Kitchen table of the future demoed by NY Times R&D Lab

Posted on Thursday, September 1, 2011

There was me thinking the NY Times was just a newspaper, but no, apparently they’ve got a full-blown research and development lab too. Amongst the cool things this lab has cooked up is their vision of the kitchen table of the future. It borrows heavily from Microsoft’s Surface technology, but has some really nice interface metaphors, such as the way you delete photos by just skimming them off the table. Full walkthrough in the video below.

Augmented Reality TV Shopping

Posted on Friday, August 26, 2011

Here’s a terrific innovation from Sony which enables you to buy the right sized TV (Sony TV, natch) for your room. It utilises a simple marker card which you mount on the wall and then photograph in-situ. Having uploaded the photo to the Sony site you can then view a series of perfectly scaled TVs in that space, enabling you to opt for a 50″ behemoth for the living room, rather than that 28″ one your partner’s been insisting on.

iFlick – Bringing media centre video goodness to iTunes for Mac

Posted on Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Here at Geekosity Towers (oh alright, it’s a suburban home in semi-rural New South Wales) we have a Mac Mini in the living room which runs EyeTV and Plex. Between the two of them most of our multimedia digital entertainment itches get scratched. However the bottom line is that all we really use Plex for is watching movies on – we hardly ever touch the streaming online video, the pictures function’s pointless, the music facility’s clunky as hell and even the weather module’s crap. So given these requirements, a solution that combined iTunes with Plex’s video facility would be very welcome.

Enter stage left, iFlicks which the developers undramatically  suggest enables you to “easily import your Video Collection into iTunes.” The description sells the end result short. What iFlicks enables you to do is import your videos into the comforting world of iTunes, re-encode them if necessary, download all the relevant meta-data (covers, IMDB scores etc), watch them and export them to iPad, iPod or iPhone if required.

Let’s break that feature list down a bit further. Firstly, the iFlicks is a separate application that functions outside iTunes – its job is to ease the transition of your TV and film entertainment. Services enable you to encode your video in a format best suited to the medium you’ll be playing it back on. Meta-data that’s downloaded automatically for each TV show episode or feature film is added in an iTunes friendly format.

Meta-data downloads tap into either themoviedb.org or TheTVDB.com depending on whether you’re working on a film or TV show. Lots of useful info is sucked up from these two mighty databases and added to your newly converted video files. In addition a funky cover is downloaded and embedded for use in a funky Cover Flow environment.

iFicks can convert video for  iTunes, Front Row, Apple TV & Apple TV 2, iPod, iPad & iPad 2, iPod, iPod Nano and iPod Classic along with iPhone and iPod Touch. You simply drag the offending video file into the main window, choose a preset and destination location for the finished article. Obviously processing speed of conversions depends entirely on the source material and the Mac you’re running it on, some won’t need any conversion and can be added directly, others such as MKV files will take longer – we converted a 4Gb MKV and it took four hours on our 2010 Mac Mini.

iFlicks is an impressive application and the ideal addition to a home media centre setup. Some may prefer the cloistered environment of something like Plex, but from where we’re sitting, embedding all this content into iTunes is an elegant solution that cuts out the middleman. If you simply want to fold your video collection into iTunes and don’t need the fluff of a full media centre application it’s the ideal solution.

iFlicks is available online or in the App Store and costs $22 – there’s a 30 day trial version available on the website.

Tversity – Your Videos on Any Device

Posted on Sunday, August 7, 2011

The problem with digitising your TV and movie collection is that it often restricts where you can view your shows. If you have a media centre plugged into the large family television then that’s where you have to watch, which makes curling up in bed to watch a downloaded film a bit tricky. It’s for this reason that media streamers have become so popular lately because they enable you to leverage the power of your home network to broadcast multi-media (film, TV, music, radio or pictures) to any similarly network enabled device.

Many media centre applications offer streaming capabilities and even something like the humble VLC Player is capable of broadcasting on an IP, but it takes an application like Tversity to wrap that sophistication within an easily understood GUI that can be used by the non-geeks in the house.

First things first – while Tversity (Windows only) is free, there’s a pro version available that adds some cool features to the application. What sort of features? Transcode to H.264, on-the-fly iPad/iPhone/iPod transcoding and built-in access to BBC iPlayer and Hulu. By default the free version does offer streaming to current generation consoles (Xbox, PS3 and Wii), but not hand-held Apple devices.

