We’ve seen a lot of standing desks, including those made from IKEA parts, but artist/designer Kelli Anderson managed to make one of the nicest convertible options yet. With IKEA storage furniture, Google Sketchup, and help from some friends, she was able to make this simple and stunning workspace with plenty of room for everything—regardless of how she wanted to work. Read more…
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Build a Motorized Convertible Standing Desk from IKEA Storage Cabinets
X-rays and advanced photography have uncovered the true complexity of the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, a device so astonishing that its discovery is like finding a functional Buick in medieval Europe. Read more…
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Advanced Imaging Reveals a Computer 1,500 Years Ahead of Its Time
The bright ball that hovers over Times Square on New Year’s Eve is special this year. Sure, it’s iconic and colorful and mesmerizing as it always is. This year, however, the ball will captivate us all with a brand new crystal coating. And, boy, is it pretty. Read more…
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Inside the Design of the New Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball
MediaPortal 1.6.0 Final We are very happy to present you the final version of MediaPortal 1.6.0 today. No new features were added between the Pre Release and the Final Release but a lot of bugs encountered by Team internal testing or because of our community who reported them in our bugforum have been fixed. Enjoy it! Highlights of this release Update to MySQL 5.6 to increase stability Due to performance and stability improvements we decided to switch from MySQL 5.1 to MySQL 5.6 which comes with InnoDB as default database engine. It is more reliable than MyISAM which was the default database engine in MySQL 5.1 and the cause of many TV database crashes. MySQL 5.6 gets only installed if you do a clean installation. If you perform an update, MySQL 5.1 will be kept. This is because users might still want to use MySQL 5.1 for other purposes than just MediaPortal. Enhanced TV experience There were quite some improvements like fix stuttering/dropped frame problems with H.264 video streams which use mixed field/frame (interlaced/progressive) encoding e.g. UK Freeview HDTV channels as well as handle some NZ Freeview channels which were causing problems. Recognition of DolbyDigital+ streams was added and a deadlock was fixed which leads to TV Server crashes or can cause a BSOD quite frequently on some setups. Music improvements A lot of things have been fixed and worked on in the Music section since our last release. Below you find the most important enhancements. Hopefully you will enjoy them! Last.FM rework Because Last.FM changed their API, the Last.fm Radio & scrobbling functions (Last.fm account needed for both!) are rewritten. As a bonus an awesome new AutoDJ function is added, which will attempt to play music forever, and you don’t even need a Last.fm account for it! Music Visualisations Music Visualisations got fixed and are now correctly listening to the beat. Furthermore while on the NowPlaying screen, you can now switch to (fullscreen) visualisations by pressing X on your keyboard. PageUp/PageDown are used to cycle through the available visualisations. To make the visualisations work you need to download and install them first. It is highly recommended to only use the visualisations provided by our visualisation package. Allmusic.com scraper update As you might have noticed, the Album/Artist scraping was broken in MediaPortal 1.5 because allmusic.com changed their layout. For your convenience, this has been fixed now. Gapless playback Gapless playback is working now and can be enabled through MediaPortal configuration. MyVideos scraper rework for better maintainability Not only Album/Artist scraping was broken in MediaPortal 1.5 but also Fanart/Poster scraping in MyVideos because of the TMDB API change . This has been completely fixed and was improved in a way that the MyVideos scraper can now be updated outside the MediaPortal release cycle which means we are more flexible when it comes to fix scraper issues. Other small improvements Besides the switch to .NET4 we also modified our core to support plugins like the amazing Auto3D plugin or the great Atmolight plugin. Furthermore we fixed a DPI scaling issue for Win 8.1 users and RefreshRate changing on multi monitor setups was fixed too. Full list of changes You can review the complete change log for 1.6.0 by using the links below: Changelog: MediaPortal 1.6.0 Final Changelog: MediaPortal 1.6.0 Pre Release Documentation of new features can be found at the following link: What’s new for MediaPortal 1.6.0 Compiled Plugin related changes Community Plugin Developers should have a look at the following page to find out about the changes which will effect their extensions. Some of these changes are mandatory to become 1.6.0 compatible: changes which affect plugins Notes: The WifiRemote plugin can crash MediaPortal 1.6.0 while playing music. FanartHandler scraping does not work in Mediaportal 1.6.0 because plugin changes are needed. Intelligent Frame Correction (I.F.C ) plugin has been updated to work with MediaPortal 1.6.0. You can update via our Extension Manager or download the MPEI package from here ! There were several reports that the old I.F.C version did not work with MP 1.5.0 and MP 1.6.0 and causes LiveTV and Video to freeze. Additional