Topping up the TV

Top up TV

Seems channels such as E4, UKTV and Discovery will be coming back to Freeview sooner than expected in the form of TopUpTV. I would say eight pounds a month isnt too bad for 10 extra channels. However I would prefer to pay something like one pound per channel. Basicly the channel line up is E4, UKTV Gold, Discovery, Cartoon network, Discover H&L, TCM, UKTV food, Bloomberg, Boomerang and UKTV style. So a real mix bag of channels. I'm only interested in E4 and the Discoverys. Anyway there doing a trial run soon, so I may consider it, would be better if I had the twinview PVR box really.

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Xbox mediacentre another look…

The Project Mayhem skin for xbox media center alpha

Kevins been chipping his xbox today, some guy at the local computer fair which is really nice to know as I now know where to send people. Costs 60 pounds chip and install, includes rom i believe but cant see why the guy would bother taking the risk. Anyway, kev dropped me a ftp site with the latest xbmc. And I started doing more research into xbmc.

There seems to be a new looking skin not based on windows media centre as its got copyright issues. However the alternative looks pretty good too, its based on the dell media centre.

The xbmc team have finally put a load of screenshots online too. Which brings up lots of questions for me. Where can I download that project mayhem skin? I didnt know xbmc can copy and manage files?
Good to see the imdb and it looks like cddb feature works well. Theres an on screen keyboard for the xbmc? Does a usb keyboard also work, as that would be really cool. Thank goodness shoutcast streaming is still supported, any chance of icecast streaming? Super large icons for all sections, very nice… Not sure what this is, too short for a movie and too long for trailers
. I'm wondering if xbmc allows for natrual categories like years, timing, etc? Could be right? There must be somekind of plugin arctecture, my weather? I'm hoping this will mean a return of xmltv listings and some new cutting edge features like streaming from xbox to xbox using xbconnect. Its also good to see new visual effects, as groom was kind of boring, plus theres a competition for more visualization. Screensavers? and this is stupid nuts.

On a whole its all too much to take in… I cant wait to see what happens next…
By the way theres a poll for what should be the default skin.

Ok I've installed xbmc and it does pretty much eveything seen in the preview and more…
First thing, the web front end is now working, its really shabby but it works. You can browse through the shares and click on the piece of media you want and the xbmc will play it a couple of seconds later. You can also pause and stop. I dont see anyway to setup a playlist but there is a skip forward and back button. Ideal skipping adverts while watching Hollyoaks from the sofa with my tabletpc on my lap.
So anyway that works well, even though I have yet to try it on my ipaq or smartphone. Imagine with port forwarding I could control xbmc from any where I can get the Internet. Home automation is almost there.

Screensaver works well, also has the option to auto shutdown after a set period. Visuals not too good, same as xbmp. Weather works but not too amazing, can wait to see what other webservice clients they build, or if its easy enough for me to build one. Can just imagine RSS readers, etc. Anyway the other thing which is also very interesting is the intergration of imdb, cddb, etc. You can look up films, tv shows, tunes and games. Then use them for thumbnails on folders as well as files. Theres also a auto scan option which will scan and create thumbnails and info for all folders and files under the current folder. Trust me it takes a while to do. The keyboard feature is also very cool, it allows you to rename files, search through files, etc. I tried out the usb keyboard and it didnt work, which was a shame.

The thing which i find really amazing is the natrual categories. Basicly when you add metadata to your files and folders via the scan option you can then look at all media through a selection of categories. Genres, Actors, Year, Title in the movie section and Albums, Artist, Genres, Top100, Songs in the Tune section. And flicking between the filesystems and categories is so easy, i cant help but do it. Makes me want to put all my movies on a couple of Huge RAID arrays rather than CD. With the right kind of money… Anyway that aside, I'm going to start using xbmc more now because its more stable than it use to be and the features are so rich and useful. Thumbs up from me…

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disagreement [Digital mixing != Vinyl mixing]


They call him the hands


In brief I'm talking about moving digital mixing into a mininorty report style gestural interfaces…
Checking out MICHEL WAISVISZ again. He's one of the pioneers of digital live music, and the human interfaces he uses are so adaptable to digital mixing. He runs Steim. The OIK project will be of interest to all.
See the problem is that vinyl djs is going in one direction while digital mixing could easily go another, but people keep on cloning vinyl djs aka final scratch and the others. The pictures on this site will easily give you an idea of where digital mixing could should go. As mentioned before the key is a beat. Atomixmp3's beat-aware engine is a step forward. Add a hardware midi or ethernet connection with a internet protocal like soap, xmpp or sip and your well away.
Going to add sections to my writing digital mixing. Will be using parts of First STEIM Touch manifestation in 1998 by steim and this question and answer with Waisvisz. No one seems to be talking about multiple layered mixing using 2 laptops or 2 versions of atomixmp3. Also the greater aspects of aggeragation within digital mixing. I also outlined a real example of digital mixing which I'm calling wireless mixing. Maybe blocky might be interested in doing a night based around these real examples? Till I write the piece or do a night…enjoy the pictures.

touch exhibition

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European Union Directive for the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights

European is about to vote for or against the European Union Directive for the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, which would ultimately create a intellectual property legislation that copies and extends the American DMCA.