After installation and a reboot, there’s the set-up process during which you add your media folders to the system and enter your log-ins for Flickr, YouTube and Picassa. Then it’s simply a question of pointing your network connected to device at your Tversity IP address and you can begin viewing the content. Pretty much anything with a browser can access the server though some things have to be converted prior to streaming in the free version. The built-in tagging system and simple web based menu system makes finding your way around Tversity very simple. It effectively means you can organise your library in the way you want, with your categories and definitions.

Tversity is an easy application to set-up, administer and use. It enables you to watch your shows on anything from a Blackberry to an iPad by just accessing the server’s IP address. Transcoding does of course depend on your network and you’ll get much more out of the system if you have a recent router/switch, particularly if more than one person is likely to access the server at one time.

Radiation detector? There’s an app for that

Posted on Friday, July 29, 2011

Leaving aside for a moment the effect of radiation on spiders that bite New Yorkers, radiation has been in the news lately. The Fukishima reactors continue to melt their way to the core of the earth irradiating a previously charming part of coastal Japan, British nuclear test veterans are taking their cancer claims to supreme court ‎and the NYPD have introduced a ‘dirty bomb’ detection system.

What with mobile phones recently being cleared of frying our brains every time our partner phones up to ask us to pick up a carton of milk and some bread on the way home, it’s about time there was a good news story. And the Smart Radiation Detector project for the iPhone should go some way to rectifying this.

Now a fully funded KickStarter project, the Smart Radiation Detector is a combination hardware/software solution that the developers say will cost less than $50. The app that drives the hardware is already available in the app store and will display radiation detection (beta and gamma), gas mantle in the marketplace (0.5usv, contact) -> 50cpm and Cs137 radiation source (5usv, contact) -> 150cpm.

iPod Nano + Watch = Seriously Cool Time-Piece

Posted on Thursday, July 28, 2011

Here’s a company doing great things off the back of investment by general members of the public via the KickStarter website. The TikTok and LunaTik watch cases were the most funded project ever on KickStarter, pulling just shy of $1m. The company have successfully brough their unique products to market now and have started branching out with new designs and configurations.

The concept behind these products is genius. You buy yourself an iPod Nano in whatever colour you prefer and then you purchase a wrist-watch shell from LunaTik to house it in. Then you strap to your wrist and enjoy iTunes, a funky clock or the fitness app. There are a number of styles available from simple understated black, through commando and an athletic red design. The retail from $39USD for the basic TikTok model up to $99USD for the cammo-styled TakTik.

BBC Launch International iPad iPlayer

Posted on Thursday, July 28, 2011

Here’s a story that’ll bring a tear to the eye of British expats around the world and, we suspect, a sudden upturn in sales of iPads to people of British origin. The BBC, gawd bless ‘em, have just annoucned the release of the special internationally branded version of the iPlayer. It will launch in western Europe now and the US, Canada and Australia later in the year, reports the The Guardian.

There will be a certain amount of free content on the app, but you open up the motherlode of televisual and radio content by paying either a  €6.99 ($10USD, $9AUD) monthly fee, or €49.99 ($71USD, $ 66AUD) annual fee. Content from the last month will be made available along with content from the Beeb’s archives.

According to The Guardian, the development team worked closely with Apple on the offline feature. “When we were doing our user testing, the use case was picking six shows before going on a long journey, and leaving them to download to the iPad overnight,” he said. ”The way the device works, though, is it hibernates and stops you from doing that: you wake up the next morning and only half a show has downloaded. We have managed to override that functionality, and Apple are comfortable with us doing that.”

If you do want to watch on the go, the player will stream over 3G or wi-fi – we’re assuming that you’ll achieve better viewing results this way than watching BBC iPlayer over a VPN. Even better, certain other British shows from indepedent channels will be made available on the iPad iPlayer including Primevil, Misfits and The Naked Chef. Bring it on.

USB to HDMI Connector Can Hook Any PC up to the Family TV

Posted on Friday, July 22, 2011

HDMI has well and truly taken over from S-Video, Scart and Composite inputs as the way to connect your TV to your Blu-Ray, PS3 or Media Centre. But what if you want to hook up your PC to the TV and it doesn’t have an HDMI connection? What if you want to connect your portable netbook to a TV in a business environment to demonstrate something and it doesn’t do VGA?

