So Boxee and D-Link are coming out with a new piece of hardware called the Boxee Box. Overall it looks really neat, it has a nice design, includes the major outputs needed for a mediacenter ( assuming you have an open HDMI port), and looks to be small according to boxees blog post.
If boxee would like to send me one, I would be more then happy to review it 😉
Hopefully its not to expensive and its a big hit, boxee has a great future!
Original price the camera is $129.99 but we bought it on black friday sale at bestbuy.com for $69.99. I was hoping for better quality being an HD camera, but its hard to tell due to no natural lighting. Overall its easy to get the videos off the camera. It stores the videos on the 8GB SD card I bought for it. The videos copy off the device quickly unlike my blackberry, but none of my videos were over 1 or 2 minutes. The photo camera on it wasnt very good in the non-natural light. I will try to post some videos and pictures when I can take it outside. Due to its cheap price I give it a 3.0 out of 5.
A little past halloween, but here is my pumpkin from Halloween and Nekota ready to go trick or treating.
Its been a while since I posted, and since then I found out a wonderful application. Its called Portable Apps. You install it to your usb flash drive and whatever computer you go to you have access to your favorite apps. Well maybe not all your favorite apps, but the ones available on the portable apps website, here is the link to apps available. I went ahead and installed firefox, vlc, 7-zip, pidgin,notepad++, and putty. Some of the applications are open source, while others are freeware if it makes a difference to you, of course they will all be virus/spyware free. So if its something you find useful, I suggest you download it and check it out. http://portableapps.com/
I am an avid HTPC user. I have been using mediaportal for over 2 years. I thought I would share a little about it, and write a full review in the future. If you are looking for an excellent windows based front end software, your search may stop here. It offers TV playback, DVR functionality, video playback, audio playback, picture viewing, any many user supported plugins. So go to the website, check out the forums for plugins and skins, and show your love for mediaportal.
So my Home Theater PC (HTPC) died a while back. Did some testing and determined it was the motherboard. So I found one on ebay a refurbished oem Asus rock Dual-Sata2. This motherboard replaced my DFI lanparty ultra-d nforce 4 motherboard. I would recommend the Asus only if you dont have dual core with sata with xp. I had some problems with the sata drivers that caused my alot of trouble. My final solution was to move to Vista… scary I know that it fixed the problem. So now that I have my HTPC back up and running I can enjoy the DVR functionality.
So Hulu just released a new desktop app a few days ago ( I am a little slow) . From first impression its farily well done for a beta release. To be honest I like it better then the boxee interface. I watched a few shows on it and everything seemed to work well. My main purpose is to open it from MediaPortal. The best thing about it was it worked well with the remote, once you got use to the buttons.
From what I could tell about the app, it was just some kind of flash overlay. Other then that not much to write about it other then it works!!
Ok blackberry app review time. I feel like writing blogpost tonight not sure why. There is a very useful app from xtreme labs that is called speedtest. They also make iphone apps. This app lets you check out your networks speed. The app is very simple just click the button and it will test the download and upload speed, and report back to you. I believe the app can be download through the blackberry store. I am unsure of how it works when connecting to wi-fi.
Alright I wrote a review about boxee a couple of weeks ago. I stated the only reason why I am testing it out was for Hulu. Well hulu decided to give boxee the AXE, and told them they can not offer their content on boxee. Well alot of users seen this poor taste in hulu, along with putting a big hurt on boxee as I see Hulu as the Holy Grail of internet tv. Well today boxee released a new version that is running off RSS feeds. While hulu could block it, I think it would be a bad idea. I downloaded the new version its very very buggy, and has crashed on me a couple of times. Users are also reporting that hulu isnt work, I also could not get hulu working. So if boxee said they will put an update in to alert the user if its up and running or not. Hopefully hulu gives in and lets Boxee Stay.
Alright to be honest I am writing a review so I can post my referal link to try to get more space on dropbox. Here is the referal link. If you sign up, you and I will both get 250 more MB on top of the 2 Gbytes. So if you sign up, I thank you in advance!!. With that note if your a current user of dropbox, you can get more space by following this link.
Dropbox allows you to have a common folder on multiple computers and the web. So you install dropbox on the computers you want to sync folders with. I believe the default Windows XP folder is ( C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\My Documents\My Dropbox ) But you can move it around. Then any files or folders you drop in there are synced with the online dropbox website. If you have multiple computers each computer will receive updates of the new files synced. I currently have a ubuntu, Windows xp, and Windows Vista Box synced up. It also has a OS X installer. It works very well to always have the files I commonly use.Also if your on the go you can access the dropbox website it will allow you to download a file or look at a picture. Another nice feature is the public folder which allows you to put files you want to share with the internet.
The screenshot I took shows a few folders sync ( blue arrows ) while the folder icons with green arrows are all up to date.
Another thing dropbox does is puts an icon ( I know ANOTHER ICON) in your taskbar and shows a little picture if its syncing or up to date. I am not really to sure what else to say about dropbox. If you have any questions or comments leave them below.