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<DIV>Wow Emlyn you've arrived at a rather interesting work around. I have a wii
game console, which is very cool by the way. Remember years back when those VR
gloves were the big deal in game play, the wii has surpassed that with it's hand
held stick. If you have the fit board it's even better - you can move around on
it and it knows where you are and how much pressure you are applying. You can
see your movements on the screen via your 3d avatar. Very interactive.
Anyway, it also has internet capabilities. If you have a wireless for
your computer, the wii will detect it and you can browse the web, including
YouTube. I really like it. </DIV>
<DIV>By the way that tattoo show on the history channel with my dermal
display is on tonight! Oh and guys, don't forget to email me about my project,
it's been pretty quiet! </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Gina "Nanogirl" Miller<BR>Nanotechnology
Industries<BR><A
href="http://www.nanoindustries.com">http://www.nanoindustries.com</A>
<BR>Personal: <A href="http://www.nanogirl.com">http://www.nanogirl.com</A>
<BR>The health stuff blog: <A
href="http://ginamiller.blogspot.com/">http://ginamiller.blogspot.com/</A>
<BR>Animation Blog: <A
href="http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/">http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/</A>
<BR>Craft blog: <A
href="http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/">http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/</A>
<BR>Foresight Senior Associate <A
href="http://www.foresight.org">http://www.foresight.org</A> <BR>Nanotechnology
Advisor Extropy Institute <A
href="http://www.extropy.org">http://www.extropy.org</A> <BR>Email: <A
href="mailto:nanogirl@halcyon.com">nanogirl@halcyon.com</A> <BR>"Nanotechnology:
Solutions for the future."<BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=emlynoregan@gmail.com href="mailto:emlynoregan@gmail.com">Emlyn</A>
</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A
title=extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org
href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">ExI chat list</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Sunday, August 17, 2008 6:06
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Re: [ExI] My animation is going
to be on the History Channel thisThursday!</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>2008/8/17 MB <<A
href="mailto:mbb386@main.nc.us">mbb386@main.nc.us</A>>:<BR>> Hooray for
our Nanogirl! :) Now you make me wish I had a TV..
;)<BR><BR>On a tangent, a quick rant about TV...<BR><BR>There's *so* much
online video to watch these days (Youtube is just<BR>the start...), but it has
this problem that you watch this stuff on a<BR>PC. Sitting at your desk is no
place to watch a movie, and even a<BR>laptop makes it a fairly solitary
experience (two people can watch on<BR>a laptop, after that it gets hard),
plus the screen is small and the<BR>sound is poor. You really want to be able
to watch a lot of stuff in<BR>your living room, on the big
screen.<BR><BR>Along these lines, I recently got rid of my old CRT TV, and put
an old<BR>PC in the livingroom. It's an Athlon 2000, 500 mb ram, circa
2001<BR>vintage? It was one of my kid's machines, but too long in the
tooth<BR>for kid's stuff (games need good equipment). The point is, it's
old<BR>and crappy, but does this job remarkably well.<BR><BR>The machine is
already on the wireless lan, but I added in a TV card<BR>for digital TV
(actually it's a usb based device, not an internal<BR>card, can't recommend
that enough). I'm in Australia so I had to get<BR>something suitable for
Aussie digital TV, which uses an obscure and<BR>poorly supported standard
(dvb-t), but you can still get something<BR>economical. Just for completeness,
the actual piece of hardware is the<BR>USB TinyTwin from DigitalNow, a tiny
aussie company. Nice hardware,<BR>decent viewing software and drivers, but
interoperating with other<BR>stuff is a pain in the butt, and the doco is
dreadful but<BR>non-existant, much as you'd expect from that kind of company.
It's<BR>here: <A
href="http://www.digitalnow.com.au/product_pages/TinyTwin.html">http://www.digitalnow.com.au/product_pages/TinyTwin.html</A>
. Cost<BR>me about $130.<BR><BR>The TinyTwin plugged straight into my old
antenna cable, no antenna<BR>mods required, and gives far better reception.
Digital TV is great.<BR><BR>So, that replaced our TV, with the addition that
we now get the HD<BR>free to air channels. Lovely. And I can record TV for the
first time<BR>in years. But wait, there's more...<BR><BR>We can now watch
youtube on the "tv" just by pulling up a browser. The<BR>machine is running
straight XP, and it's now got a wireless mouse and<BR>keyboard (cost maybe
$30?), but even with large fonts the machine can<BR>be a pain in the butt to
operate; I have to go up close with the mouse<BR>and keyb so I can see
properly. I can live with that for now though.<BR><BR>The machine also runs
Azureus, for bittorrent. Essential. 'Nuff said.<BR>Although I think Miro
might be able to do its job, must investigate...<BR><BR>Which brings me to
Miro. <A href="http://www.getmiro.com/">http://www.getmiro.com/</A> . About
5000 channels<BR>of free content. It's what community tv always needed. Most
channels<BR>are ridiculous, but there's some excellent stuff there; check out
Free<BR>Culture TV (a bit brown bread but ok), or for excellence,
Citizen<BR>Engineer (which to be fair is also on their own site<BR><A
href="http://www.citizenengineer.com/">http://www.citizenengineer.com/</A> or
youtube). Hardware hacking as a tv<BR>show, really fabulous stuff. Anyway, the
nice thing about Miro is that<BR>it's like a video podcast model, but uses
(modified?) bittorrent for<BR>distribution, which means waiting for downloads,
but some decent video<BR>quality.<BR><BR>Another recent discovery for me was
<A href="http://www.hulu.com/">http://www.hulu.com/</A>, lots of<BR>major
network US tv shows. You can't watch it if you don't have a US<BR>ip address
unfortunately. On a totally unrelated note, however, has<BR>anyone seen
Hotspot Shield? It's a free vpn that encrypts your traffic<BR>up to the point
where it comes out of their servers. It's meant for<BR>protecting you in open
wireless hotspots, but can be useful for other<BR>things. Sounds complicated,
but it's easy; on windows, you just<BR>install it, run it, and then say
"connect" when you want to use it,<BR>and voila. It does have the side effect
of giving you a US ip address,<BR>for what that's worth. Did I forget to
mention that it's free, and<BR>that I can't notice any performance impact on
streaming video?<BR><BR>And there's the Aussie government broadcaster ABC,
with its online<BR>service "iView", here: <A
href="http://www.abc.net.au/tv/iview/">http://www.abc.net.au/tv/iview/</A>. No
ip address<BR>checks, good programming.<BR><BR>And all this is without
mentioning dodgy Chinese based sites that show<BR>all kinds of awesome shows
directly in the browser, because there's no<BR>way good law abiding extros
would use those.<BR><BR>There's more every day. I can't imagine that I'll ever
subscribe to<BR>pay tv with the amount of interesting stuff that's online now,
and the<BR>free to air broadcast tv becomes increasingly less attractive. I
don't<BR>rent DVDs any more either, and I tried Quickflix (aussie clone
of<BR>Netflix), but dumped it; removable media is so last week
people.<BR><BR>So for peanuts, I have this multimedia extravaganza in the
living<BR>room, and I increasingly can't remember what was good about
broadcast<BR>TV.<BR><BR>Emlyn<BR><BR><A
href="http://emlynoregan.com">http://emlynoregan.com</A><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>extropy-chat
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