Archive for category asides
finally with the time – motorola atrix
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on April 11, 2011
After delaying for many years, I finally upgraded to a smart phone. The salesman was impressed as my old phone was activated in 2005. The funny thing is, I’d still be on an even older phone if it weren’t for Cingular buying AT&T Wireless and shutting down the TDMA network forcing me to upgrade in 2005. Now Cingular is AT&T Mobility and we’ve gone full circle.
I don’t care for anything Apple, but relented and allowed my wife and daughter to get iPhones. Feeling out of the picture, I decided it was finally time to upgrade. I’ve been holding out for the latest Google Nexus, but the cost factor pointed me to the Motorola Atrix running Android on AT&T’s “4G” network. It is a pretty slick phone with powerful hardware and the community is anxiously awaiting updates to a newer version of android and unlocking of other capabilities.
I’ve got everything I need on this phone but a Sonos controller. I installed andronos but am still waiting on the official Sonos release which has been delayed until “April”.
Words with Friends people – I’m struggling to get up to speed so take it easy on me.
panasonic bd-60 + inglourious basterds
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on January 22, 2010
After having trouble viewing Crank 2 Blu Ray on my BD-60 and then witnessing similar behavior for Inglourious Basterds, I thought the SD card trick would work. Nope.
I spent a while researching and decided to update the firmware to the latest version. After the update I was able to view Inglourious Basterds.
For any of you Panasonic BD-60 people out there with troubles – update your firmware either via the internet or burn a CD with the file from Panasonic support on it.
flac or uberstandard?
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on June 1, 2008
Three years ago i purchased a Rockford Fosgate digital media server. This device streamed MP3′s from my PC to my hifi setup. At that point i decided to rip all of my CD’s for access by the streamer. The omnifi only supports MP3 or WAV so i chose to rip everything according to the uberstandard at the highest possible bit rate per the standard.
Fast forward three years and i have since ditched the bug laden Omnifi. However – the open source simplecenter that powered the interface to the PC is awesome…perusing the source made me very happy to see their technology choices. The replacement? A Sonos system! Since seeing this incredible whole home audio system in action at the owner of my company’s house i had to have one.
Now that I’ve got a system that is totally bug free and supports lossless audio formats I’m rethinking my decision to go with the uberstandard. Now that hard drive space is ubiquitous and my player supports it FLAC with its own DAC has peaked my interest.
What say you audiophiles? FLAC or go home?
man in the middle
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on April 27, 2008
Occasionally your team won’t be the only team on a big league project. Sometimes you find yourself as the man in the middle. This is the first time that i find myself on the outside of the good ‘ol boy network. For the perseverance of the team we must push through. The shame of it is when the good ‘ol boy network determines enterprise solution decisions. Good times.
Adobe Flex going open source
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on April 26, 2007
An interesting new player comes to the open source world – Adobe Flex. Flex seems to be a powerful choice for building the new buzzword Rich Internet Applications. I’m still unsold on having an entire application be one giant flash movie but time will tell. It does have some powerful capabilities especially in the enterprise dashboard realm. MicroStrategy has released some new flex based functionality to allow developers to build dashboards on top of normal business intelligence reports served by MicroStrategy’s BI platform. I think Flex is a good fit in this arena as it is able to aggregate many reports into a sleek and sexy dashboard. Yet, I’m still struggling to see where this technology will make its place in the traditional web application environment. It is very good for displaying data to a user and providing drill down and aggregation, but I can’t see it replacing the standard forms based approach to transactional based web systems.
A nice article is here at Ryan Stewart’s Universal Desktop.
Hat tip to Nick for sending me the article.
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