Posts Tagged Network Option

Myka ION brings Intel Atom and ION graphics into the living room

Posted by on Thursday, 5 November, 2009

myka-ion

Think of the Myka ION as a nettop built for your HDTV. The little media streamer utilizes an 1.6 GHz Intel Atom 330 CPU and an NVIDIA ION GPU to provide your TV with quality high-definition content. Actually, the Myka ION is more computer than dedicated media playback device, which is good thing. Well, a Linux-powered computer with Boxee and XBMC installed, that is.

The company claims that the Myka ION has enough juice to power Boxee, Hulu, and other Internet sites as well as playback HD content encoded at a high bit rate. After peeking the specs, which includes 2GB of DDR2 memory and the aforementioned hardware, I don’t see why it couldn’t. Video can be outputted to a display via VGA, DVI, or HDMI and the audio can ride on either optical or dig-COAX digital channels or over analog outputs. There is even a wireless network option, along with a Blu-ray drive and various hard drive size options.

myka pro ui copy

But it’s the software that makes a streamer successful and this guy is stacked. It has everything: Boxee, XBMC, Hulu Desktop and it’s own GUI powered by a full version of Ubuntu 9.10. Needless to say that the Myka ION can probably play back any video file you throw at it.

All this nerdy goodness doesn’t come cheap. The base model Myka Ion without wireless or a Blu-ray drive and only a 160 GB hard drive, costs $379 and will take 4 – 6 weeks to ship. Once you add all the options, the price climbs to a $769, which is on par with media centers from Dell and HP. But Dell and HP don’t ship with what looks like to be a killer software suite.



Review: Eye-Fi Pro 4GB wireless SD memory card

Posted by on Tuesday, 7 July, 2009

eyefipro

What can be said about the latest Eye-Fi SD card that hasn’t been said about every other iteration? The Pro is just that, a Pro. With support for RAW files, Ad Hoc network support and Selective Transfer, the Eye-Fi Pro is perfection.

Using the Eye-Fi Manager, it took all of three minutes to get the Pro up and running on my Mac. Setting up an Ad Hoc network to my Mac was simple enough that a donkey could do it. From the wireless network dropdown list, select the “set up ad hoc network” option and create an ad hoc network. Once you’ve done that, refresh the network list, select your new ad hoc network and configure the Pro to recognize it going forward. Switch back to your wireless network and you’re done.

DSLR users can now shoot in RAW or RAW+ and have those images directly upload to their respective desktops/laptops over Wi-Fi. Eye-Fi creates two separate folders for RAW images (7-6-09) and JPEG images (July 06, 2009) with differing date formats.

Rather than uploading every single image or video that you capture, the Selective Transfer mode utilizes your camera’s protect function to identify which images to upload and which ones to leave. It’s dead simple. Protect the images you want to upload and then Eye-Fi takes care of the rest.

The Pro, as I’ve said before, is a dream come true — but at $150 it’s tough to justify such a purchase for a slow 4GB SD card. However, it also automagically uploads to your photo sharing site of choice and supports Ad Hoc networks. In a pressure-filled situation, like a live blog, the Eye-Fi Pro is a required gadget in a blogger’s bag. I’d throw down $150 clams for one, but I have the luxury of expensing it back to the big guy.

Eye-Fi Pro [Eye-Fi]