Posts tagged box

Blackberry Coming on Strong with new Stuff

Blackberry is introducing new APIs for there 5.0 software. This will definnitely make their phone more competitive as new smartphones come quickly into the marketplace. The new APIs will significantly enhance productivity, functionality, and entertainability. Push functions, in third party apps is a big thing. As new apps come on line with push functionality, your message box will become increasingly important and useful.

At Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Developer Conference Monday, the company made a slew of announcements that aim to boost the platform’s appeal to developers.[Source]

The message box is already a communications dynamo. It integrates all of your email, sms, mms, and instant messaging into a single inbox. How much better can it get? Apparently much better. More message, more consolidation, more features.

XBMC – MythTV – What to Use for your Frontend – Backend

I have been using MythTV for some time now, and it covers all the bases. .21 works great, and I have no doubt .22 will be even better when it reaches stable. I use the backend to capture firewire in HD. It organizes, categorizes, schedules everything in an intuitive way. I used the frontend for some time locally and remotely, but I have come across a superior alternative. XBMC is simply superior. Albeit it is unstable at times, but so it the MythTV frontend. I bought a lowend mac mini a while back and had linux on it to run a remote MythTV frontend. I though “I have mac hardware, why no try and use a native mac application?”. I tried XBMC for mac, but I could not get it to actually load the movies. It would see and create a screenshot of the movies, but they would not play. I then looked into a forked version that actually worked as XMBC should have. OSXBMC worked out of the box; they call their fork Plex. It works with the mac mini remote out of the box. Set your box to sleep instead of shutdown, and you have an instant on low power PVR. Just add a video source: myth://mythtv:dbpassword@192.168.0.100 Look up your mythtv database password in /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt. Its at the bottom of the file. It can be tricky at first to setup your MythTV backend to serve remote systems. You have to use mythtv-setup as well as bind mysql to the local ip of the computer rather than localhost. Configure mysql in /etc/mysql/my.cnf. Check out OSXBMC/Plex at:

Plex logo

Plex logo