Monthly Archives: April 2012

XBMC running on Raspberry Pi. I may faint with the anticipation

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The kids’ non-360 XBOX running XBMC has been an amazing piece of kit. We’ve had it for over 4 years and got it second-hand for approx €60 but it maxes out at 480p content. I had thought that getting a replacement like the Patriot or WD Live TV would cost north of €80. But some geniuses have got XBMC running on the Raspberry Pi. A streaming media player with HDMI, LAN and 1080p support for £31 including VAT and delivery? Yes please.

 

Also, someone has already beaten me to the punch by getting a ZX Spectrum emulator running on it. We need someone to make cases that look exactly like 48K Spectrums, including a working keyboard, that the RPi can slot into. Do it!

Whilst you wait for your Raspberry Pi, run the software on your PC

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As we all patiently wait for the Raspberry Pi boards to arrive, one smart individual has built a full VM so you can try out the software in Virtualbox on your PC. I’m downloading now and will report back on whether it runs on VMware Workstation and Player too. There are a few things I want to try out on Raspberry Pi and this setup will let me confirm whether they are feasible or not in advance.

Note that they are torrent links and if you are on Eircom, you won’t be able to click the first one :-)

Speaking of torrents, here is a brilliant tutorial on how to use Amazon S3 to seed files via Bittorrent. This type of distribution of popular legal material makes so much sense.

UPDATE: It works perfectly in VMware Workstation (just use the relaxed settings when it complains and asks you). Check it out. Tingles!

Fuji Finepix 4200 + iPad + USB Adapter = Fab

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So far I really love the Fuji Finepix 4200 bridge camera. Barely scratched the surface of it but it’s like being in a different century to our old point n shoots.

One obvious drawback of a non-cameraphone is that you lose Instant Upload to the web. It’s a bit of a kerfuffle to remove the SD Card, power up a laptop and then upload.

Recently I got a dirt cheap USB adapter for the iPad on Deal Extreme in Hong Kong. I loved that you could stick a USB stick or similar into it to copy stuff into the iPad.

Today I had a brainwave. I took the camera’s USB cable, plugged it into the iPad USB adapter and taa-daaaa, the iPad offered to import all the pictures on the camera.

That’s a really really slick setup. Once I find out what the best photo editor is for iPad, I have the perfect mobile photo taking/editing/upload/blogging setup.

The only practical improvement I’ll be making in the coming months is to get a sub-$100 7″ Android tablet to do the same. Without needing an adapter of course.

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Unofficial Mario Kart 64 on Android and an $89 Tablet

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Two completely separate stories joined together nicely this morning.

First was the news that Mario Kart 64 now runs on Android. I initially thought [a] it’s an official port and [b] therefore it’s an April fool. But I installed and ran it perfectly on a HTC Sensation running ICS.

Then I got an email from MP4 Nation in Hong Kong offering their Herotab C8 Android Tablet for $89. Yes, that’s €66 for a 7″ multi-touch capacitive screen tablet with 512MB RAM, 4GB storage, Wifi, HDMI, USB, USB OTG, microSD, 1.2GHz CPU and (sadly) Android 2.3.

Now this tablet is entirely generic and they even warn that it will probably have cosmetic nicks and marks on the body but it’s €66!

My daughter was looking at the Nintendo 3DS in the Argos catalogue yesterday and it was €182. As for the PS Vita pricing, are they all on crystal meth in Sony? Not a hope.

Which do you think your kids are going to go for? An overpriced clunky web-clueless 20th century device with games that cost upwards of €44 a pop. Or a web-enabled handheld computer with hundreds of thousands of apps and games where most cost less than €5?

The perfect example of this is Scribblenauts which is €21 on DS and 79c on iPad. None of our kids play it on DS any more, as the 10″ screen on the iPad blows it away for playability. Yeah yeah I know Scribblenauts isn’t on Android yet. But you get the point.

I know they won’t do it, as they (like Apple), make a profit on their hardware, but at some point Nintendo is going to have to bite the bullet. The Sony Experia Play is the sort of thing they should be looking at but for a younger audience and with really great gaming controls.

It’s time for the Nintendo Andro-DS. It would offer the absolute best playability for DS games. They might go the route of locking the games so that they only play on their Android device and they also give owners access to the full standard Android market. But if they were really brave they would make the games available on all Android devices for €4.99 each. They should still make an Andro-DS as it would be the best way of playing the games.

Scribblenauts has sold 1m units on iPad. Mario Kart Andro-DS would sell 20m units easy.

Back to that el-cheapo tablet. Android 2.3 is horrible on tablets so it really needs to have ICS before I’d consider it, no matter how cheap. There are some community ROMs out there but they all look very early-stage. If I could be sure ICS was coming, it is a no-brainer at that price. Still I’m very tempted to take a flutter as it’s a 1-day deal only.