First off I want to say that the Palm Pre is a huge leap in smartphone tech.  The interface is clean and crisp and the synergy functions of WebOS make it a great phone to organize and update contacts, calendars, notes and tasks across a range of services and social networking sites.  The integration with google is only shadowed by Android obviously.  The services that Sprint offer in their plans arent to shabby either.  The price plans are by far the best bang for your buck in term of what you get.  The fact that you can have navigation, unlimited sms, mms, im and data is awesome.  Even the unlimited everything plan is only 99 bucks compared to Verizon or ATT which would run well over that.  The app store is starting to grow which is another welcomed addition.  Overall the Palm Pre WebOS is what i would classify as a good starting point for Palm to regain some ground but there is more work to do.

I went and purchased a Palm Pre exactly 42 days ago expecting to upgrade my wireless capabilities to a new level and now I am chewing on blood pressure medication like they are tic tacs.  I grabbed the Palm Pre with the expectations of being able to replace a few of my daily gadgets with an all in one device.  My TomTom, iPod, Phone and PDA could all be in one handy little device.  For the most part I acheived my goal except there is that “for the most part” issue.  The Palm Pre is an expensive smartphone at the price of 200 bucks with a 2 year contract on Sprint  and now there are issues with the Pre.

First off, I had no problems for 30 days except the OS lacked some basic functionality that PALM really dropped the ball on.  Things like selecting text for cut, copy and paste is a pain and in calendar event view i can’t scroll to see the entire entry for an event location.  The Blue-tooth capabilities are seriously flawed and don’t work with most blue-tooth car kits or aftermarket devices. Now I am running into hardware issues.  The contact in the 3.5mm headphone jack sticks and disables the audio to the phone’s earpiece making the phone app unusable.  To fix this you have to exercise the headphone jack a few times to unstick the contact.  This is unacceptable for a piece of hardware i spent 200 bucks on. There are other issues that I have read about in other posts such as the slider breaking (mine is getting kinda loose) , screen pixel issues ( 1 is stuck and I’m sure more to follow) and wifi problems that I am sure i will have the privilege of experiencing in the near future.  Those issues are not the worst part though.

Sprint is the 3rd biggest cell provider in the country and their policies and customer service reflect that.  My experience with Sprint customer service is once you bought it and got past the 30 day period YOUR SCREWED!  I am 12 days over my 30 day return period and they are completely unwilling to work with me to resolve the issues.  The Sprint repair center I visited today said they could replace the phone under warranty ONLY if they were to receive a non functioning phone.  Well of course when i got to the store the contact in the 3.5 mm jack became unstuck and the phone worked again so they wouldn’t do anything.  But lets say it didn’t work for them either, they still would only replace it with another Palm Pre that would have had the same known hardware issue.  What am I paying the insurance for if they are gonna give me another phone that has a 99.9% chance of breaking too!  That’s like a Ford recall for exploding gas tanks only to replace it with a gas tank that could EXPLODE!  I can understand not taking a return on a phone that is 2 or 3 months past the return time but 12 days, Really?

Sprint is really on the ball with their plan options and included services but their customer service as the 3rd in the market needs some attention.  My love affair with the Palm Pre was was fiery at the start but is quickly over much like the ability to use the headphone jack for fear it might break my phone.  It was a nice try and a good start to rebuild the Palm name but the bar has been set pretty high by things like the iPhone and the Android OS.  Palm needs to hit those marks before i will buy a Palm device again.  Maybe the HTC Hero can save me?

The remote application accesses your Boxee media center PC via Wifi and requires no server side application (other than Boxee obviously).  The iPhone/iPod  has two user interfaces for control.  The first is a gesture method that displays a Boxee logo in the middle of your device screen.  Place your finger on the icon and slide up down or side to side to simulate using the arrow keys on your keyboard.  Tap on the logo after you’ve highlighted your selection to accept, much like a mouse click.  The second user interface is called “Buttons” and its just what you think.  Select the buttons mode and a set of direction arrows, OK button and a back button appear on your device.  A volume slider bar across the bottom of the iPhone/iPod screen will adjust the audio of the computer being controlled.

The iPod/iPhone will also display thumbnails of the current video playing on Boxee and a Now Playing button will display Artist and Title of any music playing.

Boxee Remote Control will work with Boxee Media Center running on PC, MAC and Linux.  Go get it today!

Apple Itunes Store – Boxee Remote

Boxee Media Center

The Debian package was a quick one click install with no hassle. Set-up of the software was the same.  Simply enter the name of your HAVA box, enter your password, and click on the connect button and away it goes. Be careful as the IT wants to make the first character a capital by default. Video on the LAN is superb. It’s leaps and bounds better than the equivalent slingbox mobile and desktop players.  The best part of this is that it’s portable. You can take your IT (Internet Tablet) wherever you want to go, you can even watch an episode of House in the bathroom if you want.

