Technology
Entries related to technology.
Random Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/08/2011 - 22:21Yesterday, I was significantly delayed in my trip home by flood waters across the Wilber Cross Parkway. I mentioned this in passing in my latest blog post on the CHC blog.
There was an interesting question on Quora, Assuming Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination in 2012, who will be the Democrat's nominee in 2016?
I posted a list of some of the younger Democratic Governors
I’ve started playing with dscover.me as another way of tracking sites that I’ve visited. It seems to work fairly nicely, only showing sites youve white listed, and allowing you to delete different pages.
I’ve also started using sitesimon. I haven’t done enough with it to get a strong sense. However, I worry that it’s Facebook connection may be a bit spammy. Meanwhile, I continue to use OneTrueFan as another way of tracking sites I’ve visited and sharing them.
The one other site I started playing with recently is SocialCam. Seems okay, but I don’t see it really doing a lot for me that I’m not already doing with Qik.
That’s it for today.
Random Notes
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 20:57So, recently, I received an invitation to Diaspora. I have logged in and looked around. It looks a bit better than the early version I had run on one of my servers, but it is still pretty primative. I have a few invitations and a friend is writing about it, so I gave her an invitation.
I also logged into Jumo a while ago. On Quora, I asked if anyone is doing anything interesting with Jumo and got no response. I haven't been back there very often.
NACHC has set their own social networking site, Health Center Voice. It actually has a little stickiness, with various tasks to do to promote health centers, and badges and points you can win. Pretty nice.
I received a book that I've been asked to review, a medical thriller. Sounds interesting, but I don't really have the time, so I want to load it on my wife's Nook. Unfortunately, it was sent as a word document and not as an epub book. So, I've been playing with Calibre to convert documents to epub format. It looks like it has worked and I've loaded the book on my Nokia N900. I'll load it on my wife's Nook later.
Had an interesting day learning more about electronic medical records. Lot's to write on that when I have time.
More later...
Further Roku Explorations
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/25/2011 - 21:40The other day, I wrote about a new Roku Player that we recently got. I mentioned, that you can connect to port 8080 on the Roku to send commands, similar to what you do with the remote control:
press up
press down
press left
press right
press select
press home
press fwd
press back
press pause
I mentioned getting an Android app, RoMote that uses this to make the Android a Roku Remote. It works pretty nicely. However, there are other ports, 8085, 8086, and 8087 that are open that no one seemed to know what they were.
I received various comments about what other people are doing, much of it around YouTube. Playing around with the Roku, I couldn’t find YouTube, so I searched online, and found out about private channels. Private channels work like the regular channels on a Roku, but you have to go to the Roku website, login, and enter a code for a private channel there. Then, the new channel will show up in your channels on the Roku.
thenowhereman has a list of a couple of the key private channels, including YouTube, Archive.org, Twitter, UStream, NASA, and PodTV. PodTV is a neat channel that gives you lots of different podcasts to chose from.
To me, this raised the question, how do you create a channel? Can anyone do it? Well, it looks that way. Roku Developer gives you information about becoming a developer. It is free to be a standard developer. On the site, you can download the developers kit, the developers guide, and lots of other fun stuff.
In the developers guide are two interesting tidbits. The first is how to get into developers mode. On the remote, you enter “Home 3x, Up 2x, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right”. I had problems the first couple times I tried because I entered back instead of Up. When you get Developers mode running, it starts a webserver on the Roku that you can use to install programs. It also mentions that port 8085 is the debug console, so you can see what is going on while the programs you are testing run.
There are lots of other interesting combinations, such as one to turn on tcpdump, etc.
So, what are developers doing? One idea that I find interesting is to use Roku as a MythTV front end. I’m not running MythTV right now, but it seems like an interesting thing to try. To push things further, people are writing about Boxee and Vudu and Mubi. Perhaps I’ll figure some way to tie together some of these different pieces.
Exploring the Netgear Roku Player
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/23/2011 - 10:07I’m a fairly frugal sort of guy, especially during these difficult financial times and particularly when it comes to electronics. My primary desktop computer is a salvaged 1996 era server. My primary laptop is also salvaged, about a 2004 vintage machine that I reformatted to run Linux. Other computers around the house are from different groups I’ve worked with and are mostly in various states of disrepair. I have a digital camera. A refurbished 2007 device that was my third upgrade of refurbished versions of a gift I got probably around 2001. We have not upgraded to HD TV or to Blu-ray player.
