The arc mouse is a dream for mobile people since it collapses to less than half it’s size and it even has a very clever little magnet to hold the USB dongle-wireless-transmitter-thing.  The surface of both the mouse and the dongle-wireless-transmitter-thing are slightly rubberised and franky they feel wonderful as a result.

I’ve only got one criticism, the little back button is a bit too little…sure I’ll get used to it.

Installation is super easy, no drivers are required.  To get even more from it though grab the software for it from Microsoft which gives you access to extra features, like putting Flip3D on a middle mouse click.  Works perfectly with Window 7.

The night was a great success with presentations from Ben Nunney ( @bennuk ) , Chris Tingley ( @fringley ) , Dom Green ( @domgreen ) and from Jim who covered some pretty diverse topics.  It was great night and I decided to contribute by taking some often blurry photo’s of the whole thing.

Great conversations were had about digital identity, how newspapers and ebook readers like the kindle can coexist and far too much other interesting geeky stuff.  If you’re a geek in Reading you should come along.  Follow the blog , and the hashtag #rdggeek on twitter. 

You’ll find my Flickr photos of the event here and take a look at @amykates photo’s too.  Here are a couple of my favourite pics from the night…

[Lego man image from #0000ff;">Cardz on Flickr)

Available from these folks http://thabto.co.uk/mug.htm

[via @overheardatmoo on twitter]

It’s on the US Amazon site, but doesn’t seem to be available in the UK just yet, oh well.

I have a thing for geeky t-shirts, and this is a super example…might have to get my hands on it.  If you don’t know what it is it’s Chewbacca on a bicycle, Genius.

It’s available just here and I found out about it via the fabulous Uncrate

What we get this time though is what promises to be some hefty integration.  Bringing not only all your Live services together (which till now have frankly been all over the place) but it also allows you to start aggregating your external content, ala Friend Feed.  Mike Arrington on Techcruch has published the reviewers guide with lots of delicious detail, but this is looking good.

Potentially it’s less Walled Garden than most of the other social network sites and it also integrates your email, calendar, well pretty much every darn thing you’ve got.  The interface is also getting a far more consistent make over which is never ever a bad thing.

Reports are it’s due to be turned on this evening.

In case you don’t know, which you probably don’t if you don’t wear them, glasses can be really expensive.  I wanted a new pair so I did the usual rounds on the high street, the only pair I found that I liked were upward of £200 – that’s a new PC!!  So I decided to get online and went strait for Glasses Direct.

They have loads of styles online to choose from and with much umm and arring with my fiancé we decided on a pair, then a pair of sunglasses.  You can see the new pair in this picture, which is incidentally my new profile picture / avatar everywhere (hence the new).

I placed the order by entering the details from my last prescription (which was from a hastily purchased and ill considered pair of Ray Bans).  I got an email to say that the order was placed.

A couple of days later I got an email to say that they’d been manufactured and sent.  The first pair made it through the letter box.  They were the sunglasses, and frankly they’re great.  Normally when I put on some new glasses my eyes have to adjust for a couple of days, these didn’t.  The new specs in this picture arrived a couple of days later.  Both arrived with an edible eyeball!!!!!

So, get your glasses here.  The website is great, the service is great, the delivery (which was from SMS) was great.  I’ll be buying some more soon just for the heck of it.  Oh yeah, and they blog too.  Total cost for both pairs £91 !!!

• There’s an annoying .net framework error popping up on the Media Center every so often.
• My Harmony remote isn’t quite set up well enough.  It doesn’t work well when the Media Center is already on.  The problem is that I’ve installed a standby saving power bar, which I want to keep, but it doesn’t play nice with the remote.
• I need to find a way to ARM the Y-CAM when we leave the house and disarm it when we return.  Or I need to move it to an area with slightly less traffic, i.e. where we don’t walk all the time so that my mailbox doesn’t fillup!
• I need to be able to view the Y-CAM stream on my Windows Mobile device, or at least be able to see the latest image.  That might mean configuring FTP, which means finding a secure FTP server on the net.
• I want to workout the overall power consumption of the kit in the house.  I might be scared.
• The TV Arial just doesn’t seem to be quite right, it’s a few degrees off!  Time for cable?
• My Windows Home Server is using a bit too much power, 40kwh in standby – that needs to come down.

