Thin client hacking
For the past few weeks I have thought about setting up a thin client pc for my kids, over the weekend a fried decided to give me an unused compaq T20. These are tiny devices with no hard drive and a minimal operating system , they are pretty gutless but are designed to access other terminal servers.
Any way the one one I got was still provisioned to another company so i set about re-flashing the firmware back to factory settings. on the HP web site you can get a utility called netxfer which is a bootp/tftp server to deploy the new firmware , unfortunately after trying to set it up on 3 computers all i could get was
"Unable to start the application--the Java Virtual Machine cannot be loaded.
Class not registered"
So I gave up on that idea and set about hacking back some admin rights. This machine came out of a business enviroment so was locked down but not compleatly untouchable. By defualt when it was turned on it booted into a session and automatically started an ica client. all other apps were removed from the start menu , right click disabled , run command killed, browsing in explorer disabled. So what to do ? well my first goal was to get a command shell opened , from there I at least had something to work with.
First I opened the control panel , this was locked down with very few tool available but the address bar was showing so I typed in a url, when the site opened I selected view , source, this open in notepad. Then I deleated all the contents and replaed it with , cmd.exe , then I selected to save this to the desktop as a batch file. At first this failed, only flashing up then closing, so i edited the file wo be cmd.exe pause cmd.exe. Saved , now this work I have command prompt.
Media center options
Over the holidays I have been looking at rebuilding my media center system. What I really want is a back end system that can look at network drives and transcode that to front end systems like ps3, xbox, psp and windows media center.
Here's what I found
Neuros osd
http://www.neurostechnology.com/
This is the most promising system , would love to get my hands on one..
This is more of a media managment system that allows you to organise your downloading of videos but is not much of a media center as such.
Boxee
http://boxee.tv/
This is social media center app that recomends videos. Pretty cool but lacks the abailty to stream to psp and ps3.
There are plenty of other systems out there but these are two that really suprised me.
Windows 7 beta download link
Product keys from here ( when its back up )
But untill then apperantly the slmgr -rearm command will give you 120 days grace
OLED flexiable screens comming soon to a home near you.
An Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED), also Light Emitting Polymer (LEP) and Organic Electro Luminescence (OEL), is any Light Emitting Diode (LED) whose emissive electroluminescent layer is composed of a film of organic compounds. The layer usually contains a polymer substance that allows suitable organic compounds to be deposited. They are deposited in rows and columns onto a flat carrier by a simple "printing" process. The resulting matrix of pixels can emit light of different colors.
looks pretty cool , would imagine the price of laptops falling more , batterys lasting longer and maybe even stronger
Mmm Touch screen
Just cant help but thinking this would make a cool coffee table with pong and be able to switch over for home automation and mediacenter control.
Find stuff thats like other stuff..
So , say you like some band but becouse you have been listening to it on your Ipod for the last month you are getting pretty sick of it. Thats where tastekid comes in, no its not some cannibal-pedofile playground, its a search engine that recomends other things you may like based on your search terms.
Open Pandora
[youtube 1WOMFrOCti4]
- ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
- 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
- PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
- 800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
- Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
- Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
- Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
- 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
- Around 10+ Hours battery life
MMmmmmm
What Camera should I Buy?
I have been looking around at DSLR's for a while now and think I have managed to get my choices down to two brands , Sony and Canon. Now I know a lot of people would shudder at the idea of a sony but looking at the specs they are really good value but.. the sony uses alot of their own attachments like shutter release and flash mounts. On the other hand Canon is much better knowen, has a broader range and better 3rd party support but tends to cost a little more.
So I am looking at spending approximatly $1000 - $1200 on a camera , for that I want a good body and preferbly a twin lense set up and hell thrown in a 1 gig card. What are your suggestions ?
Eee pc 901 review part 3
Today I threw the default eee OS back on the eee, I found the system to be very intuitive and easy to use. I was able to do basic things like create documents and play movies without needing to install any other software. Overall I would guess that the preinstalled apps would cover most people needs.
The one thing I really missed was the typical start menu style I was accustomed to, however I didn’t have to look far to find out how to enable the start menu. You can find out here http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:icewmstartmenu
To be continued…