The video and audio on the LAN is very good and remote viewing over the Internet isn’t to shabby either. This will obviously depend on the quality of your Internet connection. I have a pretty poor connection at home (Stay away from housing developments that use Hcontrol) and I can still view a show with decent quality. The video does have a tendency to get out of sync with the audio from time to time but, this is a slight offset and should be improved before the final release to the general public. The HAVA unit is also capable of streaming HD content from an external HD Tuner. I played with this a little yesterday and it does work but, there’s nothing to exciting about it. The quality was the same as standard definition content but, I guess if you want to see your local broadcasters HD2 weather channel, then it’s a plus.

The user interface is simple to navigate and provides quite a bit of control. The software includes four generic remote control surfaces that include a standard number pad with channel up/down, a favorites pad with 12 programmable favorite buttons, an STS remote with standard sat receiver controls, and a generic PVR control for playing recorded shows. The last function is not implemented yet. The only way to view recorded shows at this time is to record and then transfer them to your Nokia N800/810.

Overall, I have to take my hat off to the folks at Monsoon, good work.  This is an application that a lot of people have been wanting for a long time and the people at Sling refused to provide. Thank You.

I received the Hava Platinum HD in the mail a couple weeks ago and quickly ripped it out of the package (Christmas Morning Style).  The contents included the Hava Platinum HD, Ethernet cable, 2 Component HD cables, 2 AV cables, powers supply and CD.  The Component and AV cables are standard RCA connectors on one end and 1/8th inch 4 contact phono connectors to interface with the Hava box.  The Hava Box is capable of streaming HD channels across your network and has HD pass through so you can place your Hava Box in-between your cable box and TV, hence the two HD cables.  Audio is only standard stereo unfortunately and is handled by the AV cables minus the video plug.  Hell, if you wanted 5.1 surround, go sit in front of your 72 inch plasma with your 3000 dollar surround system with your 18 speakers.  That’s what you bought it for.

Heres the rundown:

Hava Platinum HD- HD and Standard Definition, IR blasters for cable or Sat box control,wired Ethernet only, recording or time shift capabilty to a PC and NO built in tuner.

Hava Wireless HD – HD and standard Definition, Standard Definition tuner built in, IR blasters for cable or Sat box control, wireless bridge built in, recording or time shift capability to a PC.

Hava Titanium HD – HD and  standard definition, IR blasters for cable or sat box control, wireless USB dongle with future support for N networks, recording or time shift capability to a PC.  This unit also has an internal hard drive or 2 USB ports to plug in an external drive for recording.  This function is in beta now. No built in tuner.

As of today, Hava only supports Windows based software for the player.  The software has a nice interface and is easy to set-up and use but the real advantage these units have over the Slingbox is that they are developing the client for the N800 and Linux support.  Thanks for showing the penguin a little respect.  More on this later when I get my copy of the Internet Tablet software.

First off, the Kindle is Amazon’s entry into the ebook reader market.  It joins the Sony PRS-505 Reader which has been around for awhile but, it adds a lot of interesting features such as a free built-in wireless connection that allows you to tap into Amazon’s online bookstore from just about anywhere you can access Sprint’s EVDO cellular data network.

The Kindle is similar to the Sony Reader. The Kindle is 7.5 inches high by 5.3 inches wide by 0.7 inch deep and only weighs 10.3 ounces. That is about the same as your average paper back. Both devices have 4.9-by-3.6-inch (6-inch diagonal), 600 x 800-pixel screens. The screen on both readers uses a technology call E ink. E Ink is an electrophoretic display.

From Wikipedia:

 An electrophoretic display is an information display that forms visible images by rearranging charged pigment particles using an applied electric field.

E Ink is a type of Electronic paper display. From Wikipedia:

Electronic paper, also called e-paper, is a display technology designed to mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper. Unlike a conventional flat panel display, which uses a backlight to illuminate its pixels, electronic paper reflects light like ordinary paper and is capable of holding text and images indefinitely without drawing electricity, while allowing the image to be changed later.

There are several different technologies to build e-paper, some of which can use plastic substrate and electronics, so that the display is flexible. It is considered more comfortable to read than conventional displays. This is due to the stable image which does not need to be constantly refreshed, the large viewing angle, and the fact that it uses reflected ambient light. It has a similar contrast ratio to that of a newspaper and is lightweight and durable, however it still lacks good color reproduction.

One annoyances of E Ink technology is that the screen takes a second to refresh. The result is it tends to blink when you change the page. Amazon has done a good job of minimizing this so it isn’t that distracting but, for those that have not used an E Ink display before, it might cause unnecessary concern. Considering you can read the screen in direct sunlight, the trade-off seems worth it.

