Hauppauge Digital have whipped out a new add-on card to convert a boring old PC into a multimedia-tastic satellite TV receiver.
Their new WinTV Nova-s card receives free satellite channels (the -s is for satellite), and will work with Sky’s Freesat, that give free access to the unencrypted channels on Sky, which are currently all of the BBC offering and soon ITV (hopefully). Sky normally charge you £150 for the privilege.
Once they’ve shelled out for the £59.99 (~$103, ~€87) decoding device, punters won’t need a viewing card or subscription fees to enjoy free satellite transmissions on their desktop.
The card is aimed at consumers who already have a satellite dish stuck on their roof/wall, with Hauppauge suggesting that the WinTV Nova-s would be ideal for a PC “in the kitchen, study or bedroom as an additional digital TV.”
Owners can watch full screen satellite TV on their desktop, or have a smaller window open whilst trying to work on something else (yeah, right: who’s going to carry on working on their VAT return when there’s some top notch footie onscreen?!)
The Nova-s is compatible with Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition, and also offers the option to record shows to the PC’s hard disk. It will also work with all-round media handlers like ShowShifter.
At the moment, the Hauppauge’s WinTV Nova-s can receive all the BBC TV channels (including One, Two, Three, Four, CBBC, Cbeebies and BBC News24 and Radios 1 to 7.)
ITV currently encrypts, or scrambles, its satellite transmissions using the service provided by Sky, but will soon be following BBC’s lead and broadcasting its channels without encryption, so they can be viewed any satellite receiver.
This means that ITV1, ITV2, ITV3 and the ever-fascinating Men&Motors will become available soon, with more channels to be added in 2006 when Freesat officially launches.
Freesat will be the satellite equivalent of Freeview,” said Yehia Oweiss, Managing Director of Hauppauge Digital. “Already broadcasting BBC, the service will be available to all UK households and bring free digital TV to the 25 per cent who are outside Freeview’s area. Consumers can buy our Freesat tuner now and enjoy many digital channels now, with more being added all the time.”
The WinTV Nova-s looks reasonably future proofed too, offering HDTV (High Definition TV) compatibility, with HDTV broadcasts expected to be delivered by satellite in 2006/7
Freesat’s EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) will be made available on the Hauppauge card, but for now the information can be downloaded through the Internet.
The Hauppauge WinTV Nova-s also provides a video input socket for slapping in a camcorder and digitising the content into MPEG format for editing and burning to DVD.
The $100 laptop project launched by MIT Media Lab, gained a big boost yesterday when the labs Nicholas Negroponte met with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.
“USB ports galore” will be provided as will built-in WiFi. The only thing it will be missing is a hard drive. We’d imagine that this will be down to the additional power drain they have, and to try and maintain the necessary ruggedness. The networking will be via a wireless mesh.
All software will be open source as in Negroponte view “open source software is the key to innovation in software and learning technology.”
The impact of this project could be huge on many fronts – if it comes into being – and we’ve no reason to imagine that it won’t. Giving any and every child access to a computer, and teaching them to use it and inspiring them will be the start of a revolution bring free communication and equal learning to all citizens.
One of our Digital-Lifestyles favorite digital media entrepreneur Swede, Jens Nylander has extracted himself from recent problems and brought out a new mp3 player called MP-X.
Accton Technology has unveiled a Skype-enabled Wi-Fi phone, the SkyFone WM1185-T in Tokyo.
This is exactly the type of deal that we thought that Skype would be doing and fits perfectly into our thought of 
It has taken the Bluetooth headset industry a remarkably long time to twig that we don’t want to use one headset for listening to music, and then frantically rip it off to use another Bluetooth headset for answering the phone. Anycom has the one… at a price.
And the icing on the cake: a Bluetooth audio gateway. Without further details (actual hands-on reviews!) this is probably going to seem more wonderful than it can in reality be: but what we’re hoping it will do, is allow you to plug several audio inputs into it, and switch between them – from landline phone to Skype, from Skype to iPod, from iPod to mobile phone. 
