote machine and thats it. Because Hamachi uses a 5.x.x.x address, Boxee connects and the locally running Hamachi takes over the connection. Not only that, because Hamachi’s central server is only used to connect the two points, all traffic is routed as directly as possible. Aka the lag time I’m getting is super low due to the 1meg upstream link at home and super fast connection at work. Fast enough to even play some of films if I really wanted to. I also suspect when away off site I can use my 3g/HSDPA connection to do the same with no changes to Hamachi or Boxee.

Boxee with Hamachi VPN

I know a lot of people don’t like Hamachi but to be fair I run it on almost every machine I own and enjoy how simple it makes VPN and tunneling. I’ve still had no luck with L2L: layer two but yet to try Wippen which I hear is the truly open version of Hamachi.

I could use XBMC to do the same but I actually prefer boxee’s interface for my laptop and xbmc’s for large displays. Also the social features in Boxee means if I quickly hear a tune I like or something, within a few clicks its shared and i’m back to work again. Now if only mix podcasts came with tracks…

Converting posts from Blojsom/WordPress to Moveabletype

I had to write this because for weeks now I’ve been trying to convert blog entries between different blogging services.

The first one was converting Blojsom to WordPress, but this wasn’t too bad because both work around the RSS 2.0 format. Getting the comments, tags, metadata out and into the rss 2.0 feed was a real pain and I’m convinced I dropped a load of trackbacks and pingbacks in the process. This is another reason why I started using Disqus for all my comments.

The harder task was moving blog entries from WordPress to MoveableType. Yes I expect most of you are wondering why I would move from a far superior system to something which most people left in the dirt ages ago. Well unfortunately we still use MT on the bbc.co.uk/blogs platform and that means as backstage moves to the official blog platform, some mug had to find a way to down convert to MT 4.1 which only imports/exports in this crazy text only format.

So after lots of looking around, I finally found a XSL which I modified to do the job from a stripped down WordPress WXR file (RSS2.0 with lots of WP namespaces stuff). Its important that you strip down the WXR file as it might not be valid XML, so no XSL transform is going to work. I also took a bit of time to write a XSL to remove most of the namespaces elements or convert them into a more valid RSS 2.0 element. You can do the same with lots of finds and replaces, so I won’t post the simple XSL.

Hopefully this will save others a lot of time in the future, if your faced with the same problem.

Fake passport or over sensitive policing?

I tweeted at 19:33, 15th Jan from Amsterdam Airport – Sitting in airport police in amsterdam airport, they think my passport is faked

I had come back from Amsterdam after giving a talk at Follow the Money conference about BBC Backstage, Everthing was going well and I had plenty of time to catch up with some of the CES coverage using Boxee but when I got to passport control things seemed to be taking too long to look at my passport. About 10 people passed me on the other booth while I was standing there watching this police officer messing with a small microscope type thing. I was prepared for the questioning I usually only get at flights into Chicago O’Hare. But it never happened. Instead someone else came to the booth and the agents talked for a second in dutch, then the first one came out of the booth and gestured for me to follow him into a room less that 5 meters away.

Yep its one of those backrooms where theres people coming in and out. Massive mirror you just know isn’t a mirror, I was sure it was a 2 way mirror or I was being paranoid. When i sat down there was a woman who had gotten a new passport and something was missing from it. Not sure but a phone call later, she was up and out of the room. I waited while 2 officers looked over my passport, one with a microscope. After a while they left it on the table. A new guy came in from eastern europe and sat next to me. His passport also was suspect I assumed.

Anyway after about 30mins, we both get moved to a new location, I swear it was on the opposite side of the airport for another sit down for another 30mins while a 3rd officer looks at the passport under some machine. The officer walking us down said it was quicker to go down there, than send my passport down there and wait for it to come back. After a while of waiting it was decided that maybe the passport was fine and that the RFID tag might be a little faulty or something. Those rfid chips in passports are bull I was told I was free to go but I should follow the officer back through the back way to make the plane.

The trek to the gate was fast and frantic. They had left me about 20mins before the airplane closes its door which would be fine if I was super fit like these dutch officers. Being marched down to my gate so I don’t miss my plane. This airport feels like 10 miles long, but I’m out and coming home

It was certainly a struggle keeping up through the miles of tunnels and doors. I quickly grabbed a few gifts in the shop and boarded the plane back home. Only to be stuck in a queue for 50mins on the UK side because of new passport checks… Geez, I slept well that night…

A Rant About Women by Clay Shirky

A Pensive Clay Shirky

If you’ve not been following the heat/blowback from Clay Shirky’s rant about woman then its worth reading and following some of the strongly formatted comments which follow.

Personally I see what Clay is trying to say, but I don’t think its written as elegantly as he was thinking. That or he’d felt like causing a bit of a storm on the internet for a while. I wanted to pick up on two comments which sum up my thoughts…

Simon St.Laurent says:

There are two basic problems with this piece.

