Interesting media playing service

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Now this is interesting. The developers of divx have released a beta of their new software which provides an easy way to play all your media files on all the computers you have. As regular readers know, I have been planning the construction of a ‘media box’ to hook up to my home theater system so that I can play my mp3 collection and the movies I grab using my tv capture card without having to hook my laptop up to the home theater. The basic idea is a sort of tivo/digital media box. Anyway I have been investigating my options. Lately I am leaning towards going with an Xbox because of the excellent xbox media player project, which I could have up and running for around $250 (as compared to the PC I specced out to do this, which would cost around $6-700). The downside is, no tivo functionality, the upside is, cheap! But Mastermind looks interesting also, I’m going to play around with it and see if it’s viable. the downside is it seems to rely on their centralized server, which I don’t like. I want to run the server on my own boxes, I have no interest in marketers building a usage profile on me.

More as I learn about this, over the next couple of months I will be installing something in the living room. What that something is remains to be seen 😉

I am such a geek

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This post is coming to you live from my very cool new pda. I just got the wireless working with it. For once with cutting edge tech things seem to have gone very smoothly , plug and play even, despite being linux. woohoo!

I’ll post some pics and more details tomorrow. The thing is damn slick though, of that there’s no doubt.

OLED’s – tech to be aware of

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ZDNET has put up a quick overview of what OLED’s are all about. OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode. They’re going to start showing up in laptop and PDA screens and possibly in flat panel TV’s and light bulbs and the like over the next several years. To summarize the article, they have several strengths compared to existing flat panel systems – they’re easier to manufacture (and thus cheaper) use lots less power (where is my 8 hour life laptop!) and they are a lot brigher and have a more vivid picture which is also viewable from any angle, unlike the polarized screens in existing flat panel screens. The downside is their shorter lifespan and uneven degradation of picture quality (imagine a laptop where the red channel is faded and there’s nothing you can do about it). Despite this they’re going to start showing up in all kinds of devices. Kodak is already shipping a camera with one in it that i saw on Tech TV and the difference in quality is obvious, I could see it even on tv, they look excellent. Cross your fingers they deal with the lifespan issue and these things start showing up soon in retail, I want a $200 21″ flat screen monitor.

A total mind bender

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Want to befuddle your poor overtaxed brain? Check out this tough to believe optical illuision. Yes it’s true, those two squares are in fact the same color, our visual systems just aren’t up to the task of noting that fact. There are several other illusions to scope out from the link as well.

I’m not nearly as clever as I think I am…

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So I am playing Zelda last night and I need to get into the pirate’s ship. There’s a riddle, ‘I can be filled with water or sail upon the sea, what am I” (I’m paraphrasing.).

Sheesh is that easy I think, Vessel!

Bzzt, no joy, the pirates won’t let me in. So I wander around randomly smiting weeds with my sword, thinking. Wait, a pirate ship, seas, shipwrecked, message in a bottle!.

Bzzt, no joy. More weed whacking with sword ensues, but nothing else occurs to me. I start to conclude the game designers are cheating. Later I figure out through a cut scene that the password is schooner and am like schooner? schooner??? WTF does schooner have to do with being filled with water? A sunken boat? That’s a stretch. I end up figuring it is a bad translation or something. Except that later I check it on dict.org and discover that my vocabulary is not as good as I think it is. Go check for yourself if you want the definition. It wasn’t a bad translation though I will say that.

Copy that DVD

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It blows my mind that Hollywood is not freaking out more about the easy availability of DVD copying software these days. I mean, check out this little number. It’s completely free. You need it and a copy of TMPG encode and away you go – rent a DVD, stick it in the computer, 4 hours later you have 2 SVCD’s you can play in your DVD player. Assuming you have a DVD player that supports SVCD anyway. Jack Valenti is off in Congress ranting about some draconian law or another to stop the trading of movies on the internet, meanwhile any shmooten with half a brain can download this software, sign up for Netflix, and begin building a movie library to rival the one in the library of congress. Amazing.

Get yer war on

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Been checking out the war coverage on the major networks? Wished you could spend more time looking over the high resolution sattelite footage of Baghdad they show? Your wish is my command. Extreme closeups of various areas of downtown Baghdad can be found at that link. It’s amazing how good the quality is.