Samsung is going to release a new cool device – Ultra Mobile PC Q1 / Origami. Inside Q1 is:
- Celeron M ULV 900MHz
- 256MB (upgradeable to 1GB)
- Intel 915GMS chipset
- 60GB drive (up from 40GB!)
- Ethernet
- 802.11b/g
- Bluetooth 2.0 EDR
- two USB 2.0 ports
- VGA out
- audio out
- 7-inch 800 x 480 display
- Windows XP Tablet PC Edition with new Touch Pack
I see that Q1 can be effective equivalent of WebDT series which is used as Pluto Orbiters.
Updated: Pricing has been confirmed at $1,390 (£800). Is it reasonable or not?
Company Sling Media released Slingbox – geek device which allows to stream digital TV from Freeview/PVR/Sky box over LAN. It also supports remote control. Integration with SlingPlayer Mobile allows to watch digital TV on PDA or smartphone. For more information have a look a full list of Slingbox features. Here you can see a couple photos of Slingbox. $249.99 for this device is very reasonable price.
The bad news are Slingbox needs PC with Windows as a client with SlingPlayer.
[via PVR UK]
Nokia770 seems very popular and power device. It’s time to watch a digital TV on it using VLC. VLC is well-known the cross-platform media player and streaming server. It might be interesting to port it under Nokia770 because it has Wi-Fi connection and can be used as mobile terminal to watch video stream from your home VDR server for example.
I found the post Porting VideoLanClient by Josep Torra who started to port VLC under Nokia770. Let’s see his progress.
Recently I faced with problem: Embperl started give Segmentation fault after upgrade to Fedora Core 5. To resolve this problem Gerald Richard – the author of Embperl asked me send him Apache stackbacktrace. I didn’t do this before. I made a search and found a simple receipt howto get the stackbacktrace.
- start gdb:
gdb httpd
- we have to specify config file for Apache and define a set single-process mode (option -X):
set args -f /path/to/your/httpd.conf -X
- start Apache process:
r
- make a request via web browser
- after display a message about Segmentation fault in the gdb console type a command BT:
BT
Now you can analyse given backtrace or send it to the application author.
Another geek solution for Nokia 770 – How to use it to display GPS information. There is a detailed explanation of installation and configuration of Nokia 770. Also, the author evaluated strong and weak aspects to use Nokia 770 for this purpose.
I spent two hours to setup 64bit diskless Media Director but as result I got nothing. The Media Director booted find but on-screen Orbiter didn’t start. When it tried to run X Window it crashed. It seems that video adapter S3 Trio32/64 is not good for Pluto MD and I tried to setup another MD with different video adapter. The second PC was 32bit and had embedded on the mainboard ATI Technologies Inc video adapter. It takes more that two hours because the ISO for MD was 64bit (it was generated on the CORE) and it needed to download and install all 32bit packages. But the Orbiter started without any problems! Well the next target is to integrate VDR into Pluto which is not trivial task.
Recently I played with Plutohome which is based on Debian I found some strange thing with grep. When I tried to find the word ‘pluto’ in the directory /etc/init.d:
grep -i pluto /etc/init.d/* -n
I was very surprised when I saw error messages about missing files in this directory. It seems that grep under Debian uses locate to retrieve a list of files for specified directory. Maybe it isn’t a common case. It looks strange because the indexes for command locate are updated once at night. Some new files which are not indexed yet won’t be in the grep input and result won’t be correct.
Yesterday a new version of Plutohome – one of the best open source solution for building smart home was released. There are several principal updates related with Asterisk, Linux and SDL Orbiters, Bluetooth Dongle and hardware detection. The full change log can be found here.
Unfortunatelly, I didn’t find any additionals or improvements of VDR integration. Hope I’ll be able to configure it on my installation 
I still have a problem with boot of diskless Media Director. The on-screen Orbiter is not appiare at all.
