Computing – Page 25

Boxee Beta and Box unveiled

December 9, 2009December 9, 2009 Doug Groves beta, Boxee, Boxee Box, D-Link, Linux, Mac, Media Center, Windows5 Comments

I’m a huge fan of Boxee which is, outside of Windows Media Center, my favourite way to access media on my TV. Boxee, a social networking aware media center, has been in alpha for a long time, and Monday night’s beta announcement marked the next step for the company that wants to be your media portal to the world. With the announcement of the beta program (chock full of screenshots), Boxee has been given a new look along with new functionality. The menu system appears to have more polish, making…

Top publishers aim at digital distribution

December 8, 2009December 10, 2009 Doug Groves AP, Associated Press, Conde Nast, eBook, eReader, Hearst, magazine publishers, magazines, NewsCorp, publishers, publishing, Time Inc3 Comments

Imagine reading a headline like “5 top publishers plan rival to Kindle format” from the Associated Press, and it started off like this… Five of the nation’s largest publishers of newspapers and magazines plan to challenge Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle electronic-book reader with their own digital format that would display in color and work on a variety of devices. You’d think that big name ‘old media’ was about to play hardball, especially if you kept reading it. The article continues to make confusing references to a ‘Kindle challenger’. This lead me…

HP Mini 311 with Windows 7 and ION now in Canada

December 1, 2009December 1, 2009 Doug Groves HP, ION, netbook, Windows 70 comment

Although available for some time beyond Canadian borders, the HP Mini 311 line of netbooks have finally appeared in Canada. Although still using the single core Atom N270 processor, the Windows 7 Home Premium Mini 311-1033 sports 2GB of RAM and Nvidia’s ION graphics processor along with an 11.6 inch LED backlit display for $499. The 1033’s little brother, the 311-1000 at $429 has the lower powered ION LE GPU, which has less addressable memory, and is wearing last years fashions in the OS department, with XP Home. Both, luckily,…

RED Scarlet: Film resolution for the rest of us?

December 1, 2009 Doug Groves Red, Scarlet3 Comments

The RED ONE camera has been around for a while now, showing it’s chops as a replacement for analog film for a couple of years. Since then, Red also annouced two new cameras, including the Scarlet which is aimed squarely at the prosumer market. Well, the details are out thanks to the RED user forum, and although they added a little more ‘pro’ to the pricing than originally announced, the specs are pretty impressive. The ‘all-in-one’ Scarlet fixed 8x lens and brain will be priced at $4750 (US). This price…

Stantum multitouch running on a Slate PC

November 27, 2009November 27, 2009 Doug Groves display, multi, multitouch, resistive, Stantum, Touch Park3 Comments

Stantum, who earlier this year demonstrated their innovate resistive touch screen technology which incorporates both multitouch and pressure sensitivity on a mobile screen at Mobile World Congress are showing a new update to the Touch Park software. This time it’s running on a Slate PC, which is a modded Dell Mini 10 netbook. This suggests that Touch Park has moved on up in the world to the x86 architecture found in PCs. Among the capabilities are pressure sensitivity, pixel resolution and 10 point multitouch. There’s no mention if 10 points…

Harmony Universal Remote Roundup

November 26, 2009February 16, 2010 Doug Groves Harmony, Harmony 1100, Harmony 700, Harmony 900, Harmony One, HTPC, Logitech, review, universal remote7 Comments

Before the Canadian company Intrigue Technologies (makers of the original Harmony remotes) was bought out by Logitech, obliterating the remote clutter in one’s living room or den was largely an exercise in frustration, either dealing with incomplete solutions or spending hours ‘training’ your universal remote to do exactly what you wanted to. If you were one of the few, you actually made the leap to the JP1 forums, which turned certain models of remotes into veritable powerhouses of IR control, after making a custom cable that allowed your Radio Shack…

“Rogers On Demand Online” – Hulu North or just another VOD?

November 24, 2009November 24, 2009 Doug Groves Hulu, Rogers, VOD0 comment

We’ve talked about the lack of a Hulu-type service in Canada on a number of occasions. In the US, Hulu is a free service that allows users to watch full TV episodes and movies from a number of content providers in an on-demand service on their computers, either via a web browser or dedicated client. The service does contain advertising, but is less intrusive than watching over the air or cable broadcasts. Rogers announced that they have partnered with 15 network content providers to allow streaming of content from 19…

AOL is dead. Long live Aol.

November 24, 2009 Danny X America Online, AOL, time warner0 comment

AOL today unveiled its new branding, and people are less than impressed. The new corporate identity, created by hotshot design agency Wolff Olins New York, involves using a set of hundreds of different backgrounds to sit behind the new mark in which AOL is written Aol. (don’t forget the full-stop). Landing on this design was the result of a long and winding road which included research, testing, and creative reviews, all to answer the question, “should we even stick with the AOL brand?”

If you smoke your Mac could be a biohazard.

November 23, 2009 Doug Groves Apple, smoking0 comment

That’s right. According to a Consumerist story, at least two individuals had their Applecare extended warranties voided because the computers lived in households that had at least one smoker. The resultant residue inside the machines was enough to have them considered biohazards by Apple. To be clear, it’s not that the computers were damaged BY the smoke, but the presence of nicotine in the computer itself. Today, April, 28, 2008, the Apple store called and informed me that due to the computer having been used in a house where there…

YouTube getting all Hulu – that’s a bad thing

November 20, 2009November 20, 2009 Doug Groves google, online video, Popcorn Hour, YouTube31 Comments

Starting on December 2nd, YouTube is planning on blocking access to content based on where and how it’s being delivered. This according to Popcorn Hour’s COO Alex Limberis: On November 18, 2009 Syabas, makers of the award-winning Popcorn Hour product line, uploaded a message to their Media Service Portal that said, “As of Wednesday, December 2, 2009, YouTube will no longer be available to Popcorn Hour users.” Please understand that this is neither a technical glitch nor a decision the company has voluntarily made. To be clear, Google has changed…

Internet Explorer 9 getting HTML 5 support and GPU acceleration

November 20, 2009 Doug Groves IE 9, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, Windows0 comment

Internet Explorer may be the most popular browser in the world, but that’s only due to its inclusion with Windows itself. Mozilla’s Firefox has been steadily clawing at IE’s market share for a couple of years now, and Google’s been pushing Chrome, though with less success, so far. Microsoft tried to change that with IE 8, which actually has a very nice interface, but still presents rendering issues in a number of sites, rgbfilter.com included. This is supposedly going to change with IE 9, with more standards compliance in general,…

Google Chrome OS reveal party

November 19, 2009November 19, 2009 Doug Groves 1 Comment

It’s been a while since Google first announced its foray into the desktop OS market, but today is the launch party, and the open source project is free to download. If the above video, in all its treacly glory, isn’t enough of an indication, Chrome OS may already be obsolete. The new OS is a lightweight Linux based operating system targeting low end computer systems such as netbooks running both X86 desktop and ARM based mobile CPUs. It’s designed from the ground up to run inside the Chrome browser, right…