LG 22LU5000 HD LCD TV – Hackable

So I bought a new LCD TV for my bedroom, the old Sony 21″ 4.3 TV had finished it’s tour of duty.

I ended up with a LG 22LU5000 22″ LCD tv YouTube video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt8s_m6dFi0, mainly because of the price I have to say (DKK 1.750,- aprox € 233)..  So how is it?; well picture quality is a big thumbs up, the menu system is fair (I miss being able to name the channels myself) but the sound is dreadful (yes it really suck when it come to sound, it’s something they call invisible speaker …..  yeah, it almost sounds like they forgot to include a speaker)…  Oh well, as mentioned the price is very fair and it is only for my bedroom, so I guess I can live with a bit poorer sound.

What however proved to be really cool and a total surprise was that the tv/firmware was hackable, it allowed for a hack that enabled a USB mediaplayer within the tv..  So now I can plug a usb disk into the service USB port on the TV and play xvid, divx and mkv files   now that’s cool…  I had even bought a WD TV Mini for that job (before I learned about the hack) but hey I guess I can use that in the living room

If you have a LG tv, take a look here, maybe your model is equally hackable cool…
http://lgusb.wikispaces.com

Comodore Amiga 25th birthday – happy birthday

On July 24th 2010 it is 25 years sinch Comodore released their first Amiga, the Amiga 1000.

Even though I never had one on the ‘original’ first Amigas (the Amiga 1000) I quickly followed with an Amiga 500 followed by an Amiga 2000 which by it’s retirement was totally modded with custom rom’s, level7 interrupts and what not..

I was actually quite involved in the scene at the time; http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/The_Silents (Cyborg) it was good times indeed   incredible that we did it all without the internet at the time…  Nostalgic as I?  Check this; http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+silents+amiga&aq=f

The Amiga’s was truly ahead of their time, long live their memory..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1000

Noise cancelling headphones

Noise cancelling headphones are really cool, what they do is to monitor the background noise around the user and then sends inversed noise into the headphones thus canceling the noise.  This technique is among other places used on aircraft carriers to protect the ears of the flight crews, and many frequent fliers use them to remove the annoying humming when flying. 

So, the technology is cool, however two problems exist with most noise cancelling headphones;

1. Price (they are often very expensive)
2. Power (usually these headphones require an extra battery pack for the noise cancelling part which is bulky and unsexy)

But these Blackbox i10 headphones seem to have something going for them, 1) Not THAT expensive (still the price is not for the faint hearted) and 2) The power issue has been solved in an excellent way by using the ipod 30pin connector (which does require an ipod or an iphone)..

https://www.blackboxonline.com/ca/pages/i10-Earphones.html

Office 2003 -> 2010 Help / Tip’s and trick’s

Did you just recently upgrade from Office 2003 to 2010 or are you just having problems finding some obscure feature from Office 2003 in 2010?

Well, try this on for size;
http://office2010.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/learn-where-menu-and-toolbar-commands-are-in-office-2010-HA101794130.aspx?origin=HA010370239#_Toc256784678

It’s actually really cool, you get to select the feature in the Office 2003 gui and is shown an animation of how to find it in 2010.   And as 2010 and 2007 are very alike then this may also work for Office 2007.

Grooveshark – one of those sites you just HAVE TO visit

My colleague Jesper mentioned a web-site to me a few days ago, and I must admit that this site has been on top of my favorite list for the last few days.

The site is www.grooveshark.com and it’s a free music service.

The cool things about this service are;

1. it’s free (always a good argument)

2. it has a TON of music in all sorts of versions (different artists, mixes and remixes) 5 mill + songs

3. the interface is just excellent, totally intuitive.  It lets you ‘browse’ the music library just like you do the web, you will be on a journey through music.

4. you can make playlists which you save online and possibly share with friends.

oh yeah, did I mention it’s free well it is, and it’s totally cool.

There only seem to be one or two drawbacks;

1. it is streaming only, so you can not download music and put it on your favorite mp3 player for road-duty.

2. legality, So, is this legal?  Well, to the best of my knowledge no, but hey I am no expert on international IT copyright law.  Anyhow the service has existed for some time, and it strikes me as strange that it has not been taken down by a ton of law suits if this was blatantly illegal, my guess would be that it’s in the same gray zone as Youtube etc.

Read more about the story of the site here

This is one of the coolest sites I have discovered for a LONG time…  It does by far beat the closest similar service I know of, something called TDC Play (a danish service that require subscription with a specific ISP).

Knee defender – your friendly knee protector in the sky

Ever been on a long air flight and had to endure the person in front of you putting his seat down from start to end?  Annoying like hell..  Well here’s the trick to combat that “Knee Defender”, you lower the table/tray in front of you and attach this Knee Defender and viola the seat in front of you is locked in it’s upright position -  but yes the tray/table has to be down for this to work, nothing is free so that is the drawback to this little trick.   At a price of US$ 15,- it’s a bargain for those transatlantic trips.