The Sewell HDdeck USB to HDMI is a neat looking bit of hardware that converts a USB connection into an HDMI. The HDdeck takes advantage of a DisplayLink chip for output to a secondary displays and the manufacturers claim that since the USB pipeline maxes out at around 480 mbps, there’s more than enough bandwidth to provide high quality video connectivity. Of course HDMI does audio too and so does the HDdeck, converting sound out through USB directly to a TV.

As an added benefit of this device, Sewel say that it can output to up to six screens at once in 1080p. If that sounds of interest, the HDdeck will set you back $99 and is available here.

iCam – The guts of a D-SLR and the brains of an iPhone

Posted on Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Here’s a great concept that we hope will make it from the concept stage through to production. It uses the rather ingenious idea of leveraging the amazing processing power of a smartphone such as the iPhone and combines it with the high quality custom optics you get with a D-SLR system. The end result we imagine is one that avoids all the issues of traditionally weak camera phones and simultaneously ushers in an era of app based ‘firmware’.

The idea of the iCam is simple – you buy a shell of a camera which can utilise high quality lenses such as Canon or Nikon and into that shell you insert your iPhone. Docking the phone with the shell automatically starts a camera app that enables you to take the photos, set aperture and exposure, white balance, optical zoom and all the other niceties of real photography. The possibilities, as you can imagine, are virtually endless. Imagine having all the inventiveness of an app like Hipstamatic backed up by professional grade glass – or the ability to instantly share very high resolution images instantly to the cloud or your social media sites.

The iCam, which recently won a covetted reddot Concept Design award was conceived by Turkish designer Zeki Özek. We can only hope that an enterprising manufacturer snaps up Zeki’s amazing design and brings it to the marketplace because we imagine there would be considerable interest in such a product.

[via Rexplore]

K-Lite Codec Pack 7.20 Released

Posted on Sunday, June 19, 2011

One of the biggest issues on Windows media centres has always been around the playback of exotic filetypes. Packs such as the K-Lite suite were a blessing in this regard because they packaged up all the codecs and the players required to use them and offered a one-stop download.

This latest edition includes updates to Media Player Classic Home Cinema, updated ffdshow and updated Xvid amongst many other changes. If you have K-Lite installed already you should update and if you don’t have K-Lite installed, get it here.

Watch UK/US TV Abroard – The 2012 Beginners Guide

Posted on Tuesday, June 14, 2011

I first wrote this guide over at my personal blog. It got picked up by Lifehacker and is in the Stumbleupon archives, so it still gets a fair bit of traffic. I’d been threatening to update it for some time and, with the new Geekosity site I figured that now was the time to do it. So if you arrived here afresh or were redirected from my blog, welcome.

When this guide was first produced four years ago, there were far fewer opportunities for the homesick expat or traveller to view TV from home. Since then, as broadband speeds have grown ever more capacious, so have the options. Enterprising companies have started branding themselves directly in order to attract these customers and existing suppliers have produced special products. All that being said, the general thrust of this article hasn’t changed. The bottom line is that if you want to watch TV from another country, it’s far more convenient to simply download it and watch it later than it is to attempt to view either live or via a specialist country-specific player application such as iPlayer or Hulu.

Authors note: I live in Australia and my principle interest is in viewing UK television and the better American output, however many of the topics discussed below apply equally whether you’ve living in Perth or Panama.

Update: 12/10/11 – If you’re looking for a quick and simple automated TV show downloader, check out this tutorial I just added to the site.
Update: 23/04/12 – Check out this iPhone/iPad app that lets you watch UK TV channels live!

Broadcast

Before you dismiss your new country’s televisual offerings out-of-hand, have a good look at the schedules. Depending on where you are you’ll probably find a great deal of UK and American TV. Here in Australia the national broadcaster (ABC) is virtually a British TV channel on some nights of the week. Moreover the national 24 hour news channel (again, ABC) broadcast an hour of news from the BBC in the small hours of the morning. Invest in a decent media centre or a satellite PVR (either Foxtel IQ or MyStar here in Oz) and you can record these programmes broadcast at exotic times of the night.