Technorati Tags: y-cam,media center

Having done loads of looking about the only really good thing I could find was from Y-CAM.  It’s now been delivered and it’s installed.  I picked the Y-CAM Black and bought from ebuyer, since it was about £30 cheaper than everywhere else.

Having installed it, at first it really wasn’t a great experience, it didn’t like my router and it brought down the whole network…I’ve done a firmware update now and all seems to work well.  Very well.

This camera sees really well in the dark with its knight vision, and the management software is pretty good.  Actually it’s a breeze to setup.  It can do motion alerts to email, which again was simple to setup and allows me to select 4 regions of the picture to watch for motion.

Two I need to work through at the moment:

• I need to setup FTP publishing to somewhere so that I can view the camera at work since I can’t see the active X control
• I need to get an app for my WinMo phone that allows me to view mp4 encoded RTSP…unfortunately HTC Streaming media won’t cut it.

Finally I’ve also emailed the manufacturer to find out if they have an API, so that I can develop something to easily arm the motion detection.

You can read the full review at Mobile Tech Addicts…

So time for my long awaited Squeezebox Duet review, actually make that series of posts.  I first read about the Squeezebox when it was announced, and Automatedhome.co.uk also has great review.

Whilst I was in the states I picked up a Squeezebox Duet from Fry’s in Seattle, it was actually on sale on Memorial Day weekend, so it cost $349 + TAX.  This thing is brilliant!

When I got it home it was a doddle setup.  First off, I bought this in the US, so power needed to be sorted out.  The power supplies are international and can take anything from 100 to 240v input, just a case of changing to the UK adapter.

The next thing to do was to install the SqueezeCenter 7 software on the Media Center.  Again a simple process, no install glitches – but I did have to manually start the scan of my music library.  About 20 minutes later it finished and had catalogued all the albums.

Next I installed softsqueeze3 on the Media Center.  This is a cool bit of software that emulates a squeeze box.  After configuring it with a name and pointing it at the SqueezeCenter installation, a web address on port 9000, it was able to access the media fine.  So I turned on the Duet controller.

The controller picked up my Wifi network and asked me for the security setup.  Then it found my SqueezeCenter server automatically, and, I was a bit surprised about this, it let me select my SoftSqueeze installation on the controller.  All of a sudden my Media Center was pumping out tunes controlled by my Squeezebox Controller!!

Very cool.  This thing can control any squeezebox!

So I went into the kitchen and setup a micro hifi and plugged in all the stuff for the Squeezebox Reciever.  I pressed the button on the front and… the controller sprang into life and picked up the receiver, automatically configuring it!  Next thing I know I’ve got some Fun Lovin Criminals bouncing out of the stereo in the Kitchen…and it sounds, GREAT!

Wondering what else this thing can do I found the ability to sync the output from the Kitchen Squeezebox Reciever with the Softsqueeze installation in the lounge!  This is going to be great when we have a party.

Next I went into SqueezeCenter, which is really the heart of everything and found that I can control all the squeezeboxes through the web interface.  Including being able to make changes to them.  So I did, I changed the names, the Softsqueeze to “Lounge” and the Duet Reciever to “Kitchen”.

This is becoming one cool whole house audio system.  Need to sort out Media Center integration though, enter MCE Softaqueeze.

How would I rate ease of installation 5 stars, Ease of use 5 stars.  I love this thing.

Comming soon:

Part 2 – Overview of the Squeezbox controller

Part 3 – Looking around SqueezeCenter

Part 4 – Extensions

Part 5 – The wish list

For the past week I’ve been toiling away on integrating Summize into HelloTwitFace.  Summize replaces TweetScan as HelloTwitFace’s replies and search tabs.  This was a challenge as I’d already built in RSS reading capabilities to read the TweetScan results, but Summize works with ATOM.  I did some diggining and finally got it working…and I have the start of a Summize .NET API.

I think this is the first Windows Mobile app out there to include Summize capabilities.  Summize rocks by the way, it is SUPER FAST!

Deets on how to use what’s new after the jump.

So how do those new features work then?  Simple, you click on “@” to see all replies sent to you, including those that just mention you with an “@” in there and thoser replies that come back when people have responded to many people at once.

Search is simple too, click the “Summize” tab and enter the search criteria.  All your searches are cached locally on your device.  Note not the actual results but the search criteria, I did that ‘cos like the rest of the app, I find it useful.