Get it here; http://www.kneedefender.com/

Boxee the “WD Live TV” killer..

I somewhere read about this software a while ago called “Boxee”, it’s a new mediacenter software which can be downloaded for free from http://www.boxee.tv But with so much mediacenter software out there it got lost in the masses.  Anyway, recently I was reminded as D-Link is rattling their sable with the forthcoming release of the Boxee Box (well that is hardly going to be the name but still)..  It looks VERY interesting especially with a full qwerty keyboard being merged into the very neat remote that come with it, and it does seem somewhat more interesting than the WD Live TV (A LOT more apps/widgets) and a more finished design overall.

It does indeed look interesting.  Boxee seem to be based upon XBMC (X-Box Media Center) http://xbmc.org/download (which I btw still use on my old trusty X-Box 1 Classic)

Should you want to preview the experience you can download the free software for your pc/mac here http://www.boxee.tv/box

A few notes though;

• You need version 10.1 of Adobe Flash (currently only available as beta software), you will find it here; http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

• The box is generally good at recognizing your video and music files (even series etc), BUT if it does not recognize the media file (it does so from the naming of the file) it wont show it :-/  thus you will need to rename it to a naming convention it understands which seem silly and acquad.  From what I can tell it will be getting the data (including photos) from IMDB.
• I had some issues getting it to accept a share on a Windows 2003 server, I could ‘bypass’ this by mapping the share as a drive letter on my Win 7 machine where I ran Boxee but I am still puzzled as to why it did not seem to accept a simple Windows Share.

• A further cause of concern is, what data is reported back to the producers of this software!?  Do they get the complete list of my music, video etc. archives?  Sadly I don’t know which concerns me as you have to register to run the software

A quick look at what formats it recognizes;

Video:

• Adobe Flash 10.1
• H.264  (MKV, MOV)
• VC-1
• WMV
• MPEG-1
• MPEG-2
• MPEG-4
• AVI
• Xvid
• Divx
• PCM/LPCM
• VOB

Lyd:

• MP3
• WMA
• WAV
• AIFF
• FLAC
• AAC
• DTS
• Dolby Digital
• Ogg Vorbis

Billeder:

• JPEG
• TIFF
• BMP
• PNG

Adobe Flash Player v.10.1 beta download

So if you want to be totally up-beat or perhaps are testing out Boxee then you will want to install the latest Adobe Flash Player (Boxee actually seem to require this), but no worries you can get it right here;

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Among other things this version will add HW acceleration, neat for Netbooks as compatible GFX cards now can assist in playing video and thus perhaps adding HD playback to your otherwise slow Atom processor (however this DO require a compatible GFX card to work like the Nvidia ION and others).

Bypassing US IP restrictions and/or Surfing anonymously

If you live in Europe you are bound to have experienced being rejected, when trying to watch your favorite TV show on a US web-site – something in the line of “We are sorry but your IP seem to come from a country outside the USA” bummer – this is annoying as some US TV stations have cool tv shows available for free viewing (but restricted to the US).

So, as I have mentioned before you can use the TOR network (http://www.torproject.org/) to proxy around this problem – but TOR is an install package that may not always be appropriate to install on a company/school pc etc, along comes UltraSurf (http://www.ultrareach.com/) a simple little portable application you can put on your USB stick.

UltraSurf will once it is started open a browser and you can browse the net with a US based IP (by proxying your traffic) thus giving you access to US based webservices.  Speed is not great but seemed acceptable and I managed to get an ok mediastream from ABC (note you may have to restart the browser when installing activex components).

A word of caution, I would not share creditcard or other confidential information on a proxyed connection, you never know who/what is inspecting your HTTP traffic, HTTPS/SSL/TSL traffic should be secure though (but still think about what you are doing).

Get it here (Free);
http://www.ultrareach.com/

Show your IP (you will notice this changes once UltraSurf is started);
http://showip.net/ or http://www.ipchicken.com/

A-Team movie – There is no plan B

How neat is this, the A-Team series from the 80’s (1983) will be ‘revieved’ for a movie, sadly not with the original actors (most known is likely Mr. T., but also Dwight Schultz is very well known for his roles in Star Trek) but with a new cast and perhaps with a newer up-to-date finish ala 2010..

I for one found the show very entertaining, it was so quirky and fun – no one ever got hurt in the show, and the ‘punchline’ was always the same – build something out of nothing (a bit like McGyver) and help the underdog..

Links;
The original series; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084967/
The new movie; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0429493/

Now with trailer;