The legislation would allow copyright owners, such as record labels, to raid P2P users' homes if they suspect the user for sharing copyrighted material via P2P networks. It would also allow copyright owners to seize users' assets and get their bank accounts frozen whether they had any financial — or any other — gain from file sharing or not.

Briefing Materials on the European Union Directive on Data Protection
Campaign for digital rights – European Union Copyright Directive

European Union directive – Wikipedia
Use this page to contact EU Parliament members with a pre-written message from EFF

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Maths and art

Miles dropped a email about kandid . It sounds interesting and I may try it out later after some other things have been done on my giant to do list. But my reason for blogging has to with how this reminds me of apps on my old 16bit machine. At the time there was little way to get the real feel for maths in art. It took too long to do fractials for example. I remember playing with L-systems and it would take hours to build a highly populated L-system. However even then I enjoyed the results. If you remember the old cubicgarden background, that was built using L-systems.

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Bookmarks blog vs Furl

I was flicking through seblogging when I found this interesting web service via this post.. It is described as…

Your Online Filing Cabinet for Useful Web Pages Furl is a new web browsing tool that lets you save and organize thousands of useful web pages (you know, the ones you want to save for future reference but then can never find again) in a personal “web page filing cabinet”.

Once saved, you can effortlessly find any page again later using a powerful full text search tool. With Furl you can forget trying to save and organize dozens of bookmarks, forget saving web pages to your desktop, in fact forget everything except how to find a useful web page again next time you need it.

As Sebastian Fiedler rightly points out, the interesing thing is that you can fiddle with the rss feed it gives off. So this will basicly do what my bookmarks page does already but with a little xsl can be tightly intergrated into anything. I'm thinking about for example a reading list of not only books but websites for my students. Or with a little aggeragation you could pull together a couple lecturers or even students favourate sites into one feed. Nice.

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Learning and advancement through blogging

I've been reading Dan Saffer blog about his experience on the MA Interaction design course in Carnegie Mellon for a while now. And I just caught his post about his interview by elearningpost.com.

Anyway I wanted to write a comment to Dan, but felt I had lots more to say and should bother him too much about it all. Oh its also good to see he now provides his rss feed in complete form. Wish more moveable type users would do this. Anyhow I'm going to pick through a few things in the interview.

Why do you blog your course?
In a way, it's about justifying the personal and actual expense of leaving work and going back to school: something I could point to and say, see, that's why I'm doing this, this is what I learned. This is why it was worth it. – Exactly…I really believe students are empowered by blogs because it not only gives them a voice but allows them to compare experiences with others in simular situations. See it would be great to have my interaction students commenting back all the time while Dan and others commented on the interaction blog. I know Dan's doing a MA and my students are doing BA but that shouldnt make a difference. In broader aspects blogs are great for justifing work to yourself. I look back through my blog and cant believe the amount of projects I have running and I can always check up on there progress even years later.

Didnt know Dan's class had a project blog. He finds it more useful than email, but I wonder if he finds instant messager useful too? I see lots of equals with my students wanting to setup there own website. For any of my students reading, read between the lines…

Has blogging helped you increase your learning network?
Dan brings up some healthy problems with blogging generally. The whole problem with quoting and citing is one so difficult to solve. I tend to say who dropped the idea or quote, but not too much because yes it can get really stupid. Only a couple of times in the interaction blog have students quoted me, and they tend to be Ian said today. As a open lecturer, I'm not that worred about students taking a little credit for something I suggest but it all depends on the situation. On the RSS comment thing, its a problem but I feel the barrier to entry is just right. Someone needs to change from RSS reader to web browser so they can write a comment. Most wankers wont be bothered to comment, while those who do really wanted to, and will leave something interesting to read.

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New CSS candidate recommended specs

Some progress from CSS 2.1 to CSS 3 is happening in the W3c.

Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 revision 1
This spec describes CSS 2.1, a revision of CSS 2 that removes rarely implemented features and adds a few new ones including media-specific style sheets, content positioning, table layout, features for internationalization and some properties related to user interface. It also fixes a few bugs in the CSS2 spec “the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML's 'style' attribute and a new calculation of the “clip” property”. Features removed iunclude text-shadow, display: marker, display: compact, and content: uri tag.

