Archive for the ‘Technology’ category

HelloTwitFace – now with Summize search!

May 20th, 2008

For the past week I’ve been toiling away on integrating Summize into HelloTwitFace.  Screen06 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.

» Read more: HelloTwitFace – now with Summize search!

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iPlayer on MCE – very promising indeed

May 16th, 2008

I picked up on this from Ian’s blog but this has got to be one of the best Media Center plug-ins in development at the moment.  If you’re in the uk you’ll have heard of the BBC iPlayer, basically we have a “uniquely” funded broadcaster and they are making much of their content available for free in the UK.image

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.

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Freesat is comming…finally, oh and a recommendation for a FreeView aerial

May 6th, 2008

Stuff-em-up-the-hill-backwards has an interesting piece with links etc, on Freesat’s launch today in the UK.

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.

 

Gigaboost Digital TV Aerial Kit 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.

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hellotwitface minor update

May 1st, 2008

Ok. That caught me out. I think twitter updated their xml format on Tuesday. On Wednesday hellotwitface stopped working, it wasn’t immediately obvious but they added an extra tag inbefore the user tags on the friends timeline.

It’s now fixed and an update is available through apptodate.

I’ve also included a sneak peak at the next release, with is using http://tweetscan.com to fine all your replies. hellotwitface is moving into a phase me becoming a mobile mashup for twitter and related services.

If there’s a feature you’d like comment on this post!

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

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Wii-Fi Woes

April 29th, 2008

We just got a Wii.  It’s so cool!  What wasn’t so cool was the wifi situation.image

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

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HelloTwitFace 2.0 Available

April 27th, 2008

htf2It’s taken me a couple of weeks but here is version 2.0 of HelloTwitFace!

This was quite a major update, the main portion of which was moving away from using m.twitter.com to using the API and the great new tweets display that includes the image of the person twittering.  There’s what’s new:

  • Nice twitter interface
  • New De-Scobleizer tab – the ability to move one of your contacts into a separate tab
  • New Icon 
  • Automatic refresh at user set interval up to 10 minutes

 

Go get it from here!

Screen04 Screen05

Screen02

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Poundland blog

April 23rd, 2008

Who knew that this existed.  Following on from my post last week, The best things in life are free…well a pound, I’m proud to say that I received a ping back yesterday from www.poundlandblog.co.uk that’s quoting what I’ve said about them.  I’ve subscribed so hopefully I’ll find out when they have more £1 gadgets.

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next hellotwitface update

April 22nd, 2008

Another hard night of geeking out and I’m almost there. There are a few ui changes to make and I still have to work out how to create a cab that doesn’t overwrite all files but its getting there.

The new version has a nice new twitter tab.

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

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HelloTwitFace update

April 17th, 2008

I’m planning on updating HelloTwitFace at the weekend, probably late on Saturday with new feature I’ve been working on.  I’m going to move the twitter tab away from simply using http://m.twitter.com to using the twitteroo 1.4 API to build my own twitter stream.  I’m planning on including an interesting feature in that too.  The option to keep the mobile page will be there still too.

For now, as they’ve been requested and I need to upload them, here are two screenshots.

Screen02 Screen03

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HelloTwitFace launch

April 12th, 2008

I’ve just spent this evening on a bit of a GeekOut quest.  I’ve just put the finishing touches on HelloTwitFace.  It’s a really simple app that combines three of my favourite mobile sites, hellotxt, twitter and facebook.

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!

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