There’s something a little inelegant about covering your gifts with odd bits of tape. It’s quite literally the rough duct tape solution to wrapping presents. If you don’t have any tape or ribbon want to avoid a tacky aesthetic, this Japanese method can keep your presents wrapped sans sticky tape. Read more…
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Wrap Gifts Without Any Tape or Ribbon Using This Japanese Method
A cache of over 4, 000 silver and bronze coins dating back to ancient Rome has been discovered by a Swiss farmer. Buried some 1, 700 years ago, it’s one of the largest treasures of its kind ever found in Switzerland. Read more…
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Farmer Discovers Priceless Trove of Ancient Roman Coins While Removing a Molehill
Forget the Like button: Facebook wants you to hit the Buy button instead. Buzzfeed reports that Zuckerberg & C0. is testing new, miniature e-commerce sites that are embedded within the Facebook pages of retailers. Read more…
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Facebook’s Testing Online Shops Embedded Into Business Pages
Remember when Apple went after that handy note-taking widget , a popular app that’s one the first truly useful widgets for iOS 8? Turns out, Apple’s been pulling all kinds of apps that take advantage of new features in iOS 8—even after they’ve been approved to be in the App Store. And developers are starting to get pretty upset. Read more…
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Apple Is Pulling a Bunch of the Neatest iOS 8 Apps
MediaPortal 1.9.0 Pre Release Attached to this news you will find the Pre Release version of MediaPortal 1.9.0. Pre Releases are provided as a way for the community to test and give feedback on all the exciting things we have lined up for the next release. We allocate about one month for Pre Release testing with your help. For this Pre Release we’ve put our focus once more on Bug fixing and improved stability. However, there are a couple of new features. Skin designers will like the new and functions. There are enhancements to the video resolution logos that will give you more information about the video you are watching. There is a new sort method in My Videos called Name with Duration. There are several improvements to logging, and a significant number of bug fixes. Scroll down to the ‘Full list of changes’ to read up on all of them! Highlights of this release UNC Streaming for Live TV The default protocol for LiveTV streaming on a multi-seat setup is RTSP. MediaPortal has an option to change this to UNC for those that experience problems with RTSP. In the last release, we fixed some long-standing issues with UNC paths. Therefore, this option (which was previously hidden) is now present in configuration. Thumbnails Thumbnails are a really important way for you to get feedback about video files, and these have been improved in several ways in this release. Individual plugins can now use their own default thumbs. Issues with large thumbnail creation are fixed. Content Protection We found a number of issues with content protection. It wasn’t working properly in date view in ‘Pictures’. Also, the PIN code was shown unencrypted in the configuration files. This is all now fixed, and the PIN code now supports letters as well as numbers. However, you will need to reset all your PIN codes for this release. Titan Extended The Titan team have decide to stop development on Titan Extended. Therefore it has been removed from the installer. If you already have Titan Extended, this won’t affect you. For clean installs you will need to download Titan Extended manually from the plugins repository in order to find skin files for plugins. For 1.9.0, plugin developers will need to provide the Titan skin files as part of their own installers. Titan TNC will be the new skin name of the Titan Extended theme, and this will be released as a stand-alone skin, probably at the same time as the 1.9 Final release. Full list of changes You can review the complete change log for 1.9.0 Pre Release by using the link below: Changelog: MediaPortal Documentation of new features can be found at the following link: What’s new for MediaPortal 1.9.0 (Pre Release ) Installation, Upgrade, Download and Feedback Installation Since we switched to .NET4 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, but you NEED the .NET 3.5 features enabled! ). 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 the 1.9.0 Pre Release there is nothing else to worry about. Upgrade Upgrading from 1.2.x, 1.3.0 Alpha/Beta/RC/Final, 1.4.0 until 1.8 to 1.9.0 Pre Release All MediaPortal 1.2.x, 1.3.0 Alpha/Beta/RC/Final, 1.4.0 till 1.8 installations can be upgraded to 1.9.0 Pre Release, without losing your settings. Plugins: If you are running MediaPortal 1.6.0 or earlier, then it is possible that some of your previously installed plugins will be shown as incompatible after the upgrade to 1.9.0 Pre Release! Whether or not a plugin is incompatible depends on the MediaPortal subsystems the plugin uses. All plugins that work for the 1.8 release, should also work with the 1.9.0 Pre Release. Skins: Warning! Due to the new features and changes introduced in 1.4.0, none of the 1.3.x skins are compatible with 1.9.0 Pre Release! 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 1.9.0 Pre Release All MediaPortal installations starting with 1.1.0 RC1 can be upgraded to 1.9.0 Pre Release, 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 1.9.0 Pre Release! You must update your extensions after the upgrade! So, please make sure that 1.9.0 Pre Release 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 1.9.0 Pre Release 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 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 1.9.0 Pre Release .::. :: Post a Comment ::
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MediaPortal 1.9.0 Pre Released
No, this portrait isn’t made up of thousands upon thousands of magnetic sculpture beads . The metallic wonder’s lifelike contours and shimmer comes from painstakingly hand-placing 13, 000 variably sized platinum beads. Read more…
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Watch Pure Platinum Turn Into a Pricey 3D Portrait
Every year at CES, the Eureka Park outpost where they stick the scrappy startups is the best damn part of the whole shindig. This is where all the people with a screw loose or a decided lack of good common sense come to peddle their spaghetti-cooking robot or aroma-powered computer – or, as happened this year, their solar-powered beer cooler . SolarCooler is a “world first,” which is a common epithet at Eureka Park, and it’s currently undergoing crowdfunding on Indiegogo. The startup is looking for $150,000 to make their portable refrigerator (it even makes ice!) a reality, but it’s currently looking like it’ll need a real groundswell of support to get there. Here’s the big issue: the entry-level model costs just under $1,000, and that’s a special backer-only price. Retail for the SolarCooler is $1,200, which is bound to be a bitter pill to swallow even for the most ardent of tailgaters. Still, this is essentially a solar-powered 12V battery backup for everything combined with a cooler that offers true, continuous refrigeration, so that price tag starts to look at lot more reasonable when you consider its other potential uses. It also has a lot of potential to help out in commercial and medical settings as a transport for goods that need to be kept cool when direct power is in scarce supply and loading up a device with a significant number of batteries would make it cumbersome to use. SolarCooler is pursuing a flex funding goal, meaning it walks away with whatever it raises, and the founder seems keen on building it whatever the outcome, but there are still over 40 days left in the campaign, so it could still turn into a Cinderella story. All I know is I like beer, and I like it cold (that ‘best served at room temperature stuff’ is BS) so SolarCooler makes sense to me.
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SolarCooler Keeps Your Brews Icy With The Power Of The Sun, But It’ll Cost You $1K
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
Web: To beat the pressure of gift-buying, we recommend you give experiences instead of objects . So how do you find these experience-based gifts, and which one is right for whom? Unstuff Gifts makes it easy by aggregating, sorting and recommending the best “non-stuff” gifts for the holidays. Read more…
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Unstuff Gifts Picks Experiences, Not Stuff, for Holiday Presents
We can’t even pretend we’re not enamored with Google here at Lifehacker, but there is life on the other side. While the quality of search results is largely subjective (contrary to what the Bing Challenge would have you believe), there are some things that are definitely better in Microsoft’s garden. Read more…
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Five Things Bing Does Better Than Google