Information: TVE3 Code freeze At the moment we are working hard on releasing a new version of our TVEngine – which is called TVE3.5. Development is still in early stage and some features are missing. To make a release of this happen in the future we have to put our current TVEngine (TVE3) on code freeze. This means only critical issues will get fixed. Everything else will have to wait for a TVE3.5 release. When we think it is ready for public testing you will find a testbuild in our Area51 forum part. Since we have limited resources we are not able to give you a specific release date. It is ready when it is ready! We’ll hope you understand that. Thanks! Installation, Upgrade, Download and Feedback Installation With MediaPortal 1.6.0 we switched to .NET4 so you need to make sure you have .NET4 installed on your computer (not needed if you are on Windows 8 because it comes with .NET4). Otherwise you are not able to install MediaPortal and the installer just quits. Download-Link: Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (Standalone Installer) Aside from that when doing a clean installation of 1.6.0 there is nothing else special to worry about. Upgrade Upgrading from 1.2.x, 1.3.0 Alpha/Beta/RC/Final, 1.4.0 or 1.5.0 or 1.6.0 Pre Release to MP 1.6.0 All MediaPortal 1.2.x, 1.3.0 Alpha/Beta/RC/Final, 1.4.0, 1.5.0 and of course 1.6.0 Pre Release installations can be upgraded to 1.6.0 without losing your settings. Plugins: If you are running MediaPortal 1.5.0 or earlier , then it is possible that some of your previously installed plugins will be shown as incompatible after the upgrade to 1.6.0 ! Whether or not a plugin is incompatible depends on the MediaPortal subsystems the plugin uses. Skins: Warning ! Due to the new features and changes introduced in 1.4.0 , none of the 1.3.x skins are compatible with 1.6.0 ! Please contact the author of the skin you use for further information and updates. Upgrading Extensions: The easiest way to upgrade your extensions is by launching the MediaPortal Extension Installer , and let it check for updated versions. However this only works for extensions that use our MPEI system. If the author of the extension releases it as a stand alone installer, you must contact them for an updated version. Upgrading from 1.2.0 Alpha or earlier to 1.6.0 All MediaPortal installations starting with 1.1.0 RC1 can be upgraded to 1.6.0, without losing your settings. If you are running MediaPortal 1.2.0 Alpha or earlier, then none of your extensions (plugins and skins) will work after the upgrade to 1.6.0! You must update your extensions after the upgrade! So, please make sure that 1.6.0 compatible versions of your extensions are available before you start the upgrade! General note about Upgrades Manually stop TV-Service! On some systems our installer is not able to update the TV-Server installation because its files are locked or the service can not be stopped. For upgrades to 1.6.0 we recommend that you manually stop the TV-Service and make sure, via Windows Task Manager (enable the “all users” option), that the TvService.exe process is really gone before starting to upgrade. Custom TV-Service properties If you manually changed the properties of the TV-Service (like restart on error options) , then you must redo these changes after the upgrade. The installer is not able to save and restore your custom service properties when it installs the new version of the TV-Service. Feedback Bugs If you think you found a bug then please post a detailed report in our Bug Reports Forum . Make sure your report includes all the required information . Incomplete reports will be removed to keep the forum clean. Download Finally – the download. We hope that you took the time to read this release news entirely because it includes vital information about the major changes. If you would like to support MediaPortal, we would be happy to receive a small donation ! The Team wishes you a lot of fun with this new release! .::. Download – MediaPortal 1.6.0 Final .::. :: Post a Comment ::
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MediaPortal 1.6.0 FINAL released
We already knew that the NSA had developed a taste for intercepting packages to put backdoors in electronics . Now, it turns out that those hacks provide it with almost complete access to the iPhone , too. Read more…
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The NSA Has Crazy Good Backdoor Access to iPhones
Google is expanding its pool of Explorers, slowly but surely. First it was people attending I/O, then friends of existing Explorers, now its subscribers to Play Music All Access . To celebrate the release of Play Music on Glass (albeit a little belatedly), the tech giant is offering subscribers to its streaming service a chance to buy the fledgling wearable. Emails apparently started going out this morning (though, no Engadget editors have received theirs yet) inviting those eligible to request a place in the Explorer program. Of course, entry to the exclusive club still costs $1, 500. Though, we’re sure you’ll been looking for something frivolous to spend your tax return on in a couple of months. Filed under: Wearables , Google Comments Source: Android Central
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Google Play Music All Access customers are next in line for Glass
