QBlinks Is A Multi-Use Remote Control And Notification Center For Your iPhone

 Qblinks wants to be the Swiss Army knife of iPhone remote controllers. The Bluetooth LE device, which is currently seeking $35, 000 on Kickstarter, can be used to alert you to notifications from different apps on your smartphone; as a camera remote shutter; to activate Siri; play music; and help you find missing phones by prompting it to ring even when it is in silent mode. Qblinks even has… Read More

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QBlinks Is A Multi-Use Remote Control And Notification Center For Your iPhone

Google Opens $1M Contest To Shrink A Power Inverter

 Google opened up applications today for the Little Box Challenge, announced in May, with plans to give away $1, 000, 000 to the group that can create a smaller and cheaper power inverter. Inverters take direct current from power sources such as solar panels and turn it into alternate current so that it can be used in homes, cars and businesses. Making the inverter smaller allows for more cost… Read More

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Google Opens $1M Contest To Shrink A Power Inverter

Watch iOS 8′s Latest Beta Transcribe Voice To Text In Near-Real Time

 Apple’s iOS 8 beta 4 just hit the interwebs today, and among the new features found therein, there’s a cool new visualization of the iOS dictation feature (seen in the MacRumors video above) that shows your words being transcribed almost in real-time as you say them. It’s a feature that previously appeared in Siri, but it’s new to the dictate option found in Messages… Read More

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Watch iOS 8′s Latest Beta Transcribe Voice To Text In Near-Real Time

MIT Students Create An Ice Cream Printer

 You scream, I scream, we all transform an off-the-shelf Cuisinart soft-serve maker to extrude super-cooled and 3D-printed shells of ice cream! Three students at MIT, Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim, have created a homemade ice cream printer that extrudes soft serve and immediately freezes it so that it can be layered on a cooled plate. The system is a proof-of-concept… Read More

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MIT Students Create An Ice Cream Printer

How to Peel a Mango in Under 10 Seconds

Mangoes are objectively one of the best fruits in the world (see you in the comments), but they can be notoriously difficult to peel, due to how slippery they are inside. Here’s how to skip the mess and get rid of those pesky skins in seconds. Read more…

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How to Peel a Mango in Under 10 Seconds

4K Displays Ready For Prime Time

An anonymous reader writes “After the HD revolution, display manufacturers rolled out gimmick after gimmick to try to recapture that burst of purchasing (3-D, curved displays, ‘Smart’ features, form factor tweaks, etc). Now, we’re finally seeing an improvement that might actually be useful: 4K displays are starting to drop into a reasonable price range. Tech Report reviews a 28″ model from Asus that runs $650. They say, ‘Unlike almost every other 4K display on the market, the PB287Q is capable of treating that grid as a single, coherent surface. … Running games at 4K requires tons of GPU horsepower, yet dual-tile displays don’t support simple scaling. As a result, you can’t drop back to obvious subset resolutions like 2560×1440 or 1920×1080 in order to keep frame rendering times low. … And single-tile 4K at 30Hz stinks worse, especially for gaming. The PB287Q solves almost all of those problems.’ They add that the monitor’s firmware is not great, and while most options you want are available, they often require digging through menus to set up. The review ends up recommending the monitor, but notes that, more importantly, its capabilities signify ‘the promise of better things coming soon.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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4K Displays Ready For Prime Time

MediaPortal 1.7.0 FINAL released

MediaPortal 1.7.0 Final We are very happy to present you the final version of MediaPortal 1.7.0 today. This release includes a number of new features and bug fixes. Please report any problems in the bug reporting sections of the forum.  Highlights of this release Many of the changes in this release are things that you might not notice at first, but they are designed to improve the stability of MediaPortal moving forwards for the next few releases. Using SkinSettings/Expressions Skin Settings and Expressions are really powerful. Skin designers are going to be doing some amazing things with them in the near future. We have already been testing a home screen editor entirely within the MediaPortal GUI. Look for this in Area 51 very soon. Separate the WindowsPlugins to individual files This is one for the developers. Since MediaPortal started, the core plugins (My Videos, My Music, My Pictures, etc.) have been stored in a single file called WindowsPlugins.dll. This means that a lot of code has been loaded that isn’t always needed. Also, making a change to one plugin often resulted in another plugin developing a new bug. We can’t carry on like that, so the plugins are now in their own self-contained files. This will make things more stable and easier to fix/improve in future. Attention:  This change made us ‘bump’ the plugin subsystems, so there is a chance you need an updated plugin to be compatible with the 1.7.0 Release. 1.7 Pre Release compatible plugins will still work fine with this release. Enhancements to the TV and Video OSDs TV recording thumbs and comskip markers were not properly shown in the TV and Video Info OSDs. This is fixed. Improvements to the Installer You probably have the LAV Filters package installed to get the best quality playback of most video files, and TitanExtended installed to provide skin files for your plugins. The installer correctly detects the installed version, and only offers to install these if a newer version is available. Wake On LAN MediaPortal can now wake your server if it is in sleep mode and you want to access your files. Add MediaInfo For Files in the Background We use a code library called MediaInfo to obtain certain information about video files when you play them. This information can be displayed by MediaPortal. Up to now, it has only been possible to obtain this information when you actually play a file. With this release, we have added a setting to allow all files to be scanned in the background. This is turned off by default, so check out the documentation for changes to see where this setting is and how to enable it. We also updated the library to v0.7.67.  Full list of changes You can review the complete change log for MP 1.7.0 by using the link below: Changelog: MediaPortal Documentation of new features can be found at the following link: What’s new for MediaPortal 1.7.0 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 1.7.0 compatible: changes which affect plugins 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, 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 1.7.0 there is nothing else special to worry about. Upgrade Upgrading from 1.2.x, 1.3.0 Alpha/Beta/RC/Final, 1.4.0, 1.5.0, 1.6.0 and 1.7 Pre Release to 1.7.0 All MediaPortal 1.2.x, 1.3.0 Alpha/Beta/RC/Final, 1.4.0, 1.5.0, 1.6.0 and 1.7 Pre Release installations can be upgraded to 1.7.0, 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 1.7.0 ! 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 1.7.0 ! 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 1.7.0 All MediaPortal installations starting with 1.1.0 RC1 can be upgraded to 1.7.0, 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 1.7.0! You must update your extensions after the upgrade!  So, please make sure that 1.7.0 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 1.7.0 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 1.7.0 Final .::.   :: Post a Comment ::

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MediaPortal 1.7.0 FINAL released