Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Google+ Hangouts gets desktop sharing and recording


Wow - Ironically we wanted these features from Group Video Skype - but they aren't available.
Well now they are.... and they are free.
 
 

Thursday, July 21, 2011

HTC Desire Rooted

I had heard mixed reports of HTC Desire rooting (cynaogen), but I took the plunge (thanks Dean) with Oxegen - an Open source minimal android (gingerbread) 2.3.4. It works very well, minimal, fast and bug-free. 2.3.4 seems pretty nice on battery usage as well which is nice.

Also you get more memory to play with cos the HTC sense stuff (pretty but bloaty) isn't there.

Steps to install.

  1. Root: http://theunlockr.com/2010/09/20/how-to-root-the-htc-desire-unrevoked-method/. 
    1. Top-tip when they say turn on USB debugging and connect your phone via USB, ensure you have disk sharing enabled.
  2. Copy the above oxegen zip to your SD Card 
  3. Put your phone into recovery mode, wipe and then load the above zip.
  4. Switch on, configure and start installing your favourite apps - note you'll need to install Maps and YouTube. Since Google won't allow these to be distro'd.
 

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Wow - Babylon slapdown

Woah: Lulz Security Just Took On the CIA - Gizmodo

Things are certainly hotting up.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Apple TV + XBMC - nice hardware meet nice software

So first-off thanks to Ross for switching me onto this.

The AppleTV is a neat piece of hardware, small with a HDMI out for connecting to your TV. It streams movies directly in HD to your TV. One problem in Ireland is there aren't that many movies and there's no TV shows. However, the main problems are the lack of connectivity options and the poor support for media formats - both are deliberate and typical of apple walled-garden.

So on its own, the new shiny AppleTV could basically rent a limited selection of movies, which granted is a slick process. In order to connect to any other media, you need a server running iTunes - no support for UPnP/DLNA, SAMBA, Apple Networking. You can't even stick a USB hard-drive in the back.

Even if you do have a server running iTunes continuously, the support for non-apple media is poor. So essentially, for me the out-of-the-box AppleTV would be limited to on-demand movie rental.

Enter XBMC. First you need to Jailbreak your appleTV a simple process using Seas0nPass. This will install. Then install XBMC on it - which involves ssh and running a couple of commands.

Your appleTV will now connect to basically anything and will stream most media formats - allowing the excellent AppleTV hardware to be used to its full potential.

Nightlies

While more formats ran fine. I ran into some difficulties with large MKV files so I've opted to install one of the nightlies - which fixed the problem. While slighltly more complicated, it can be perfomed on top of the basic install above, which means you can choose to do this at your convenience.

The download link is here.
Reasonable instructions are here

One thing to note - as pointed out in the download link above, if you do this, you must turn off apple auto-updating checks, since these seem to interfere with this build of xbmc. This is pretty trivial, simply editing the /etc/hosts file. See this link for details.

Labels:

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Mobile phones kill bees

First it was fungus, now phone calls, Facebook will be implicated next. From Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide

Friday, March 18, 2011

⇗northeast scala symposium

⇗northeast scala symposium

Some good videos here from the cutting edge of Scala. Particularly like the Akka presentation. Next generation distribution via Actors. Scala actors on steroids. This looks very good - project has gone 1.0.

Will definitely give this a whirl.

via:Mike

Friday, February 11, 2011

Permanent TSB leaves mortgage business

Irish times reports the crazy fixed rates hikes bringing their fixed rates between 7 - 9%. - personal loan territory. this effectively ends their fixed rate business.

But they are also pricing themselves out of the variable rate - for new mortgages. They are more expensive and the mortgage products have effectively been removed from their website. Used to be front and center - now there's only a item on "Mortgage Repayment Difficulties".

So now they effectively don't offer new mortgages at all and essentially exist to gouge more money out of their residual variable rate mortgage holders. Is this really their business plan?