Finally seen real HDTV

Letterbox view of a film

Watched High Definition NBA basketball on ESPN HD via DirectTV while in Chicago. Part of my wifes family are well into technology and own multiple Hard drive recorders and a High-Definition Television setup. It was super crystal clear, more like a monitor picture than a television picture. It was ever-so very vivid too, almost too slick to watch. The picture was at long last in widescreen format which is still odd because no one owns a widescreen set only 4:3. When will we get HDTV in the uk? maybe 2008 on sky and 2010 on Digital TV. At least the new settop boxes now support 5.1 surrond sound through optical or coxial outputs now as standard.

Oh by the way, i am now thinking about not buying a cheap digital tv box and instead getting one of the previously mentioned PVRs because there getting much cheaper now. The Humax pvr is going for 190 pounds on Empire direct. Even the Pace twin view is going for around the same price now. Swap the hard drives out for something more like 120 gig and I'm laughing.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Webdav calendar share

At long last my wife has given up on Outlook and Internet explorer. So I set her laptop up with Opera, Mozilla and Neos Jabber client. And shes loving the calendar in Mozilla 1.5, she loves the idea you can actually share calendars and see others.

So now I really need to sort out a webdav server so I can actually get our calendars working in each others clients. Saw this after a short search. Oh spotted this too…Yum

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Blojsom upgrade and permalinks

Serving more as a note for myself. I really need to make changes to blojsom because the new features are something else. If I do a upgrade on my blog I will do one on the interaction blog too. so fear not my students. Webbased blogging is coming to you all soon…

Plus a load of permas to check out sometime soon from my feeds…

Blog on Blogs- excellent educational example of weblog use (ebnWL News)

Blogtalk 2004 – July 2004
Who needs a phone? Infosync
Can You Sell More WiFi With Content? (Techdirt Corporate Intelligence/images/emoticons/happy.gif

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Moblogging

For ages now, I've been thinking of setting up a moblog, which is basicly a blog of interesting or not so interesting pictures which I snap with my camera phone through-out the day. Its kind of like my picture gallarys but less structured and pictures are uploaded via mms so they appear instantaly online no matter where you are. Which would have been extra nice when I was in America, except MMS didnt work on either Tmobile or AT&T while I was there.

The other thing which seems to becoming possible is vidblogs as operators allow for video messaging. Obvioulsy Orange havent yet launched there video service, but there on the brink and my SPV2 phone supports it. So realisticly I could send it over GPRS as a email instead.

Anyway, I've been meaning to look at textamerica for ages and have signed up now. Didnt like all there terms though.

14. Textamerica.com may use, sell and/or share with its affiliates any information provided by you on this website, including your name, e-mail address, usage patterns, and uploaded images and text

The URL is http://cubicgarde.textamerica.com and yes it looks pretty shite at the moment. But I'm thinking about writing my own moblog now rather than using text america as it seems very limited and ASP buggy. Then again i need to check out the other moblogging apps out there too.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

International GPRS roaming

Yes it works and I was so shocked when I saw the GPRS logo on my phone when I left Chicago Ohare airport, I just had to try it out on Tmobile and it didnt work too well. But worked perfectly on AT&T wireless through-out most of my holiday. Even Tmobile started working once I got outside of Chicago.
So at long last GPRS has come of age? Now if only 3g also worked…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Installing Linux

So finally I got my act together and got a old machine from college. It was a Pentium 2 233MX with 192meg of PC133 memory and 3 gig of Hard drive space. So I ripped out the old motherboard and chip put in my old Asus A7V with the servers old Athlon 800 into it (put in a 1.33ghz Athlon into the server now). Used the same PC133 memory as I'm not sure where my old stuff has gone and the old Hard drive. And tried to install Debian using the net install version. Oh my, took me ages to work out how to install the network card and download more of what was needed. So its working but I have no idea what the default login is… So I'm kinda of stuck at the moment…HELP

Quick update – Finally got Dynebolic to work when I downloaded version 1.1.1 as version 1.1 didnt support the Award Bios. Also downloaded Smoothwall, Knoppix and Mepis, so will try those out sooner or later too. For now Debian can wait. And I'm thinking about using the old Pentium2 as a smoothwall firewall if I can get another ATX case.

http://www.linuxmigration.com/quickref – almost forgot about it.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Happy New year to everyone…

Sorry to all who missed Cubicgarden over the christmas holiday. Its been along holiday away, and I thought I'd solved the hardware fault on the server. But nope it went down and never came back up…Anyway it should now be solved, as I think its the graphcs card and I've swapped that out now.