Satellite TV

Satellite broadcasters weren’t slow to capitalise on the foreign visitors market. On Australian satellite TV there are numerous UK channels, such as UKTV, Lifestyle and BBC Knowledge – I’m sure the situation’s similar in the USA. In fact there’s so much ‘homegrown’ telly on the satellite here that you may well find you don’t need to go any further afield to satisfy your cravings. What may force your hand is the age of the programmes being broadcast, soap operas broadcast on satellite here are famously behind the UK.

Internet

Far and away the cheapest and easiest way of getting your fix of British TV is to download it. Yes it’s illegal and yes everyone’s doing it – but if you’re the nervous type I’d still stick to satellite TV.

Downloading Shows via Torrrent

Without doubt, the best way of infesting your PC with spyware and viruses, is to download bent software, movies or music. But then you probably already knew that, right? It’s a bit like smoking – many of us are prepared to take the risk. Unlike smoking, however, you can cut down on your chances of contracting something undesirable by staying away from the dodgier download sites. Get a decent antivirus and antispyware package on your PC and instead get your pirated TV shows and movies from torrent sites.

To download you need a torrent program such as uTorrent on the PC or Transmission on the Mac. Install them. Nurture them. Love them. Here endeth the ‘which downloader program is best’ section.

In order to watch your shows once they’ve downloaded, you’ll need a decent media player of some sort. The one I’d recommend is VLC Media Player which is cross platform. Alternatively, combine your torrent downloading with a very capable viewer and use Miro. If you have a media centre then get XBMC if you’re on a PC or Plex if you’re on a Mac.

The days of having to burn your downloaded shows onto DVD are well and truly at an end. With the massive variety of purely digital playback formats available these days, it’s hardly worth bothering mentioning it. However – if you’ve burning shows or movies for a friend who only has access to a DVD player, then you have a couple of options. If you the DVD player in question can playback DivX and/or Xvid files (and it’ll probably say on the front of the player if it can) then you just just burn the files to disc as if it was ordinary data and they’ll playback fine. If your DVD player does not support DivX or Xvid then you’ll have to convert the downloaded files into full DVD format for which you’ll need something like ConvertXtoDVD.

On the torrent sites, you’re generally supposed to share as much as you download – so if you’ve downloaded at 500Mb TV show, you’re supposed to let uTorrent upload 500Mb too. However. It’s only the sites you have to register for (such as TheBox) that you have to care about that for. If you download from Pirate Bay you can stop the file uploading as soon as you’ve finished its download. It’s called doing a hit and run and it’s not the done thing to do, but fuck it.

Once a file’s finished downloading (and if you’ve uploaded as much as you want to in order to keep your ratio high at sites like The Box), you can click on its name in the main uTorrent window and hit the delete key to remove it. This will not delete the actual TV show or whatever, just the torrent details from within uTorrent. As long as a file remains in that main uTorrent window it will continue ‘seeding’. If you let it, uTorrent will use *all* your upstream bandwidth, which can make things very slow for web browsing and the like – so you can either limit it, or just leave it going overnight (which is what I do). If you want to limit the upload speed, so you can browse the web etc without slow-downs, open uTorrent and go to Options > Preferences > Connection … and in the bottom right where it says ‘Global maximum upload rate’ set it to 10. This won’t harm the speed things download at – just the amount of upstream bandwidth you donate to sharing the files.

Torrent Sites

There are zillions of torrent sites, but just two are exclusively devoted to all things UK – they being UK Nova (the original British TV torrent site) and The Box (the new kid on the block). For more general TV downloads I can recommend Pirate Bay and Demonoid.

Now the thing to bear in mind with sites like UK Nova and The Box is that the people that run them have a rather inflated sense of their self worth. They seem to have forgotten the fact that they’re helping to peddle pirated copyrighted media and instead think they’re great big throbbing cocks of love. The truth is halfway between the two. Anyway – the specialist torrent sites take things very personally when you simply download what you want as quickly as possible and then stop. It’s also pretty difficult to register on either of the aforementioned sites and so you’d be spiteing yourself if you didn’t share as much as you snag. Personally I find all that ‘upload as much you download’ business so draining that I go out of my way to download anywhere but UK Nova and The Box.