Amazon opted not to use a backlight which might strain the eyes during long sessions. The result is that you’ll need a well lit reading environment just like you would with a real book. The Kindle has a 185 MB of user-accessible internal memory and is expandable with the use of SD cards. Memory cards up to 4GB are supported. That is a lot of books. The Kindle also supports playing MP3s and Audible audio books. The MP3 player is a little restricted in that you can’t select which MP3 to play. It will only play them randomly. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future firmware update but, for now, that feature is pretty useless.

Navigating the Kindle interface is pretty easy. There is a home button that takes you to the main list page of your content.  There is a scroll wheel that you can use to select lines of text and menu items along with next page buttons on both sides of the device. There is a pervious page button on the left side and back button on the right. Altogether, navigating is pretty intuitive. When you are viewing the home page, a click of the scroll wheel allows you to sort the list of your content by author, date, or title and to show just books or periodicals. You can bookmark key passages of what you’re reading, and (using the keyboard), make, edit, and export notes. The Kindle also saves your place when reading anything, so you can always pick up where you left off. One of better features is the built in dictionary. You can use the scroll wheel to select a line of text on the page. By default the dictionary will look up all the words on a selected line so you don’t have to worry about selecting a specific word or using the keyboard.

One of the Kindle’s main advantages over the Sony reader is the built in EVDO cell connection. This is included mainly to allow you to download purchased content from Amazon without the need for a computer or too be in range of a Wi-Fi network. Luckily, there is no charge for this connection and Amazon was nice enough to include a basic web browser. The browser is fairly slow and doesn’t handle link and image rich web pages very well but, if all your are looking for is a quick answer, it does the job. One of the main features of the built in browser is the direct access to Wikipedia. Basically you have an entire encyclopedia with you at all times. Another cool feature is by pressing Alt + 1 you are taken to google maps which, in conjunction with cell triangulation, using the built it radio, can roughly show you where you are. Sort of a poor man’s GPS.

Downloading books wirelessly to the Kindle is generally a very pleasant experience. You can search for titles or authors in the Kindle Store or scroll through the national and Kindle bestsellers lists (Amazon is currently offering more than 90,000 titles, including 90 percent of the current New York Times bestsellers).

Kindle is compatible with a few file types. Most files have to be converted. Amazon provides you two ways to convert your files: you can either send attachments wirelessly to the device’s personal e-mail address, which will cost you $.10 per attachment or you can send them to a “free” Kindle e-mail address that you access via your Windows or Mac OS computer and then transfer the converted files to your Kindle manually via USB.

By default the Amazon Kindle supports the following formats:

Here’s the simple nuts and bolts to make this work with your system.  The Software is simply an application for your N800 or 810 and a server application to be installed on your mythfrontend. 

Mythetomer N800/810 app: 

To install the Internet tablet program, navigate to this page from your Tablet and click the download link below.  Follow the prompts.  Easy.

Download Mythetomer app

Server App:

On your frontend machine open a terminal window and type in

sudo wget http://netti.nic.fi/~icewood/mythetomer/file.php?file=mythetomer_0.2-1_i386.deb

After the file downloads to your machine type in a terminal window

sudo dpkg -i mythetomer_0.2-1_i386.deb

Done!

You will now need to shutdown your frontend if you haven’t already and start the mythetomer server.  To do this simply open a terminal window and type “mythetomer” and press enter.  Add a & sign at the end to run it in the background otherwise don’t close the terminal window or the server will stop.

I set mine up last night using the WLAN in my home and it works great.  The software gives you a remote control surface on you IT with number pad, direction arrows, menu and esc buttons, volume and channel up/down, and player controls such as play, pause, skip forward and back.  I have not tried the bluetooth connection as of yet cause I really have no need too but I might play with it a little later to see what happens.  The performance of the software is top notch, easy interface , no lag on button push and pretty steady connection.  I did have an issue once where the server croaked and the N800 lost its connection.  This required me to shutdown the frontend and restart the mythetomer server which to say the least very frustrating.  I am currently working on a Cron job to monitor the status of the mythetomer server. 

Overall its a good piece of tech gadgetry available for download.  I like it and it works much better than my Lirc based machine remote.  Give it a whirl.

Mythetomer Website

1. If you have cable TV or satellite your probably just fine. The cable companies will still be broadcasting their content in standard definition. They do have digital content on their systems but you wont be able to see it.

2. Buy a new TV

3. Purchase a digital to analog converter box. This is a unit that will accept the digital broadcast and down convert it to a standard definitions analog signal that your 1970’s console TV will accept.