Luckly I got lots to blog from my holiday in America. Here are a few,
Minneapolis/St Paul skybridges and public transport, International GPRS roaming, Will america ever embrace texting, Will america ever use bluetooth, Real HDTV, Cheaper PVRs, Great customer services state side, Bearing weapons in the twin cities, the Fbi story, alongside others.

Unfortually I have little time because I got a talk on Monday. So expect more after Monday and I will start looking though my feeds soon as I can. Because I saw some very interesting developments while I was away. Till then check out my photos online.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Dreamix Q-A session 7:00pm EST / 00:00 GMT

Dreamix crew doing a session on IRC tonight, so I'll try and stay up and listen in. More info at xbox scene. Will try and keep a log of all what happens.

Oh also reading this – Beyond hacking the xbox, while i wait for the modderated chat at midnight.

I was blogging it live, and poped open the avi they gave us while watching tv and computer crashed so i lost my log! Sorry guys…will ask some one for there log later. Should have used mirc rather than chatzilla.
http://www.dreamix.tv/DreamixTeaser.avi

The Dreamix project began with the goal of bringing PVR features to the Microsoft Xbox. Due to the magnitude of the project, we have slightly veered off course from this goal, however we have not totally abandoned the idea. Dreamix in its current form is a standalone set-top box, which runs the Linux based Dreamix Embedded OS, an operating system specially engineered for multimedia applications. Our goal is to create the next generation set-top box, including 3D support, MPEG-4, and future HDTV support. In our second generation product, we plan to unofficial support the Microsoft Xbox. The reason support for the Xbox was excluded from the first generation design is because of difficulties in producing a viable product, which would be limited to modified Xboxes, as well as technical difficulties in implementing such features using the information currently available on the Xbox hardware.

What the xbox scene forums have to say about it – OW! now that hurts!

Some one did get all the questions however, I've downloaded just incase it gets taken down. Heres my copy

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Intelligent documents

Seen this on xml.com. Pretty much covers what I already knew about authoring xml. However there are some interesting points.

A shame, too, that while Microsoft has brought XML into the Word and Excel products, Outlook does not permit XML document creation. – Yes they couldnt even put in ical support.
Udell suggested that a way of doing this might be through using style as a back door. Many people are willing to spend a long time on getting the look of a document right, but not be willing to spend that time on metadata creation. Udell suggested that by providing metadata-significant styles, authoring tools creators could encourage more preservation of context in communication through the carrot of creating beautiful documents. – Now thats interesting, I'd never thought of that. I've used implied structures.
Interesting talk about Adobe, as it seems there starting to get there smart documents and network publishing together now. Will have to look into it later on, but I like what i'm hearing…
The smart documents contain three elements: the document part, including XSL-FO and SVG for presentation; the forms part, using XSLT and JavaScript for validation and adaptation; and metadata, using Adobe's XMP (a restricted RDF). – More under the blog.The XML documents can be filled out through Adobe Acrobat Reader – Now thats a super smart move by Adobe, weve already seen SVG being trojan'ed onto peoples machines through Acrobat reader. Now its the Smart documents time.

The starting point
Xforms examples, yum yum…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Live TV on Xbox Media Player

While looking for interesting storys for next tuesdays lecture, seen this xboxmediaplayer
TSReader is an MPEG-2 transport stream analyzer PC application for Windows9x/2000/XP. Normaly this would not be so interesting for many XBMP users but the thing here is that TSReader has a build-in XNS server, which when enabled can stream live digital TV (broadcasted over satellite, cable and terrestrial) to XBMP on demand. TSReader is compatible with many Digital Video PCI-cards that provide the actual transport stream from DVB, DVB-T, ATSC or Digicipher.

Going to try this out once I setup the xbox keyboard for linux… Yep got the USB to Xbox cable today too.

Oh and Tuesdays lecture is now online for those students who are reading my blog.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]