I have never really been a great fan of Social Media, I just fail to see the bigger picture on what it is meant to do for you and in my eyes just lets everybody know your business. When Google plus came about, it was exciting at first but as time moved on, it just became the very same as the rest, people spamming stuff on there and touting there business. What caused me to pull back once again from my chosen social sites? What made me drop contact with people I respected and treated as friends? What made me jump right back to Skype?
Posts tagged media
Turning my Back on Social Media
Boxee Box vs Playstation 3
Recently a good friend of mine went out and got himself a Boxee Box and the strange thing here is this box can be bought in the USA for about $179.99 whilst the UK pricing seems to be closer to £200. For those that are not in the know, the UK price should be closer to £114, so you can see why UK people will reject this box pretty much straight away. What got me thinking though was simple, will a Playstation 3 (which is now $250 or £190) do a better job then the boxee box as well as provide more content in the way of games and such?
UMPlayer Cross platform media player
Came across this open source free-ware media player that is out there for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. It can be skinned, plays just about anything and its called UMPlayer.
UMPlayer comes packed with dozens of advanced features, such as skinnable interface, built-in subtitles search, audio / subtitles sync, enhanced filter rendering and YouTube™ player / recorder, yet has a simple and intuitive user interface that was designed for ease of use.
With over 270 built-in Audio and Video codecs UMPlayer can handle nearly all media formats, including AAC, AC3, ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, H.263, Matroska, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG, QT, RealMedia, VOB, Vorbis, WAV, WMA, WMV, XVID and many more.
Do we really need DVD these days?
We have seen that the new Mac Mini is now void of any drive to insert DVD’s into and f you look at any of the latest tablet / laptop type computers – they too have no drive to insert any DVD’s into. You may ask yourself what if you wanted to install the operating system, what about playing DVD movies and god forbid you wanted to sabre some data to cd to send off right?
I wanted to use this post to look at ways to show that in fact CD/DVD as a medium is in fact dying out and there is always a way around doing things better using other media, namely memory sticks.
Trying out Twitter again
In my time I had I think Three Twitter accounts (maybe even more) and for one reason or another I changed them, de-activated them or just plain never used them. Now my view of Twitter is a pointless exercise in life and I feel the people who use twitter to tell you about every second of there life probably do not have a social life were they interact with real humans. I do not understand why anyone would need to know that I have woken up, eating my breakfast, going to work, arrived at work, having lunch and so forth. Anyhow – I shall have another go at this and as my previous accounts are all now lost, I created a New One – Called LiquidTV. Fell free to Follow, I will follow back.
Virgin Media introduce 100mbit Connection
Although a bit slow of the mark to report about this, Virgin media (my Current ISP) is all set to bring out a new faster service of 100mbit connection to the home. This service will have a 10mbit upload rate and while there is no restriction as such on the service, they will be bringing in a general degrade of speed on upload for Torrents and such. Why will anyone need such a fast connection, fast in fact as most office LAN connection and the upload is faster then most have on ADSL for download.
The Television is evolving
When you are working in the field of technology, it is easy to forget that the ‘normal’ people have no idea about anything other then a Set Top Box, a DVD Player and a TV. Are we as consumers expecting more out of the box we sit in front of each night? Is it that we are sick of watching what the networks push out and in this world if instant gratification – we want this and we want it now. In this post – I go through my view of media streamers, apple Tv, Google tv and so forth to look at how these might fit in with your digital lifestyle.
HotMail Compromised
It has been some years since I have even bothered to look at Hotmail or in fact MSN Live Messenger as it is now called. As I removed most of the Social networks now which includes Twitter and Skype – I thought I would install MSN once again and see if anybody was about for a chat and such. It had been such a long time that I had forgot my password – I went through and reset this to something I would know though still hard to guess. Once I booted up Messenger, it informed me I was already logged in somewhere else and it would log me off that location (very odd). As I had so many email I had not read in years, I set up Outlook to also grab the mails.
Choosing the right media device
(Betamax for the win)
Technology moves on and people try and find easier and better ways to manage and watch media, be it video, pictures or even music on there TV. It was not that long ago that it was quite simple, you bought a DVD Player that suited your price range and features, plugged it into your TV and you can now go out and buy movies on DVD. Storing 100′s of Movies presented an issue and there had to be a better way – and now there is, media streaming devices come in many shapes and sizes as well as cost and functions – this post serves as a grounding on what to look for.
Virgin Broadband 50mbit install
The wait was finally over and Virgin come and fitted today my brand spanking new 50mbit service complete with new modem, new router and even a USB Wireless Adaptor. This post goes over what equipment you get, what levels of speed you should expect to get and how my install went. It is to be noted this is of course UK Based ISP and on a cable connection provided by Virgin, I am sure USA people might get less down load but higher upload – depends on what you are looking for.