First, telling other people that the way to fix their problems is by being more like you is rarely a good strategy. It might work one-on-one occasionally, but the larger the cultural boundary this approach tries to cross, the less likely it is to produce much besides sparks.

Second, the behavior prescribed is behavior that a lot of us – men included – would like to see reduced rather than increased, punished rather than rewarded. That the first two examples both involved telling lies, however white they might seem from this perspective, doesn’t help make the case.

Stepping back and asking about how people listen seems to me a lot more likely to work than telling people they need to change how they talk.

There is a certainly amount of arrogance is asking someone to be more like yourself… I certainly don’t like it.

Marcus Brody says:

You’ve got the problem backwards. It isn’t that more women (and men) should act like hierarchical assholes, it’s that those assessing performance shouldn’t be so lazy that they only notice assholes. Your argument boils down to: people who assess performance are lazy and don’t bother to think critically so they are easily swayed by false aggrandizement. If you want to change the assessors opinions you should lie because the assessors don’t put in the effort to tell the difference between falsehoods and reality.

And you know what, most assessors are lazy, so lying does pay off. The call to action, though, shouldn’t be for more lying, but rather, less indolence on the part of those who are in a position to judge others.

Unfortunately for Clay, your starting to see this type of headline come up – Shirky: Women Need to Strap On Some Balls . Geez, wonder how long it took to create that headline…

Storage+Wifi+Server = Air stash

Air stash prouct

I’ve always wanted something like Airstash but not using Wifi, instead I’d personally prefer Bluetooth. Air stash is basically a file server which you can carry around with you. You throw in a SD card full of content, power it up and it will serve over wifi the contents to anyone connected over wifi.

Where I think they have gone wrong is tieing it to iphones/ipod touches via a browser interface and using wifi. Bluetooth has a profile for file servicing which works really well once connected and heck if your going to use wifi why not allow a simple samba share instead?

Shame, I would have loved to have had one.

Manchester Werewolf starts again: Wednesday 3rd February

Werewolf Manchester (March)

Its that time to look for those shifty feet and false smiles, because Manchester’s Werewolf chapter is back in town (Facebook group).

February 3, 2010 7 – 11pm : Manchester Werewolf Chapter at Pure Space, 11-13 New Wakefield Street, Manchester

Be part of the game, beginners to pros its all good fun. Werewolf is a game that takes place in a small village which is haunted by werewolves. Each player is secretly assigned a role – Werewolf, Villager, or Seer (a special Villager). There is also a Moderator player who controls the flow of the game. The game alternates between night and day phases. At night, the Werewolves secretly choose a Villager to kill. Also, the Seer (if still alive) asks whether another player is a Werewolf or not. During the day, the Villager who was killed is revealed and is out of the game. The remaining Villagers then vote on the player they suspect is a Werewolf. That player reveals his/her role and is out of the game. Werewolves win when there are an equal number of Villagers and Werewolves. Villagers win when they have killed all Werewolves. Werewolf is a social game that requires no equipment to play, and can accommodate almost any large group of players. For more information about the game

Android 2.0.1 Eclair running on my HTC Blackstone (Touch HD)

Those guys on the XDA developers are seriously geniuses, Android 1.6 is working and very stable it seems on most of the windows mobile phones including my HTC Touch HD (blackstone). But who wants 1.6 when 2.0 is available? Well thats working too now…

Whats not working….Bluetooth. GPS and both Cameras. But everything else works!

I followed this simple guide and only hit a problem with my new 8 gig Micro SD card which I had to swap for a old 1gig Micro SD card which has been floating around in my bag for ever.

Pictures & Videos will follow soon…

Microsoft Joins W3C’s Scalable Vector Graphics Effort

Brendan sent me this one last week, shocking news that Microsoft are joining the SVG working group. To be honest I never thought it would ever happen but hell has somewhat frozen over.

“Microsoft is joining the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C’s) Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group. The company announced its aim of improving future versions of the W3C’s scalable vector graphics (SVG) recommendation, currently at version 1.1. The nonprofit W3C’s SVG recommendation is a document that describes two-dimensional graphics processing using XML. The technology can be used for Web graphics, animation and user interfaces…

Lately, Microsoft has been leaning more toward standards compliance with its browser, especially with IE 8, which still lacks native SVG support. In particular, Microsoft contributed test cases to the W3C’s working group on cascading style sheets as it developed IE 8. In a statement, Microsoft suggested it plans to do more such work with the W3C: ‘Making the Web easier for developers continues to be important and we will continue to contribute to development of HTML5, along with other popular Web standards; and we bring a unique value—the rigor of modern software engineering to the process.

I am getting a little worried about SVG, as a lot of people are pushing not just Flash but VML and Canvas in front of SVG. Its incredible how little people know about SVG and vector graphics full stop.