Pedro Assunção » mobile

OSX video streaming the easy way

Pedro Assunção — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 13:01:37 +0000

The problem

For a while now, i have been searching for a way to stream videos from my living room’s Mac Mini to my other Macs across the house. Especially to my laptop (or in the future to my tablet) when i’m laying in bed. Yes, i know i’m lazy, but one has to take advantage of technology, right?

The problem is that i never found a nice enough way to do it. I tried streaming through VLC, but unfortunately the wireless network seems not to be enough to cope with the amount of data. Also, it’s a bit cumbersome to have to setup the stream every time i want to watch a movie in bed. I looked into whether XBMC or Plex would do the trick and, although there are some built in server capabilities, i was never able to make it work for my needs.

The solution

Enter StreamToMe and ServeToMe. Both applications are available in the Mac Appstore (they also have iPhone, iPod, and iPad apps) and allow seamless video streaming across Macs. Painless. You define the folders you want to share in the server and the client gets to browse them, complete with video thumbnails. Extremely cool and practical, especially because they convert the videos on the fly so it plays smoothly even across 3G networks

From their website:

“Files are live-transcoded into the native format for your device so you don’t need to pre-convert your media. Adaptive bitrates mean that you can stream over WiFi or 3G.”

Now if i could just get an android version

Trying out the android app

Pedro Assunção — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 01:39:17 +0000

So I come back from the road trip and what’s they’d first thing I do? Install the wordpress android app so I can blog anywhere, hehe. I kind of decided to use my blog as it was intended (as a web log), not necessarily as people see them these days (as places to write longer pieces of text that cannot be tweeted).

Peace

Introducing the new eyePhone

Pedro Assunção — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:02:29 +0000

Awesome Futurama video parodying Apple’s iPhone:

Layar rocks, or how the Berlin wall is back up

Pedro Assunção — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 09:55:12 +0000

I’m starting to love Layar more and more. One of the latest “layers” introduced was the ability to view the Berlin wall – as if it was still standing – by pointing your phone to the place where the wall used to exist. You can read the entire article here.

Do you see the potential? Being able to peek at any historical time and place and see what that location looked like a long long time ago. Imagine going to the Coloseum in Rome, Italy and watching a 3D gladiator fight happening in front of your eyes. Granted, that will take more development in augmented reality contact lenses (which, believe me, will exist in a near future) but for now you can potentially do that with your phone.

I really have to get an Android powered device

Other (probably intelligent) wordpress plugins to install

Pedro Assunção — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:24:36 +0000

Following up on my post about RAM (or lack of it), i decided to install a proper wordpress plugin to cache most of the stuff in static HTML files. It’s called WP-SuperCache and i’m hoping it’s really super

But now i cannot but wonder if i shouldn’t – somehow – find a way to have nginx serving these static files instead of passing the request to apache. I’m already caching static JS, CSS, and image files with nginx, so that would probably make sense.

In other news, installed a plugin that serves a different WordPress theme for mobile phones. It’s called wordpress-mobile-edition, in case you are interested.

Google unveils Nexus One phone. Europe fail, though.

Pedro Assunção — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:42:21 +0000

Google announced today the immediate availability of their first mobile smartphone, the Nexus One. For the US only, that is. If you happen to live in third world countries like Germany, France, Spain, etc. you will be greeted with the following sentence in their home page:

Sorry, the Nexus One phone is not available in your country.

Tough luck for all of us poor Europeans who will, as usual, have to wait for the latest gadgets to arrive (from the top of my head both the iphone and the motorola droid were released first in the US, being the latter still to be released in more countries than Germany and the UK).

I think I’ll get an iphone, since Google obviously does not want Euro-scum buying their phone right now

New programming language (GO) and new mobile OS (Bada)

Pedro Assunção — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:14:14 +0000

Wow, these have been a couple of crazy days: First Samsung announced a new operating system for mobile devices called Bada – that will compete directly with Google’s Android – and the next day Google announces the creation of a new programming language, supposedly a cross between Python and C++, called Go.

It looks like today every company is trying to spread like a freaking octopus in every possible direction. Does this contradict the usual startup talks about focusing in a specific niche and being really good at it, or is it just that – as companies grow – the niche is no longer enough to buy ferraris for every manager?

Python on my E71. Sweet.

Pedro Assunção — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:30:26 +0000