Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on Internet TVs at IFA Berlin

Internet TVs at IFA Berlin

Even though Android tablets were widely hyped, IFA also had other interesting devices on display. Among them, internet TV is starting to take off. I would have expected some Android set-top box to be shown off, but some manufacturers may prefer to attend IBC 2010 10-14 September 2010. Interestingly the 2 videos below only provide integrated internet Tvs, i.e. without external set-top box. Philips demo’ed an improved version of Net TV, a standard for internet television. Here’s the LG’s Smart TV system for Web-TV and apps on High Definition Television. They have a really cool “magic” remote. (Wii-like remote). This is still a prototype but it looks promising.

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on ViewSonic Android Tablet: ViewPad 7

ViewSonic Android Tablet: ViewPad 7

Lots of Android Tablet were shown at IFA 2010 in Berlin. The most hyped was Samsung Galaxy Tab. Charbax has lot of videos about different devices. Among them, ViewSonic Viewpad 7 seems to be worth looking at with Android 2.2, #G, Wifi, video calling, capacitive touch screen and a retail price that should be 399 Euros. It actually seems to be doing all what the pricey Samsung tablet is doing (except lower camcorder resolution). On the hardware side, it is most likely using Qualcomm MSM7227 (ARM11).

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on Samsung Galaxy Tab Video

Samsung Galaxy Tab Video

As blogged previously, Samsung released its Android Tablet at IFA in Berlin today. Here’s a video to show off the Samsung Galaxy Tab including the TV commercial at the end: That looks really good until you look at the price tag: 799 Euros. Here are the full specs of this Android tablet: Network: 2.5G (GSM/ GPRS/ EDGE) : 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz 3G (HSUPA 5.76Mbps, HSDPA 7.2Mbps) : 900 / 1900 / 2100 MHz OS: Android 2.2 (Froyo) Display: 7.0 inch TFT-LCD, WSVGA (1024 x 600) Processor: Cortex A8 1.0GHz (ARM) Application Processor with PowerVR SGX540 Camera: 3 MP Camera with Auto-Focus and LED Flash 1.3MP front camera for Video Telephony Mini-HDMI connector with 1080p video output. Docking Station GPS (A-GPS) Value-added Features: Android Market™ and Samsung Apps for more applications and contents Readers Hub, Media Hub, Music Hub, Social Hub (Facebook/Google/Outlook) Adobe Flash 10.1 player […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Digital Signage: Implementing a smooth scrolling text

Digital Signage: Implementing a smooth scrolling text

Many digital signage hardware feature scroll text. However, in many cases the scrolling text is either not smooth, sometimes teared or very slow. It may depends on the performance of the hardware used but also on the implementation of the software. Once easy way to implemented scrolling text is just to redraw the text again and again at different position. However, this is very slow and yields poor results unless maybe you have a Truetype accelerator or similar hardware font accelerator. The next step is then to convert the text into pixmaps. This can either be done in the digital signage manager software (Windows PC/MAC or Linux based) or the digital signage player. Doing so in the latter makes it much more flexible. So you may create 2 pixmaps whose width and length match the region to be displayed, you write the text on those 2 pixmaps, then simply move […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on Samsung Galaxy Tab – Android Tablet Teaser Video

Samsung Galaxy Tab – Android Tablet Teaser Video

Samsung will announce their new tablet Samsung Galaxy Tab on the 2nd of September 2010 at IFA in Berlin. Hopefully, this will be the first of many high quality Android Tablets coming to the market. This tablet features a 7″ multi-touch screen, Android 2.2, video calls (with a front camera), full web browser, HD Video playback… It is rumoured to use an ARM11 (S5PC110) running at 1.o GHz Here’s the teaser video first, and we’ll get more info and next week when it will finally be unveiled.

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on Android Tablet Review: Augen Gentouch 2

Android Tablet Review: Augen Gentouch 2

Soldierknowsbest reviewed the Augen Gentouch 2 (same as Augen Gentouch 78 ??), one of the first Android tablet available (Cost around 150 USD). Basically, his advice is to avoid it, the device is terrible: poor touch screen (resistive), no multitouch, navigation requires to use external buttons, Android Market not working, some dodgy battery usage… On the hardware side, Augen Gentouch uses Telechips 8902 @ 600 Mhz, 256MB DDR2, 2GB Internal Storage, Wifi etc…

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Quick guide to install Samba/CIFS in Linux

Quick guide to install Samba/CIFS in Linux

You may want to install Samba/CIFS in a Linux host to share files with other Windows computer or to use as a media server with a networked media player. If samba is missing, install it in the host machine (foomachine):

Create a new smb user:

Start / check status / restart samba service:

To make samba service run automatically at startup:

Type \\foomachine\foouser  in Windows Explorer and type the username foouser and the password to access your Linux files. To add other directories to share with samba, edit /etc/samba/smb.conf Resource: http://www.cpqlinux.com/samba.html

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Script to convert Twitter RSS feeds into text

Script to convert Twitter RSS feeds into text

[Update Nov 2012: URLs such as http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/759251.rss do not work anymore, but you can get a Twitter timeline RSS feed by using http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=xxxxx, where xxxxx is the screen name such as cnxsoft] We needed to convert Twitter RSS feeds to UTF-16 text for displaying them into a digital signage (That did not support RSS feed directly).  This digital signage supports regular http download, .e.g every 5 minutes. Here’s the script (called with crontab) we used for CNN News Twitter RSS feed. #!/bin/sh # CNN Twitter wget http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/759251.rss sleep 10 cat 759251.rss | grep title | sed s/\<title\>// | sed s/\<\\/title\>// > cnn.txt rm 759251.rss iconv -f utf-8 -t UCS-2LE cnn.txt > cnn-utf16.txt cp cnn-utf16.txt /var/www/html/livepics/cnn.txt The resulting text file looks like: Twitter / CNN CNN: BREAKING NEWS: Military: Last U.S. brigade combat team leaves Iraq; 56,000 troops remain. Fifty-thousand set to stay past August 31. CNN: NY Gov. David Paterson […]

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