If you fall into the group that never purchased cable or satellite TV and are still watching Opie and Aunt Bee crunk it up in Mayberry, you will need a set-top box. This is more than likely, partly, due to the fact that many people cannot afford to pay for cable or sat TV. There is help out there though. Congress created the set-top converter box coupon program to help lower income families continue to use their analog televisions after the transition deadline of February 17th 2009. The program allows households to acquire up to 2 coupons worth 40 dollars each that can be applied to the purchase of qualified converter boxes. You can then take these coupons to any participating store which include Wal-Mart, BestBuy, Circuit City, and Radio Shack to purchase a converter box. To apply for this coupon, go to www.dtv2009.gov .

Remember February 17th 2009

I bought a TomTom 720 for every member of my family for the holidays this year and have received nothing but positive reviews. I kept the TomTom 920 for myself. I know, kind of sneaky.  Anyway, that is why I am interested in any upcoming TomTom upgrades so, when I came across this, I decided to post it.

GPS review has a good review of the yet to be released TomTom GO 930. Outside of the black case it doesn’t look like there are many visual changes. New features include, Active Lane Guidance, static intersection images and IQ routes. You can probably guess what active lane guidance does. IQ routes has significantly improved route time estimations. Head over to GPS review to check out the full story.

Read more

Over the the last few months I have been able to integrate sirius with MythTV, my Linux and Mac laptops, and now my Nokia N800 internet tablet.

Radio? We don’t need no stinking radio!

I would like to give credit for most of the grunt work to jtyrrell and m00s3computer of the internettablettalk.com forums. All I did was clean up their instructions and verify the procedure.

If you have an older N800 that’s still running OS2007, upgrade to OS2008. The instructions for upgrading your OS can be found here.

The first step to installing sipie on your N800/N810 is getting root access on your internet tablet. You have two choices. You can either enable R&D mode or use the SSH method to gain root privileges. This is required to install the necessary packages.

You can find the instructions for enabling R&D mode here.

To use the SSH method you have to enable the maemo Extras repository in your application manager.

You have to do this either way seeing we are going to install the dependencies for sipie from this repository.

ApplicationManager->Tools->Application catalogue…
Edit maemo Extras
Uncheck disabled box
Click OK and wait for the refresh

Once that is done, you can go back to the application manager and install openssh. You could also goto the maemo site and use the one click installer from your Nokia internet tablet.

During the install it will ask you to set a password. Once the install is complete you can open xterm (Utilities > Xterm) and type the following at the command line:

ssh root@localhost

Enter your password. You should now have root privileges.

If you chose to enable R&D mode you can open xterm (Utilities > Xterm) and enter the following at the command prompt:

sudo gainroot

Now that you have root privileges on our Nokia internet tablet, we can begin to install the dependencies for sipie.

At the command line enter the following:

apt-get install mplayer python2.5 python2.5-dev python2.5-setuptools wget

Next install the BeautifulSoup python extension by entering the following at the command line:

easy_install BeautifulSoup

Change to you home directory.

cd /home/user/MyDocs

Download sipie from this site. I made one change to the scripts from the default. I increased the mplayer buffer from 32 to 1024 in the cliPlayer.py script to avoid skipping. Other then that, there are no changes. I just created a tar archive so you could easily install sipie using wget.

wget http://packratstudios.com/download/sipie.tar.gz

Untar the archive by entering the following:

tar -xvzf sipie.tar.gz

Change to the sipie directory:

cd sipie

Launch sipie:

python sipie.py

At this point you will be prompted for a username and password for sirius, whether you are a subscriber or guest, your location, the stream you want to listen too, and the text of a captcha file used to verify you’re human . If you are not a subscriber then you can sign up for a free three day trial at sirius.com.

The stream is usually the name of the station you want to listen to. For example, thevault, atlnation, or octane. It is always lower case and if it is composed of two words there is normally, but not always, and underscore between the words. You’ll have to play around with name. You could get this from the windows player. The stream name is part of the URL, I believe.

By default the captcha file is saved to the root of your home directory. Unfortunately you can’t see this directory in the file manager. In order to view the image file, enter the following in a new xterm session. Don’t close the original xterm session.

Of course you’ll have to repeat the method you used to gain root access in this new xterm session but, once that is complete, enter the following to move the image file.

mv /home/user/img*.* /home/user/MyDocs

Once this is done you can goto the file manager and open the image file in the preview application. Once you have the text (yes it is case sensitive) you can return to your original xterm session and enter it. Thankfully, you only have to go through this process once.

If everything went right you should start hearing your stream after a few seconds.

To end the stream and change stations you have to enter Ctrl+C. You also have to do this to exit the application.

Someone let me know if there is a better way to do this. I haven’t tried entering exit or quit yet.

Enjoy…

Of course, like the title says, this media drive comes with a HDMI port as well as composite connections. Furthermore, the unit upconverts SD content to 720p / 1080i and even comes with a remote.

Not bad for a reported $289.00 street price.