Picture courtesy of TiVo.com
I recently posted that one of my bigger disappointments of CES 2010 was TiVo’s lack of announcements. It appears that TiVo didn’t want to share the spotlight with other electronics manufacturers, and yesterday they released the TiVo Premiere and TiVo Premiere XL. I won’t go through all the details here, but you can find plenty of info here, here, here, and here. I’m a diehard TiVo snob so I ordered one right away! TiVo offers some great deals for existing users. If you have a lifetime service on one of your DVRs, you can get a $200 discount on the lifetime service from TiVo for the new box. Click “Read More” to see screenshots of what they’re offering. The new DVRs will be shipping in early April, and I’ll be SURE to post my impressions once it arrives!
Read more…
I’ll be the first one to admit it – the reason to jailbreak your iPhone is at an all time low. If we look back a few years, we all had iPhones with no applications except for the default set, no chance of using video streaming or VoIP applications, and we had a 10MB cap for downloading applications over the cell connection. We live in a different world now. Our phones are chock full with 3rd party applications. We can use VoIP applications and Slingplayer over 3G connections. The download cap has been raised up to 20MB for applications. Things are looking rosier and rosier. However, all is not perfect in Apple land. Read on to hear about my top ten favorite jailbroken iPhone utilities and applications. BTW, Big shout out to the iPhone Dev Team for making it all possible.
Do you travel frequently? If you’re answer is no, then you may not be interested in this post. But if you’re answer is yes, then let me rock your world 
. When bouncing from airport to airport, sometimes on different carriers, it can be tough to keep up to date on flight delays, gate numbers, etc. FlightTrack Pro from Mobiata gives a great interface for tracking ALL of your flight information. Combine it with TripIt and you get all of your flight info automatically entered. Read on to hear how! Read more…
Just a quick post to brag that I beat Geo-Defense! This is a really great game for the iPhone, and I bought it when it went on sale a couple weeks ago. Posted a pic of my scores for the last of the hardest levels to prove it. It was a VERY challenging game. Time to delete it and move onto the next!
After installing Fedora 12 on a new virtual machine with VMware (I use Fusion on the Mac), the first thing you’ll likely want to do is install VMware tools. You need to install a few packages in order to make the installation seamless, however. There are countless posts around the internet with people looking for help with this. Here’s a quick 15 step guide to getting up and running.
- Download Fedora 12.
- Install the OS.
- Boot up the virtual machine.
- Open up the Terminal.
- Run “su” and type your root password to gain administrative control.
- Run “yum update” to update all the packages to the newest version.
- Reboot.
- Open up the Terminal.
- Run “yum install kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc mkinitrd”
- Reboot.
- Click the menu option in your VMware application to install VMware tools. This should put a compressed folder on the desktop.
- Expand the zip file and using the terminal, navigate into the newly created directory.
- As the root user, type “./vmware-install.pl”
- When it asks you questions and prompts you for a response, just hit enter. Everything should be properly configured at this point.
- Reboot when the script finishes. That’s it!
Once the machine reboots, you should be able to immediately play with some of the more useful features of vmware-tools. For example, you’ll notice that if you drag the edges of the window to resize it, the resolution of the Guest OS will automatically adjust on the fly. If you drag files from your Host OS into the window of the desktop OS, they will copy over. Additionally, you should be able to copy and paste between the two systems. Enjoy!
CES has come and gone. The two dominating themes of this year’s show appear to be tablets and 3D televisions. I am interested in neither. Unless Steve Jobs shows me something amazing in two weeks, I don’t see the need for a tablet in my life. Not one bit. And I have ZERO desire to put on 3D glasses just to watch Modern Family or the Lakers beating pretty much anyone. However, I DO have the desire to have an updated HD TiVo. I have a TiVo HD with a 1TB hard drive upgrade, and while it works great, I really wish it did a better job of integrating internet media. There were leaks of a TiVo Premiere, and I really thought CES would be the time and place for TiVo to introduce a new line of DVRs. Oh well. I’m a sad Panda. And as for Sling, I would have loved to see some innovation on the consumer end of things. Show us a Slingcatcher that ACTUALLY can sling HD. Show us a better iPhone client. Just give us something cooler than all of the boring OEM crap you released! So anyhow, big lumps of coal for TiVo and Sling Media. I was hoping to see neat products from both!
Keeping with the theme of recent Sheevaplug related articles, here’s a post about a new, interesting piece of software called Tonido. Tonido advertises itself as a “personal cloud,” allowing you to share all of your personal files to anywhere. It’s a software platform that you install on your own home server. Once you’ve installed the platform, you can run a plethora of applications, and they have an SDK, in hopes that others pick up and write their own apps for it as well. It’s cross-platform. You can install it on Linux, OS X, or Windows. Or if you want, you can even buy their own plug PC, the TonidoPlug. Read on to hear a bit about installation on my Sheevaplug and my first impressions of the software. Read more…
Just a quick note to anyone who will be in Las Vegas for CES (wish I could be there!) in a couple weeks. There will be a Plug Computing Pavilion, likely to showcase all of the great things that people are doing with Plug PCs like the Sheevaplug, Tonidoplug, and Pogoplug. I really think that a Plug PC has the capability to take over the home server market. Two cool things that are happening…
- Marvell is going to be showing, in one way or another, a 2ghz plug! Right now the Sheevaplug runs at 1.2ghz. I’m fine with them leaving the RAM at 512MB, but it would be GREAT if they could bump the storage up to 1GB of internal flash.
- They’re running a competition right now to see who has the best idea for a killer “plug app.” I have a couple great ideas, and I’ll be sending one in!
If anyone is going to be at the Plug Computing Pavilion and would volunteer to send me pics to post, i would be MOST grateful! Leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail if you’ll be there.
If you have read some of my recent posts about setting up a Thin Client or Sheevaplug to act as home server, capable of distributing music across the house with Squeezebox Server, acting as a NAS, or running cool apps like Tonido (here are my first impressions!), then perhaps you have wondered about the best way to get your personal music collection on that server. Or once it is on the server, what happens if you want to add more? How do you keep music on the server in sync with your laptop? I hope this article will give you a great solution to that answer! I’m very happy with how it has been working for me. All you need is RSYNC, SSH, and CRON! Read more…
Before I dig into the guide, it’s best to briefly explain what the Sheevaplug is. As computers have gotten faster and faster and cheaper and cheaper over the years, the focus has shifted from being “the fastest” to being “good enough.” Take a look at the Intel Atom chip. It has flooded the market, and it seems like airports are now more filled with netbooks than they are with traditional laptops. The atom is fast enough for most people, and it uses very little power, enabling the devices to be much smaller and use way less battery. This low power technology translates extremely well into the home server or electronic appliance world. More and more of the devices in our household are becoming connected, and we need low power chips to help connect that world. What if you could have a server so small that it was only slightly bigger than a traditional wall wart plug? Marvell had this idea, and they came up with the concept of Plug Computing. Plug Computing means taking a a barebones PC with a low powered Marvell ARM CPU and sticking it inside of a “plug” and then letting companies / users explore the possibilities. There have been a few pre-packaged offerings like TonidoPlug (or you can set up Tonido on your Sheevaplug!), PogoPlug, and a few others. The Sheevaplug is a development unit that people can buy, and it’s great fun to play around with! I’ve been able to turn it into a NAS, a music server, and a few other things, all at the same time! Read on to find out how to get this thing set up for the first time. Read more…
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