The National Security Agency’s X-KEYSCORE program gives the spy agency access to a wide range of Internet traffic. Any information that isn’t encrypted is, naturally, visible to passive Internet wiretaps of the kind the NSA and other intelligence agencies use. This in turn will typically expose such things as e-mails, online chats, and general browsing behavior. And, according to slides published this weekend by Der Spiegel , this information also includes crash reports from Microsoft’s Windows Error Reporting facility built in to Windows. These reports will tell eavesdroppers what versions of what software someone is running, what operating system they use, and whenever that software has crashed. Windows also sends messages in the clear whenever a USB or PCI device is plugged in as part of its hunt for suitable drivers. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Why NSA spied on inexplicably unencrypted Windows crash reports
The fine folks at AdDuplex have provided Paul Thurrott with an early look at their final Windows Phone market data for 2013 , giving us in the public a final look at the key statistics of Microsoft’s smartphone platform’s OEM and device makeup. The figures are much as they have been all year, only more so. Nokia continues to control the lion’s share of Windows Phone hardware, ending the month up a few points at 92.1 percent (this is a calculation of usage share, tracked through AdDuplex’s network). And the Lumia 520 handset continues to dominate its brethren, with a new high of 39.3 percent share. And that Windows Phone 8 grew against the now-fading Windows 7.x system, with record relative market share of 78.3 percent. Windows Phone’s 2013, if you had to put it into basic trends, would be that Nokia cleaned up, and its Lumia 520 was the weapon of choice. Thurrott well describes the current low-ending of Windows Phone (bolding original): Almost no high-end phones are popular . Worldwide, only the Lumia 920 makes the top 10 list for usage among all Windows Phone handsets, and if you look just at Windows Phone 8 handsets, only two high-end devices make the list: The Lumia 920 and the 925. In the US, there are three: The Lumia 920, 928, and 1020. All the rest are new low-end devices or old devices. The Lumia 1520 phablet doesn’t appear anywhere in this report. What this means is that the sales momentum that Windows Phone has comes at the cost of per-unit revenue. Margin pressure increases at lower price points. The list of sacrifices that had to be made to produce the Lumia 520 is not small . So, as we tally what could be the final month in which Nokia rules Windows Phone, it’s important to note that rising unit volume has come at a cost. The Lumia 1020 is a hit among a subset of the technology elite, but perhaps few else. Can you build a mobile empire on predominantly low-end phones? Apple managed the opposite, so perhaps this, too, is possible.
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Nokia Closes Out 2013 With 92% Of The Windows Phone Market
Reverse engineering the Wii U gamepad was non-trivial. libdrc The Wii U’s tablet controller isn’t moving as many consoles as Nintendo might like, but the technology itself is still interesting enough to draw the attention of the hacker community. Engadget reports that the libdrc team gave a presentation at the Chaos Communication Congress explaining how it managed to hack the Wii U’s gamepad to communicate with and stream content from a standard Linux PC. The full talk is available in video form here . The 64-slide deck describes the many, many hoops the team had to jump through to get the gamepad working—dumping the gamepad’s firmware helped the team reverse-engineer the Wi-Fi encryption system, at which point the team also needed to reverse-engineer the protocols Nintendo is using to stream video, audio, and input data. The team included a screenshot of an emulated Final Fantasy VII in its deck to prove that the software works and was also able to get the GameCube version of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker working live onstage. While the project is, at this point, “very buggy” and “not meant for end users,” the team thinks that the project is “a good prototype that can be improved on.” The team also wants to add the ability to pair other tablets with the Wii U, to port the project to Windows and to OS X, and to make it possible to stream things to the gamepad over the Internet. It may be some time before the layperson can take advantage of the libdrc team’s work, but even as an early alpha the project is an interesting proof-of-concept. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Wii U gamepad hacked, reverse engineered to stream from a PC
The NSA may have the ability to intercept data from around the world , but we now know that it has some impressive (and intimidating) equipment for snooping on nearby targets. Security guru Jacob Appelbaum told those at the Chaos Communications Congress this weekend that the NSA’s big box of tools includes Nightstand , a custom device that can compromise WiFi networks for the sake of inserting spy software. The Linux-powered device can exploit Windows systems from up to eight miles away; it’s unlikely that you’ll catch agents wardriving in the parking lot . Nightstand may not see significant use today given that it dates back to 2008, but its existence suggests that the NSA also has newer, more advanced WiFi surveillance gear at its disposal. Filed under: Wireless , Networking , Internet Comments Via: The Verge Source: Albert Veli (YouTube) , LeakSource
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NSA can hack WiFi devices from eight miles away (video)