Yet yesterday, Kim and I went out and purchased a Netgear Roku Player (NTV250). Fiona was having a sleepover at a friend’s house, so it was going to be date night. I checked through the movies playing nearby and none of them seemed all that interesting, especially if it was going to end up costing somewhere around $30 between tickets, popcorn, etc.
Kim has been watching movies from Netflix on her laptop, which she has enjoyed, but gathering around a small screen to watch a movie just might not cut it for date night.
I’ve been interested in the Roku player for quite a while, and I saw that there low end model starts around sixty bucks. That is would be about the same as two date nights at the movie theatre. So, I searched around to see if there were any for purchase near where we live.
We did find a slightly higher end model at a radio shack in a neighboring town, so we went out and picked it up. One of the things I like about the Roku player is that you can connect it to your old fashioned TV using composite cables, or to an HD TV using an HDMI cable. What this means is that I can use it with my old TV right now, and later, if we ever upgrade to an HD TV, we will still be able to use it.
Reviews online said that it was easy to setup, but some people said that customer support is a bit lacking. Plugging in the cables and powering things up took but a few moments. It took a little longer to register the Roku player online and get it connected to our Netflix and Amazon accounts, but within minutes, we were ready to go.
The design is very simple. It is a small box with a few ports in the back to connect cables. The remote has eight buttons. Navigating the Roku is very simple. The downside of this is that if you want to search for specific movies on the Roku, it can be difficult and time consuming.
On the other hand, if you use your PC to select movies and put them in your queue, it becomes very easy to play them on the Roku. So, we sat and watched a movie last night, and the Roku worked great.
We also spent a little time configuring other things. I added a news channel and listened to some BBC and NPR programs. I set up Pandora and listened to my Pandora station. I even hooked up Facebook and looked at some of my Facebook pictures.
Being the geek, I was interested in finding out how open the device really is. Much of it is open source, but the operating system is fairly well locked down. You can telnet into the device on port 8080 and execute a handful of commands, like ‘press home’, ‘press forward’ etc to control the device. There are even android apps that put a nice front end onto this to make an android work as a Roku remote. It looks simple enough that I could probably even create an application for the Nokia N900. However, given my other time commitments right now, I suspect I won’t get a chance to try that any time soon.
So, I’ve been pleased with the Roku so far. We’ll see what else I can do with it.
Exploring Pearltrees
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/20/2011 - 22:04A couple of weeks ago in a blog about post-delicious content sharing, I briefly mentioned Pearltrees. Since then, I’ve slowly started playing more and more with it, and I’m finding I really like it. I can get it to do much of what I’ve been looking for in a social bookmarking site.
First, the downside. It is primarily flashbased. I’m not a big fan of Flash so I view that as a downside. However, it does gracefully degrade for nonflash users, so it isn’t as much of a downside as other flash based sites are.
A second downside is that, at least as far as I’ve explored it so far, it is very hierarchical. I’m not a big fan of hierarchies, and I’m exploring to see how to subvert them in Pearltrees. Trailmeme seems to address both of these downsides fairly well, but it feels like newer, not quite ready product, and I couldn’t get Trailmeme to easily do some of the things I want, so I’ll save Trailmeme for later.
Now, the things that I like with Pearltrees. You can set it up so that when you treat a URL, the URL shows up in your Pearltrees drop zone. This is nice. You can then drag the URL into wherever you want in your Pearltrees. It has a bookmarking tool, so you can go to a webpage and automatically add it to your Pearltrees, your drop zone, or do a bunch of other things.
You can allow other people team up with you on a Pearltree, which I’ve done with one of my subtrees. You can also set specific icons for different trees. For the different pearls, you can add comments. This is important to me. I hate to go back over recent bookmarks and not be able to figure out why I bookmarked a site. It becomes even more important for collaboration.
When you add a comment, the pearl displays with a yellow ring around it, making it easier to find pearls with comments.
When you click on a pearl and bring it up within Pearltrees, you can click on ‘Pearls’ in the lower left corner to switch back to the Pearltree mode. There are arrows that you can use to scroll through pages you’ve added, and you can quickly add comments to the pages in this mode. You can also use tools to share the page or open the page in a new window. As a final note, you can export the data in XML to use in other systems.
I expect I’ll spend more time exploring this. Check out My Pearltree. If you’re using Pearltrees, drop me a note. Perhaps we can collaborate.