Direct from the Source

As you may or may not be aware, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 have made many of their programmes available online. They’ve all followed pretty much the same model – some things are available for just 7 days after they air on TV – others can be downloaded whenever. They usually come equipped with nasty DRM (digital rights management) that means that a) you can’t watch them anywhere but blighty and b) seven days after you’ve watched them, they self-destruct like a cheesy Mission Improbable prop.

To make matters worse, the BBC (in particular) employ some very effective geographical IP scanning, which means that unless you are physically located in the UK at the time of download – you can’t watch nuffink. Guv.

VPN Tunnels

VPN Tunnels are a good way of getting round geographical IP checks. There are numerous companies offering there services in this market and as more and more broadcasters have begun locking down their feeds to other countries, they’ve also started marketing themselves as a specific solution to the geo-IP lock-out. The VPN Tunnel creates a direct secure connection between your computer and the server operated by the VPN company. Once you’ve connected, your IP address will cease to be Australian (or American or whatever) and become a UK/US one. When you want to watch or download something from iPlayer or Hulu, you just connect the VPN tunnel and start downloading. It really is that simple.

You can find the BBC’s iPlayer here, ITV Catchup here and Channel 4 on Demand, here. Fill your boots.

Some people have had success using a proxy based software/subscription service called HideMyIP. The software costs $29.95 and then you’ll need to pay $7 a month for the premium subscription service to get yourself a useable UK based IP. If anyone’s actually used this service and can both stream and download from BBC iPlayer – please let me know.

The current favourite amongst homesick telly addicts, however, is Expat Shield. This uses a simple proxy to fool the foreign servers into thinking you’re in Birmingham and not Barcellona. Even more amazingly, Expat Shield is completely free. The only problem I have with it is that whenever I’ve tried to use it, it’s been chronically slow. However I know plenty of people who swear by it – so give it a go – you’ve got nothing to lose. Oh and unfortunately, it’s Windows only at this time.

I recently stumbled upon a new cool (and free) VPN service that worked really for me. It’s called TunnelBear and comes in both Windows and Mac flavours. For free you get 500Mb of bandwidth to play with, which is useful for testing the service out. If you decide it’s working really well for you then the full service is a very reasonable $4.99 a month. We had really good results with this VPN watching BBC iPlayer from Australia – and if that works well (given the 12,000 miles between me and the server) you can be pretty sure that everything else will.

I recently gave Unblock-us.com a roadtest, using the company’s 7 day trial period to view BBC iPlayer in the UK and Hulu in the states. While Hulu playback was fine from here in Australia, the iPlayer wasn’t – it buffered endlessly and after bumping the video quality down to dialup grade, it ground to a halt. Your mileage may well vary depending on where on the planet you are and what size pipe your modem’s plugged into.

I’m used to be a paid subscriber at Strong who are the biggest  of the VPN companies and while their service is not without its faults, it works okay. I never got terrific results streaming from the UK to Australia, but US feeds were, for the most part, fine. The main issue I had with Strong is that switching servers is a pain in the arse. On other VPN services I’ve used, you simply set up a couple of concurrent VPN accounts and join the one that’s appropriate to your viewing requirements. However if I set up a UK based VPN on Strong and then want to change to an American server to watch Hulu, I have to log into their control panel, select a new server and then enter a new username and password. It’s a silly setup, but since I hardly bother with Hulu these days, I just leave my UK connection active.

Current VPN Recommendation

This is the BBC iPlayer app running on an iPad using UnoDNS service to bypass the Beeb's region-blocking.

The service that I currently use is called UnoTelly. I reviewed their service here and have found their solution to watching region-blocked TV to be far and away the best I’ve used. UnoTelly’s UnoDNS service gets round a couple of major problems quite neatly. Firstly, it’s easy to setup and requires no extra software. Secondly you can set it up on your modem/router and all the attached computers, smartphones, media centres and TVs on your local wi-fi will have access to the service. Thirdly, the same service affords access to UK and American region blocks with no changes required. Fourthly and most importantly, it totally rocks – I can stream BBC iPlayer live and in high resolution from the UK to Australia and that’s something that no other service I’ve used has ever managed.

Alternatives

If you want full hi-def quality with AC3 5.1 surround sound then your best option is to sign up to one of the better Newsgroup providers (like Astraweb) and download your shows automatically in 1080p. If you use a server based download application like SabNZB and get an account at nzbmatrix.com or newzbin.com then you can set up simple search expressions to download your shows as soon as they become available.