Pat’s Blog

A techie who likes good beer, soccer and hanging with friends and family
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Archive for November, 2007

Jumping into the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray war

Friday, November 30th, 2007

I was planning on staying out of the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD war until one format clearly looked to be the winner. Some movie studios are releasing their titles on one format and not for the other. It’s a pretty ugly stalemate. One of my co-workers who’s a real videophile/audiophile (hi Mike) owns both HD-DVD and […]

A couple of strange phone calls

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

A couple of weeks ago I get a phone call from some guy who claims to have read my blog and have similar interests as I do. He says he’d like to get together for a couple of beers and talk about soccer in New York City. It was a very awkward conversation and I […]

Streaming audio and eating lots of turkey

Friday, November 23rd, 2007

So this Wednesday Dann was going to be out of town and not able to do the show. I volunteered to take the reins and set about learning audio streaming on Linux. At first I tried downloading and installing the package of MuSE which is used to stream to an icecast server. My recording box […]

Main Actor update coming soon

Friday, November 16th, 2007

I read this announcement this morning regarding the acquisition of Main Concept by DivX Inc. for $22 million. Last Monday I contacted Markus Moenig again to see if they were any updates in regards to Main Actor being open sourced. Expect some kind of an announcement in the next week or so. […]

Controlling the world with my Harmony 880 remote

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

So I finally got around to picking up a Logitech Harmony 880 remote. I absolutely love it! It actually fulfills the promise of being able to control any IR enabled device. I’m using it in the family room to control my t.v., cable box, MythTV box, DVD player and A/V receiver. So instead […]

Nokia N810 - no developer discount for me, goto plan B

Monday, November 12th, 2007

So Nokia announced the list of people who will be receiving a huge developer discount code to purchase a brand new Nokia N810 for 99 Euros. I submitted a proposal but did not make the cut. Congrats to everyone who did. So on to plan B. More than likely I’ll be picking up a used […]

Bad news regarding the OpenMoko NEO1973 in the Western hemisphere

Friday, November 9th, 2007

Apparently there’s been a pretty major oversight from the manufacturers of the NEO1973 (used by the OpenMoko project). The phone has been designed to support only 3 bands (900/1800/1900MHz). The following countries primarily use the 850MHz band:
Antigua, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Cayman Islands, Colombia, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Grenada, Guam, […]

Another cool embedded option

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

I just read a bunch of articles regarding this new interesting embedded product from Bug Labs:

Basically it’s a modular kit to create your own embedded devices. The modules include a touch screen, a sound module, a web camera, GPS, motion detector, etc.. Unlike some of the other embedded options out there this one will […]

Upgrading to Gutsy on AMD64 was absolutely flawless

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

After my shitty Gutsy upgrade experience on my POS laptop I decided to see if it was any better on the AMD64 platform. First up was my main workstation running Kubuntu. I have a ton of applications on this beast so I knew it would take a while. Several hours later and a reboot and […]

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