The final change is also one that’s under the hood, but it won’t crash now when TweetScan goes down.

Final comment, when you download me, follow me, @simonster , on twitter.  I release HelloTwitFace about 24 to 48 hours in advance on twitter and to AppToDate users.

Martin Millmore has created this great plug-in as the beeb have been a bit slow to react to making a Media Center interface for iPlayer, although they have made one available for wii, I must sort that out (not to self).  What I love about this is that its nice and clean and installed really easily.  Lots of the other hacks out there to get this working require the local iPlayer client, this plug-in doesn’t require that as it will display the stream’s that iPlayer offers.

The streams are by the way, watchable, not amazing but not bad either, I was able to watch the Madonna performance at The Big Weekend last week absolutely fine.

There is a minor niggle with the plug-in in that it needs the mouse to start the stream, not a big problem as there is software to make the Media Center remote work as a mouse.

Martin, if you read this post, then there is one improvement I’d like to see…a blue background.

]

A few sources are today talking about facebook opening up their chat application to jabber capable clients. I’ve talked about this before and I can see this being the killer thing for the fb chat platform, which to be fair has been lack luster in its growth.

I see this as being a kin to to twitter opening their api, just like most tweets come from other app’s that’s what will happen to the fb chat platform.

Notice that I’m calling it a chat platform.

Opening it up in this way is going to encourage some really cool app developers to come out with cool things! On the mobile front apps like palringo are gonna sky rocket in their use, any kind me identity aggregation will take off with high use of the elements the combine. The very widespread and diverse user case of fb will lead up to more people chatting. I think we will also see some asynchronous methods me using fb chat popping up, like sms to chat services.

This space is gonna get very cool, very quick, mark my words!

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

Via: Paul’s blog, techcrunch

From my point of view I can’t wait to see support for this in Media Center, there are some codec changes that need to occur for MC to be able to view the Sat channels, which I think are MPEG-4.  Hopefully this will come from the Direct-TV changes being made for the US.  This will give us HD TV in Media Center in the UK quite nicely.

Also over the weekend I upgraded my parents Digital Terrestrial aerial with one with a really great, and now VERY highly recommended bit of kit from Maplin.  I bought this unit, Gigaboost, it gives a 16dB boost to the signal and is simply the best Freeview reception I’ve ever seen!!  Installation was fairly simple, following electrocuting myself on a mains cable loose and un-terminated in the loft!  It’s powered mast head amplified unit.

In other news HTC are due to announce their “Manilla” or “Touchflo 2″ interface today, so we’ll see how that pans out.

As you’ll know I’m using DDWRT on my Buffalo router, I’m gonna change to Tomato soon as something keeps dropping out, apparently Wii has a problem with this out of the box!  I’m just trying a little fix, that’s posted just here.  I’m writing this as I do run through it….

I’ve disabled my encryption, yikes! And I’ve now got the Wii connecting and updating firmware.

Cool, that’s done, now to turn the encryption back on (WPA2-PSK TKIP).  Back into … oh need to set my laptop to no encryption…back into DDWRT control panel and encryption back on!

Now to change the settings on the laptop to encrypted, then on the Wii … umm that’s a no go.  Wha! the routers vanished!  Must have restated itself.

Lets try changing it to WPA2-AES+TKIP.

Wii = YES!

Laptop = YES!

Right, now to see what this Wii can do…expect updates

I think this is the first app to include hellotxt in any way, let me know on that one.

It’s a very simple Windows Mobile app that draws the mobile versions of the above into a tabbed environment and uses hellotxt to do the updates.  I’ve been using it for a week and it seems to work really well.  I’ve also built in MoDaCo AppToDate support and it works just great!

Now to tell people about it!  Oh and sorry about the rubbish Icon!

First up I should explain how I use these services, firstly I’m very mobile, typically I don’t do two days running in the same office and I’m all over the country and I travel by train…you might see frustration in my twitter or my FB status.  Every day I use a personal laptop, a work laptop, my personal Hermes phone and my work BlackBerry Pearl.  I need my stuff to stay in sync.

Google Reader (Greader) – this is a great online reader, I use it to aggregate all my RSS.  I can access it from every device it’s totally web based and always in sync.  Why don’t I use something like News Gator?  Simple I can’t install it on my work laptop or BlackBerry.  The items I share in Google Reader appear in my FriendFeed and my Shared items.

