Monthly Archives: August 2013

Android

New gadget to play with

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Archos TV ConnectIt’s called the Archos TV Connect, which essentially is a tablet without a screen and battery, it has the rest of the connectors and as an extra a fixed network port which makes streaming 1080p no issue at all. As a screen you would normally use a TV or otherwise a monitor provided it comes with an HDMI input. On the picture you see the unit on top of the television and the remote in front of the TV. The remote includes a keyboard, game input and also can function as a fly mouse.

A have it for a couple of weeks and the device works fine. No problems with it thus far. Replaced the launcher with Smart Launcher Pro as this has no need for swiping and is more a point and click interface which serves the fly mouse well and it has a quicklaunch facility on its homescreen which is visible in the picture as well. Turn on click what you want to do which in case of a TV connected device is watching media of one form or another or video conferencing. The camera does the job however it is similar to what you find on a tablet and it would have been nice to have one which would deliver a sharper image on a 1080p display. The other side will not notice it I guess but if you use the standard camera app it is clearly visible the camera is on the lower end of the spectrum. That’s also all I can find as a downside to this device. I’ll have some more fun with it in the future, it’s greatest feature is acting as an endpoint for Youtube videos which I can select on my phone and then play on the TV. In the near future ‘Netflix’ will most likely be added as well besides the DLNA compliant Archos audio and video apps which currently connect to local storage. For those of you with older AC-3/DTS receivers, there is no seperate SPDIF or Toshlink connector and if your TV doesn’t pass on the full surround signal you might be left with plain stereo sound.The street price is a little over 133 Euros at the time of writing and I wouldn’t be surprised in a few months time it will be 99 Euros or something close to that. Enough of that as there is another gadget that needs some attention, the Leap Motion.

This Website

And a new homepage

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htmlThe redirect to portal.dullaard.nl that was there on the www.dullaard.nl website since 2004 has now been replaced by a Modern UI homepage. This page is so modern it was written with notepad (and nano or vi after it was moved to its Linux based host) and should work with any browser that got released after 1998. On the other hand I’ve not written html pages since that period so thus far didn’t have to learn anything new. It has no CSS, javascript or any of the other features. It’s just a table formatted to remain centered on a screen. It can be squeezed a bit but the table backgrounds disappear on the right hand side which is the only drawback thus far. Maybe look into getting the tables fixed and as such allow for some sidescroll action or otherwise any expansion goes towards the bottom or in between but it will be a vertical scroller if things get added along the way. Anyway take a look at the source and you know what I mean by ahum… modern.

A lot of stuff is still pointing to the old portal pages, those will all be moved in due time to either secondary pages  on their own or pages in one of our blogs.

Update (September 2014): The tables cannot be squeezed any longer they are now a fixed width. Language specific versions for Dutch and Simplified Chinese are added. Sunny still has to check mistakes in the Chinese version so any errors in there are mine at the moment. Some links will revert back to the English version as the language specific version still needs to be created.

Update (July 2015): The above remark on not using JavaScript is no longer valid, it now contains a little bit of JavaScript to make the page clickable per tile rather than just the text itself.

Open Source, This Website

First Post on the new Blog

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A continuation from the previous Windows Sharepoint Services based blog. Which I wanted to migrate for a long period to Sharepoint Foundation 2010, however the ending of Technet subscriptions forced me in looking for other alternatives that do not expire every three months to half a year or cost a fortune to maintain. I did use Technet mostly for testing but also the services that you see on the outside where build on the subscription. All of these will slowly but surely be moved to Open Source for most of the functionality used by myself and members of the family. As at writing I’m still mostly a Windows System Engineer the majority of the hardware resources in use will still be dedicated for prototyping solutions based on a diversity of software coming from Redmond, however the more continues parts of the deal are now Linux based. I doubt that Microsoft will revise the policies around Technet as it was used for pirating a lot. However since I don’t have much time to test things within the time limits that Microsoft set, there is a small penalty which currently relates directly back to my work. Or I’ll simply introduce the solutions which I now build privately to work………… Anyway I hope to make same more contributions over time compared to last few years and see if I can move over all the old entries that are currently still in the Windows Sharepoint Services Portal while retaining their metadata.