With all the speculation on what’s going to be in the new Apple iPhone – I thought I would sit down and brain storm out my top 8 wish list for the new iPhone (hey – why can’t I have a top 8 list instead of a top 10 list? I never didn’t like convention!):
1) One press car fetch.
An application that enables me to press a button and my car drives itself to my current location. This would save me having to ever walk to the car again. How lazy am I? (Don’t answer that).
2) Noise cancelling
With a touch of a button be able to cancel out any surrounding noise such as idiots playing their music too loud in public or even the wife. I’m so going to get a mouth full for that suggestion – hence the reason for this option.
3) Force Field
I want to be able to press a button and enable a force field around me. That way I could insult anybody I like in public and never fear them seaking immediate punishment upon me. I guess this would be good right up until the battery depletes – which as you know is fairly quick with an iPhone. Or it could just provide a cover above me to act as an umbrella so that I don’t get wet. No more carrying around an umbrella and no more getting poked in the eye with other umbrella’s thanks to my shield.
4) Site to Site beaming
This means I could instantly beam myself to another location. Okay, okay – I stole this from Star Trek and I guess I wouldn’t need an app to fetch my car because I wouldn’t need a car with this option.
5) Smell saving.
You should be able to save smells. Now I’m not talking about those aweful smells – though having the ability to email/SMS smells to people you don’t like might be good. Instead of calling SMS, Short Message Service, we could call it Smelly Message Service (SMS). But, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to forever save the smell of your new leather jacket, favourite perfume (to remind you of your girl friend or wife) or a fresh ocean beachy smell (whatever that is anyway).
6) Instant make up.
Instead of having to wait hours for the wife to put on her make up, just press a button and it’s done. Actually I think the ladies would probably love this feature. You could automatically setup a whole bunch of presets such as clown face, midnight panda, cup cake, cake it on and powder puff.
7) Frequency jamer
Gives you the ability to jam all frequencies within a 10km radius. This would be very helpful on the train to stop of those annoying people screaming into their phones – they simple wouldn’t work. But of course it should allow you to use your phone whilst jaming everybody else – just to annoy everybody.
8 ) Holographic head’s up display (HUD).
Why do we need to be pined down to a boring 2d touch screen. The screen should pop out of the phone in front of you and provide a holographic interface. It should be able to put a full heads up display (HUD) in front of you as you walk. That would be cool. You should be able to look at something/one and get relevant information about that entity, such as stock options, material, dimension (height, width, lenght), weight, cup-size and whether or not the entity is wearing panties (not that a married man like me would ever consider using this option – it’s for all you single people out there). It would be so useful to know whether the mailbox is wearing panties – don’t you think?
That’s all the crazy things I could think of at midnight on a Sunday night – thank god it’s a public holiday in Sydney tomorrow I can sleep in. Yipppeee! 
Have you got a suggested feature (I don’t want serious feature – be creative people) – then feel free to add a comment.
There is a new microsoft search engine called Bing (http://bing.com). It’s still in beta but it looks pretty good (or pretty). Here’s a screen shot:
Bing Screen Shot
I “binged” myself (I guess that’s a new term) and found my panaramio pictures on the first link.
The video searching looks pretty good too. It will display a thumbnail of the results and if you put your cursor over it, you can watch it directly out of the search results page.
Only time will tell if Microsoft can make a dent on Google though.
I purchased a DVICO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Express recently and I had quite a hard time getting it to work on Fedora Core 10 (FC10). I did get it to work so I thought I would share what I did. It works well on mythtv.
Step 1) Download v4l-dvb version that works!
hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/~stoth/v4l-dvb/
Step 2) Compile and install the v4l-dvb software (you should be root)
cd v4l-dvb
make
make install
Step 3) Download and install the firmware.
There is a small script included that you can use to get the firmware. It is under v4l-dvb/linux/Documentation/video4linux/extract_xc3028.pl
If you take a quick look inside of this script it should explain how to use it. Here are the instructions from the script.
# In order to use, you need to:
# 1) Download the windows driver with something like:
# wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/xc5000/HVR-12x0-14x0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip
# 2) Extract the file hcw85bda.sys from the zip into the current dir:
# unzip -j HVR-12x0-14x0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip Driver85/hcw85bda.sys
# 3) run the script:
# ./extract_xc3028.pl
# 4) copy the generated file:
# cp xc3028-v27.fw /lib/firmware
Step 4) Reboot. This should complete everything you need to do.
Step 5) Check dmesg log to see if it works. You should see something like this:
cx23885 driver version 0.0.1 loaded
cx23885 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
CORE cx23885[0]: subsystem: 18ac:db78, board: DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Express [card=11,autodetected]
cx23885_dvb_register() allocating 1 frontend(s)
cx23885[0]: cx23885 based dvb card
DVB: registering new adapter (cx23885[0])
DVB: registering adapter 0 frontend 0 (Zarlink ZL10353 DVB-T)...
cx23885_dvb_register() allocating 1 frontend(s)
cx23885[0]: cx23885 based dvb card
DVB: registering new adapter (cx23885[0])
DVB: registering adapter 1 frontend 0 (Zarlink ZL10353 DVB-T)...
Your done!
References
http://www.fusionhdtv.co.kr/ENG/products/DVBTDualExpress.aspx
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DViCO_FusionHDTV_DVB-T_Dual_Express
http://linuxtv.org/hg/~stoth/v4l-dvb/
Posted Under:
Technology,
mythtv
This post was written by Matt on April 16, 2009
Comments Off
There is a new Canon DSLR camera that has just been announced. The EOS 500D. Check out the review here –> http://www.dpreview.com/news/0903/09032504canoneos500d.asp
If you own a JVC video recorder, you may have noticed that it stores it’s videos in TOD format. This is highly annoying as it’s not very useful if you want to view it on a simply device such as a Western Digital TV HD Media Player. The good news, is that there is a simple way to turn your TOD videos into MPEG videos using ffmpeg. It should also work for MOD files, but I haven’t testing it yet – please tell me if it works. I wrote a simple bash script to do this:
#!/bin/bash
video="$1"
newvideo="${video/%tod/mpg}"
ffmpeg -i "$1" -acodec copy -vcodec copy "$newvideo"
mv "$video" "$video.done"
You can download this script here –> tod2mpeg
Run this script by putting the TOD video filename after the script name.
Eg: tod2mpeg mod123.tod
It will use ffmpeg to convert to mpeg and once completed will append “.done” to the end of the TOD filename. You should be left with a mpeg file of the same name. eg. mod123.mpeg.
You will notice a whole bunch of messages coming out of ffmpeg. Just ignore these.
I’ve also written a little wrapper perl script to enable me to run tod2mpeg on multiple files. Download this here –> tod2mpeg-multi. You will need to make sure that you already have the tod2mpeg script in your path somewhere (eg. ~/bin/ or /usr/local/bin).
You will need to pass a list of TOD files into this script like this:
ls *.tod | tod2mpeg-multi