FaceBook – rather obviously it’s a brilliant social site.  I update my status regularly and automatically with FBMCE and with FindMe and using the mobile version of the site.  When I finally get a code for HelloTxt that will be brill, I’ll be able to update my twitter status too, making HelloTxt a killer app…especially with an API!

National Rail Enquiries Wap Site – Lame I know, but the wap site is the most useful thing that National Rail do.

del.icio.us – Great social bookmarking, took me a while to get into it but now I use it exclusively and can see friends and colleagues bookmarks too.  Tagging makes it semantic and yes it’s part of my FriendFeed and you can find my shared bookmarks.

Google Browser Sync and Foxmarks- I use Firefox 2 for all my browsing and wherever I am, my Firefox stays in sync.  I use Firefox as a portable app too.  Foxmarks also keeps things in sync, but normally I use del.icio.us for bookmarks.

WordPress – That’s where you’re reading this.  I moved here from Live Spaces because it’s more flexible.  I get quite a few hits from the WordPress community, and WordPress tags.  I use the mobile version to view my stats and occasionally to post from my phones.  I have two blogs, this one and one for my house renovation.

Sharp Cast – I currently use Sharp Cast to hold all my photo’s, I moved there from Picasa, it’s great ‘cos it just keeps things in sync.  I think I’m going to move away though because I like idea of the Windows Live Gallery and Flikr hookups and because Flikr is much more customisable and semantic than Sharp Cast.

iGoogle – My homepage is iGoogle, I tried Live but I just prefer iGoogle.  I have a number of gadgets, including my stock portfolio (not as grand as it sounds) my scheduled recordings on Media Center,  my Gmail,  and Google Reader.  I’ve just added the FriendFeed gadget too.  What I really love, and what really suits my mobility is the PDA version, here I have BBC news, stock quotes and Google Reader items all in one place.

Hotmail – Obvious to all, but using Windows Live Mobile it sync’s with my Hermes.

I think that’s about it for now, but speaking of mobility, I’m currently on a train, writing this on Windows Live Writer packaged as a portable app, writing off line, and I’ll have to setup the vast array of links later.

cctv: I want to be able to remotely monitor the house while we are away from home. By that I mean being able to monitor the front door and have it capture the face of all visitors. I also want it to alert on approach to the house.

Media Center setup: I want to change the setup so that the current MC box becommes a WHS box. We’ll buy a new PC which will becomme the media center. In the master bedroom I want to have a v2 extender, or possibly an X360. In the kitchen I want a squeezebox to pull music down from the WHS.

The Phone: I’m currently thinking about upgrading to the Touch Plus on T-mobile, unless Orange an beat the deal! I’ll be moving to a normal data package, so I’ll be able to use it to blog during the day, to check the home cctv and setup and anything else good.

Home automation: I want the lounge to be on IR remote control from the Harmony remote. I want the rest of the house to be on HomeEasy and for all that gear to be controlled by the Media Center! Need to work out a way to control the loung on that…perhaps I should re think the IR control in the lounge?

Security: I want an alarm for the house that notifies us about all sorts of household alerts, doors / windows left open, smoke, motion etc. I also want some of the house lights to turn on on approach to the house.

I think thats all the tech projects covered…they may be changed a little with our trip to Seattle in May.

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

The Basics
The basic PC is actually quite old, I bought it to replace something stole during a break in over 4 years ago!  It’s a Compaq Presario 6000.  It’s got an AMD Athlon 2100 XP in it and an NVidia MoBo.  It’s been a very sound box over the years.  It’s currently got 1.25gb of RAM, I think it’s PC2300, from memory.  And a 40gb Hard Drive…wooooo.  It’s got a basic graphics card.

What makes it a Media Center or HTPC?
That’s where the hardware gets mildly more interesting.  I’ve also got a 300gb HDD in it.  Simply put it’s partitioned into two, a 60gb partition used for recorded TV and the remainder for “media”, be that music, Archived TV, Archived DVDs, or photos.

The next important addition is the tuners.  I have two, both over USB2.  I have a Hauppage USB2 DVB-T Diversity Stick, which has the potential to be great but doesn’t work that well for me, it’s a dual tuner stick with Diversity (that’s two aerials to give a better quality signal).  It should work as dual tuner, but as soon as I do that it starts to conflict with my Media Center IR blaster (bean bag).  The second is a Hauppage USB2 DVB-T unit.  This unit’s great, its the rock of the system, I wish I had two.

