I am going to miss this show so much when it ends. Leslie needed two wedding rings asap. Ron took care of it.
When I grow up, I want to be Ron Swanson.
Ron Swanson is the Patron Saint of Makers – His Finest Moment on Parks and Rec
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Tag Archives: tv
Finally MHL to TV and Bluetooth to Wiimote on HTC Sensation
Yes I know it’s a stupid thing to want to do but dammit, if it’s technically possible, we should at least try.
One of the most annoying things about the HTC Sensation is how HTC has hamstrung it with a brain-dead Bluetooth stack instead of the one provided by the chipset provider. This means it cannot do the HID profile to support keyboards, mice and Wiimotes. The only reason they do this is to shoehorn the horror that is HTC Sense on top of Android. Sense can’t even do landscape orientation of the home screen FFS!
If you switch to one of the AOSP-based ROMs like Cyanogen, you gain a proper Bluetooth stack but, for the moment, you lose MHL, which means you cannot connect the phone via HDMI to your TV to play movies/games.
But something changed recently with the latest HTC ROMs and I learned that the Android Revolution HD ROM, which I have used many times in the past, now supports both MHL and HID. It is a community variation of the official Sensation ROM so it still has the Sense crap but it seems to be rock solid otherwise and has lots of benefits you miss with the official ROMs.
So this is why I wanted to get both working:
Not my best ever video work, to put it mildly. But you get the idea.
To do the same you need:
- An MHL adapter
- A HDMI cable
- A Wiimote
- The Android Revolution HD ROM
- Xpectroid ZX Spectrum Emulator
- Wiimote Android App
Enjoy!
UPDATE: I also started investigating USB OTG on the Sensation this week. This is where you can use the USB interface to plug USB sticks, cameras, hard disks etc into the Sensation rather than the usual reverse. Yet again the hardware is capable of it, the standard drivers support it, but HTC has messed up the implementation.
Why the hell would you create devices with such amazing technical specs and then disable those features due to an obsession with a shitty software skin that offers no added-value to the end-user and which no-one has ever bought a phone for? Don’t get me started on the fact that the CPU in my phone is actually designed for 1.5GHz but ships clocked at 1.2GHz.
End of an Era – Philips switches off TV production
Whilst this story passed by mainly unnoticed, I was very sad to hear that Philips is exiting the TV business. I have a lot of wonderful memories of working with the TV guys in Eindhoven and it pains me to see everything move to a JV in China.
My first degree-related summer-job in college in 1989 was in Eindhoven. My Dad knew a Dutch businessman who had connections in Philips and he got me a job in the Overseas TV department. The people I worked with were just amazing. They made TVs for places like South America where they had to handle every crappy signal that was thrown at them. This included not just poor TV signals, but rubbish power quality too. Those Philips TVs were the Toyota Landcruisers of the television world. Where everything else curled up into a ball and cried, your Philips kept on truckin’.
I spent that summer running circuit simulations on a giant Computervision Workstation. Funnily enough, that was the summer I realised I’d never be a hardware guy and totally moved my focus to software.
Come graduation in 1990 and I couldn’t find a decent job so I went back into UCD and did a Masters in Speech Processing. In 1992, I emerged looking for a job once again. Luckily the first place I applied to was S3 in Dublin, 90% owned by Philips.
Mossie Whelan was intrigued that I had done summer work in Philips since he assumed every Irish person who did so, did it through him, as a Prof of Comp Sci in Trinity! In any case, the Philips thing must have helped and I got a job as a Software Engineer.
My first couple of years were spent working on GSM basestation software but then I landed a fantastic project, building the software for the first generation of Philips own MPEG-2 chipset. Up until then they had used SGS-Thomson chips. The work was tough as hell and we spent months in Eindhoven trying to get buggy silicon to display moving images. Finally, we cracked it and got the thing working. One of the happiest working days of my life.
I’ll never forget a meeting a few weeks later where some Sony execs came in for a demo of the system in action. They were looking to use Philips as a chipset provider, despite being competitors in the TV space. Little did they know that we were manually restarting the software every 30 seconds or so from our giant Lauterbach emulator, just to keep everything moving!
After that we kicked off a much bigger project for the next generation of silicon but I never saw it deployed as I moved to Integral Design to spend the next 4 years working on Toshiba’s MPEG-2 software.
But my admiration for Philips never subsided and the first big TV we ever bought with money from our wedding was a 32″ Matchline. Still my favourite TV ever.
So to everyone in Philips TV in Eindhoven, my lifelong respect.
I will be deeply disappointed if House doesn’t die from Lupus in the final episode
In a statement just released to the media, Executive Producers David Shore, Katie Jacobs and Hugh Laurie have announced that this current 8th season of the hit Fox series HOUSE will in fact be its last. See for yourself after the jump.
via Fox Cancels HOUSE | the TV addict.
