Free Speech / Patents

Going in to business

Lately my toying around with media centers has created some opportunities for commercial work in this area, which has been a pleasant change. As a result of this I’ve formed Noisy Media, a company specialising in the development of media centre apps for systems such as Boxee as well as the creation of customised media applications using XBMC […]

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ABC iView on Boxee

A few months ago I switched from using the standard mythfrontend to Boxee, a web enhanced version of the popular XBMC project. Now Boxee has a LOT of potential and the upcoming Boxee Box looks very promising, but its fantastic web capabilities are let down here in Australia as things such as Hulu and Netflix streaming are not […]

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Command line Skype

Despite risking the occasional dirty look from a certain type of linux/FOSS supporter, I quite happily run the (currently) non-free Skype client on my HTPC. I have a webcam sitting on top of the TV and works flawlessly for holding video chats with family and friends. The problem I initially faced however, was that my HTPC is 100% […]

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License quibbles (aka Hiro & linux pt 2)

Since my last post regarding the conversion of media from Channel 9’s Catch Up service, I have been in discussion with the company behind this technology, Hiro-Media. My concerns were primarily around their use of the open source xvid media codec and whilst I am not a contributor to xvid (and hence do not have any ownership under […]

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Channel 9, Catch Up, Hiro and linux

About 6 months ago, Channel 9 launched their ‘Catch Up’ service. Basically this is their way of fighting piracy and allowing people to download Australian made TV shows to watch on their PC. Now, of course, no ‘old media’ service would possibly do this without the wonders of DRM. Channel 9 though, are taking a slightly different approach. […]

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Election season

So it seems that there’s quite the election ‘fever’ (yay sportsfans!) going around at the moment. Obviously the US election has had the bulk of the limelight and I have to admit to having followed it far too closely since late last year (Along with my election buddy, Soporific Frog. Thanks for the memories). Somewhat less grand (yet […]

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Yet another mandatory clean feed post

So, yes, the mandatory clean feed has been generating a lot of noise lately and the Federal Member Email/Letter bomb has been dropped. In this spirit, I felt I might as well contribute an entry with the letter I sent of to my local member (Ballarat – Ms Catherine King), last week: Ms King, I am writing to […]

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Wireless woes

For a long time, one thing that has always solicited gasps from my technological friends is that I run my home wifi connection without any encryption or MAC blocking. It is free for anyone within range to use without my permission and, in most instances, I won’t even be aware it’s happened. I do this for a number […]

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My plea to Digg

Dear Digg, You’re one of my favourite websites, certainly one of the ones I visit the most, so it pains me to see you writhing in pain over this whole HD DVD key thing. If history has shown us anything though, its that sitting on your hands in a moment of crisis will do nothing but cause harm. […]

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ASX RSS feed

Well I finally got around to ‘finishing’ another of the little projects I’d been playing with. This one is probably extremely boring to nearly everyone but me, but franklin I don’t really care, it was useful for me 🙂 Basically I whipped up a little site where you can pull Australian Stock (ASX) quotes, for any group of […]

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