CSS Print Profile
This module “defines a subset of Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 [CSS2] and CSS3 module: Paged Media [PAGEMEDIA] specifically for printing to low-cost devices. It is designed for printing from mobile devices, where it is not feasible or desirable to install a printer-specific driver, and for situations were some variability between the device's view of the document and the formatting of the output is acceptable.”
CSS3 Paged Media Module
This module “describes the page model that partitions a flow into pages. It builds on the CSS3 Box model module and introduces and defines the page model and paged media. It adds functionality for pagination, page margins, headers and footers, image orientation. Finally it extends generated content for the purpose of cross-references with page numbers.”

All this comes days after the W3C Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group posted the fifth public working draft of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2.

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Munich struggling with open source

Birch dropped me this small article from a local newspaper near him in Minneapolis. Its basicly about Munich's problems with opensourve software and how Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is enjoying the fact there having problems. He makes the point that governments who change for political reasons are free to do so. While those who choose the software for business reasons stick with Microsoft. I'm not quite buying it, but we shall see as more and more governments make these critial decisions.

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Project is currently dead. Will not be back.

Had a quick look around my xbox bookmarks and found out that the Dreamix project is now dead. I was quite shocked at this because it had so much going for it a while back. Oh well we shall see if Xbox media centre moves into the area of PVR's.

I am however very interested in Xlink messager which creates a tunnel between two or more? xboxes so they can play games together or share media?

Also found Xbox tribe and xbins today which is useful for finding compiled versions of xbmp and xbmc. And I've been following a thread about HD Windows media on the Xbox. I tried to get the Matrix revolutions high defination version working on my xbox along time ago and I also had huge syncing and fps problems. But as some one said what do you expect for a 733mhz machine. Not even my 1.33mhz laptop can play it correctly, saying that the xbox has a much beefer graphics card. Also reminds me to look for a Matroska dll for xbmplayer.

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Joining up, the obvious choice

I'm starting to question the reasons why I decided to give each year group I teach a blog. If you check out the 1st year interaction blog you can clearly see lots of useful information and ideas. Its also been used as a general notice board at the moment for arrangements and planning. Which is fine, just interesting to see happening. Those who dont blog are either not that bothered and usually dont turn up to my lessons too much or dont have a easily available blogger.
Have a look at the 2nd year interaction blog and its windy city. Very few posts and little in the way of interest, no offense to HarryT or Paulo of course. So i'm thinking join them up. It would be trivial to do, as all blogs are stored on the filesystem as text files. The hardest part would be arranging categories and telling everyone the new xmlrpc address. I could redirect everything else though. Or even with the intiative of people.rave.ac.uk – I could finally offload the blogs to a real place?

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The Freedom of Information Act

Been working hard at college on the Freedom of information site. Its now coming close to completion, its a shame because I had a few things I needed to do to make it a complete job.

  1. Unlimited OPML transformation – so you can click on each outline and go down a level, only seen it done using Javascript not standard XHTML and CSS
  2. Word ML to XHTML – Microsoft's own XSL transformation is pretty good but first up only works on the Beta 2 of Word ML and its bloody HUGE
  3. Word ML to PDF – Chris was planning to do this with XSL-FO, but we couldnt even imagine the nightmare to do it. Plus you can now buy one which does it

Ideally I would have liked to done something like this. But it wasnt going to happen… The main crutux of the matter is that no matter what happens the xml which word or anything turns out will be nasty only because the staff have no idea how to create well structured office documents.

Been reading Practical RDF as well by the way, liking XML/RDF cant wait to get something I can use it for.

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Hacking the Library

XML.com has made some changes it would seem. With the topics ranging from managing personal media collections to XMLTV. Should be interesting to see the results of the changes, as they were doing quite well already. Maybe the webservices.xml.com will be more business like.

XML is well on its way to becoming a mature, ubiquitous technology. The pace of standardization has not slowed, but the time where applications took a back seat to new core technologies is coming to an end. At XML.com we want to focus more on the application space, particularly personal information management, a vibrant area of XML application development. To that end, today Kendall Clark begins a new column, “Hacking the Library”, which will focus on problems of personal information, especially those related to the digital media lifestyle.

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Mob-Blogging from another view

Aibos view of living room

Ok I'm sorry but sometimes I read about the progress of mobblogging and i'm not exactly as thrilled as I when I first heard about it. But this is a whole different matter. I'm loving the idea. Instead of mobblogging yourself, why not let your robot dog do the hard work. And it makes so much sense, cant believe people havent thought about it before. Whuffie takes most of the photos.

welcome to the world's first and only “roblog”. currently, a sony aibo robot dog and a er1 / tablet pc based robot post automatically to this site throughout the day, and once and awhile a human (phillip m. torrone) does as well. roomba to be added this weekend.

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