We first reported the news of the 
Well today, Nokia are announcing its actual availability and they’ve expanded its capabilities to enable Web browsing using Bluetooth via your mobile.
For Linux hackers everywhere, there’s the great excitement that the 770 will be running Debian Linux, with the new platform – derived from the Linux GNOME UI – going under the name “maemo”. Development on maemo has continued since May and the end of October saw the release of maemo 1.1 Release Candidate 5. They’ve even given it the fancy new name of Nokia Internet Tablet 2005, if you please. 
VoIP was hinted at back in May. It’s now been confirmed by our old mate Janne Jormalainen, “During the first half of year 2006 we will launch the next operating system upgrade to support more presence based functionalities such as VoIP and Instant Messaging.”
Hash showed off Animation Master which is a very simple (if you believe the demos) animation package. It has a huge library of pre-built characters, objects and even things like types of walks for the characters. Lip syncing even looked easy. Though the package is simple, you probably need some basic creative skills and understanding of animation to do anything sensible with it. Visit their Website and look in the gallery, the video of “I will survive” of Gloria Gaynor fame is a true classic.
LaCie had lots of disk systems on offer (firewire, USB and Ethernet) offering easy access to multi-terrabytes of data. An external 5 1/4″ drive (the size of a CD-ROM drive) can hold up to 1TB (big disk) while the double width bigger disk extreme can hold up to 2TB. There’s also external RAID drives, the biggest F800 holds up to 2TB supporting Firewire 800 (up to 80MB/s transfers) and the biggest S25 support 160MB/s and up to 2.5GB (which is 3GB internal) both support hot-swappable drives. The newest addition is the mini which looks just like a Mac mini and sits underneath it (and can be stacked with more minis), each one containing up to 250MB of disk. 
Nokia has announced three more Nokia N series multimedia devices, the Nokia N92 (the world’s first mobile device with a built-in DVB-H receiver), the Nokia N71 and the Nokia N80.
Using the built in software, users can also create personal channel lists, subscribe to TV-channel packages, set program reminders and interact through services such as voting, program feedback and additional web discovery. 
Sporting WLAN and 3G, the Nokia N80 is being touted as the world’s first handset to feature UPnP technology, and has the ability to be used as a remote control for wirelessly swapping content between PCs, audio equipment and TVs. 
Photos snapped on the Nokia N80 can also be printed wirelessly to any UPnP-enabled printer or photo kiosk.
Storage comes in the form of 40 MB of internal memory, with support for miniSD cards of up to 2 GB.
We could only find a teensy-weensy picture of the 3G clam phone as we went to print, but we can tell you that is has two displays and two cameras, one of which is a 2-megapixel camera.
The best thing about Samsung’s press photos is that they always feature groups of attractive young ladies deliriously happy to be touching their latest products.
Coming in two parts – the laptop and its detachable 19″ screen – we were confident that we’d be in for double the fun and, sure enough, we were rewarded with happy-clappy shots of two ladies near-ecstatic to be fondling the electronics.
Happily, Samsung have had the nous to ensure that they used standard monitor connectors too, so that the laptop can be connected to a bigger screen (for giving a corporate presentation, for example) – and even the display can be used with a different PC.
Full technical details, pricing and availability is yet to be announced, but we can tell you that the laptop packs a whopping 19″ WSXGA+ (1680×1050) HDTV compatible screen and is powered by a Pentium M770 (2.13GHz) CPU.
Helped by big European growth, global PDA (personal digital assistant) shipments whizzed up 21% in the third quarter of 2005, according to analysts Gartner.
The biggest shipment rise was recorded by Research in Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry device, growing 52.6% in the third quarter as the company extended its lead as the top dog worldwide PDA vendor.
Overall, the Western European PDA market grew 53.4% in the third quarter of 2005, with 1.2 million units shipped.