For my birthday, Cindy let me buy a new computer for extending our sage sever into the living room, thus creating a media extender. I have been very happy with the computer, but I have not been as happy with the keyboard. The description of the Belkin Media Pilot keyboard sounded very interesting and exactly like what I could want. Here is the belkin website about the keyboard.

Basically, the keyboard is suppose to be able to control the keyboard as well as all my other AV equipment. This is great for a Media extender, since I still have a lot of other equipment in my setup, but least of all my TV and Receiver. First of all, let me talk about using this device for controlling the computer, in that respect I have been fairly happy with it. After some initial problems of not realizing that the keyboard was in AV mode, I have got it working with my computer and things seem to be going great. I use it to do just about everything on that computer without any problems. The mouse is a little slow to move, even when I turn up the speed in Windows…

Now to the AV side… First of all, I have had a lot of problems finding the correct codes to use for my equipment. I have mostly JVC equipment, but the only device that I could get working easily was the JVC VCR. All the other equipment, I needed to edit the file that contains all the remote codes and add in ones to the JVC section that would work with my equipment. So I did get most of the equiment working, but I am still not sure if and how I can control other features of my equipment, outside of basical chanel and volume control. The documentation is very sparse. Switching from Computer to AV mode on the keyboard does not seem to be right on my keyboard. It might just be that I got a bad keyboard, but it jsut does not feel like the switch falls into place when trying to control the AV equipment. After that, the actual remote functions just do not seem to respond very well. Like I can sit there pressing the Volume up button, but it takes a while for the receiver to get the signal and turn the volume up.

I love the concept behind this device, I just do not think that Belkin pulled it off as well as they could have. Now I am stuck with a wireless keyboard that I paid too much for, I could have gotten just a wireless keyboard for less, but I was hoping for the AV control. I guess I will have to keep waiting and seeing…

-Matt

I recently got an e-mail from the Chief Operating Officer of Orb Networks (probably a form e-mail) talking about a new feature that they have just released. It is an API to allow developers to create was for ORB to stream other information other than just the Videos, music, and pictures that is currently supported.
Matthew

Thank you for writing about Orb in the past on your blog. Thought I’d follow up with you and tell you about the latest exciting thing in Orb — we have published a programming extension to Orb to allow developers to build their own add-ons…

http://www.orb.com/api

The idea is to allow developers to leverage the transcoding, transmission, and presentation frameworks inside the Orb server to give user’s access to any applications or content that is on (or accessible from) the home machine!

So what does all this mean? I am not really sure yet, I am still working through the documentation. The first thing that comes to mind is a way to view RAW files. I shoot with my Nikon D100 in RAW mode, which produces non-standard images. Through this API, I might be able to find a way to view my RAW files located on my server at home…

So that is one way, but I am sirtting here trying to think what else would be good to implement in this interface. Looking at the ORB forums, there is a simple add-on that allows the creating of to-do lists. The important part is that this demonstrates using Orb in a two way communication method. Up till now, it has been a one way passing of data to the client, but if a client can pass things back, that would be great… Here is that forum discussion.

I am going to start thinking about this more and more, and see what makes sense to use in this interface…

-Matt

This is an article about a keyboard that uses OLED screens behind the keys to let you customize what you see on the keyboard. Imagine that when you are in a given application, the images on the keys change cooresponding to what actions you need to perform. For instance, you are in Adobe premeire, and the keys change to video editing functions like play, rewind and fastforward. Imagine that when I go into SageTV, my keyboard changes to PVR related functions… This type of keyboard just has soo many uses…

Supposedly, that is what this site is talking about doing, but since it is Russian, it is a little bit hard to tell for sure. Take a look at the article here. This is a great idea that I would love to see get fully implemented.

-Matt
http://www.LearnFamily.com

So while looking at a blog, I saw reference to a touch screen monitor. So I started to web surf for this monitor and I cam acorss another website MP3Car.com, thus I started looking around. This place has all the cool toys that I am looking for, like small touch screen monitors, designed for use in a car computer application. More interesting they have car based computers in there too, and one that I really like looks a lot like a power inverter. Then I got thinking, these little devices would make a great Media Center exteneder, or in my case something to use as a SageTV Client. I have been working on my new client, trying to decide what to get, but this might be a better alternative because they are even smaller than the Shuttle PC that I was looking at. The only problem is that most of these systems are designed to have an external power supply, and this power supply is usually a DC-DC power supply, which causes problems for building it for inside use, but I am sure that someone has a solution for that…

So back to the original reason for coming to this site, they also have small touch screen monitors. The site listed above was using one of these for a digital photo frame application… Hmmm… the uses are endless… I might have to see if Cindy will let me get one

-Matt

eHomeUpgrade is running an article about some new Microsoft hardware (here). The first peice of hardware is a wireless keyboard with a few extra features to make controling an MCE computer a lot easier. Me personally, I thik that I could use something like this since I am currently using a Logitech wireless keyboard on one of my SageTV clients. I am not too thrilled about the estimated price around $100. If this was closer to what I can get remotes for, then I would consider it…

In the mean time, I will just have to keep looking for nice remotes for my computers…

-Matt