Next is that bean bag thing.  That came with the Hauppage USB2 DVB-T unit as it was an MCE unit, does what it says on the tin.  Which leads me on to the remote…which is quite cool.

The remote is a Logitech Harmony 525, highly recommended.  Its programmed over USB from some really cool Logitech software.  I love this thing, but I want the top end version…other things to buy first!

To enable the USB I’ve got a USB2 card, I had to shop around and find one with an ALi chip set, I had a VIA chip set card and it SUCKED!!!

Sound comes courtesy of a X-Fi Audio card and some Altec Lancing Speakers.  Currently in a cut down 5.1 setup – no back speakers.  Again I’m not happy with the support of this card, it’s OEM but come on Creative are usually quite good, support on Vista has sucked and it doesn’t do half of what it should.

Finally there is the Tesco Value Webcam.  See this post for what it does.  Note to self – play with that more.

So that’s the hardware setup, oh display is courtesy of a cheap Beko LCD TV which we will be upgrading when we actually have a lounge!

Windows Live Writer Portable 2.0 Now with U3

LifeExtender – This app extends your life! It sits and goes through your recorded TV and removes the adds. I have it configured to do this at 10am every day, as that’s when we are less likely to be watching. It’s just been updated. I learnt about this from The Green Button.

myTV – This is a really cool tool for managing your archived TV shows. I love the “helix” display, so cool! myTV took me a while to get setup properly and I’ve blogged about that before, in my opinion this is the single best independently created plugin I’ve seen. I learned about this from the Australian Media Center community.

TVTonic – What this app does well is allows me to watch on10.net content on a big screen. That’s all I really use it for but it can do much more. I learned about this from on10 actually.

K-lite Codec Pack – For ages my box was crashing whilst we were watching TV. I recently found this codec pack and that has mostly gone away. My box is much more stable now.

VNC – This is simple remote control, I use it to do most of the work on the Media Center. This is a staple tool that ITPro’s have been using for years.

FBMCE – This is a neat little too that’s just come out for updating your facebook status with what you’re currently watching. Jason Langridge’s blog turned me on to this.

WebGuide – The guy that created this now works for Microsoft, this is one of the best bits of software out there for Media Center. I use it to access my Guide from my phones to remotely record stuff!

Yawcam – I’ve just set this up, so just have a look at this post for more.

DivX Converter – Great, simple software. I use this to convert stuff to view on my mobile.

I think that’s about it, I’m looking something cool for managing movies that aren’t in DVD format and that isn’t myMovies.

So I picked up a Tesco Value Webcam and found the rather good Yawcam software after lots of searching. Good webcam software is hard to find. I now have, for less than £6, a motion sensitive security camera. It works too, bit needs some tweaking to get it right, I had 40 emails from it today. Oh yeah, that’s what it does, emails me when it detects motion and runs a web server that I can connect to to check in on it any time.

Todo: make it run through IIS, make it less sensitive, work out a way to activate it when we leave the house.

PointUI - I love this, it totally takes over the device and makes it very finger friendly.
TCMP – I don’t use CorePlayer, mainly because I’m tight, but this works perfectly.
HTC Audio Manager – Much friendlier on the fingers than MediaPlayer
TomTom 6 – I’ve tried other stuff but this is my current favorite SatNav
CMP - Comm manager pro, this does location based profile switching – I bought it
S2u2 – Really nice locker app
moBlog – Great application for blogging on the go!
FTouchFlo – TouchFlo for devices like mine that don’t have it.

I’ve also installed countless little fixes from my two favorite and probably the best WinMo sites, www.modaco.com and www.xda-developers.com

The Media Center show interview & Media Center in the kitchen!?

I think this device would complement it really well (if it were a full Media Center, not an extender).

This little baby is the new DiNovo mini from Logitch and it has to be the greatest little keyboard I’ve ever seen. It would look super cool in the kitchen!

It’s Bluetooth and back light changes depending on what it’s doing, green for media, orange for normal keyboard. It’s got a Green orb, and it’s palm sized!

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I generated this here: http://qrcode.kaywa.com/.

What I think is going to be really cool is the evolution of the MSR Lincoln project, you take a picture of an object and it tells you about the object…endless possibilities there.

Si

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