OdNT - open.neurostechnology.com - The Power of Freedom

Survey on open source and its influence on communities

Joe — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:59:25 +0000

Researchers in the field of open source beyond software are currently investigating the special meaning of openness and its importance for communities in this field.

Please take 5-7 minutes to fill out their survey. Your response will help advance their research on the nature of hardware/software open source projects and help improve the quality of open source projects.

Please follow this survey link

We appreciate your help!

Slashdot and a Backorder

Joe — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:04:24 +0000

Getting slashdotted in the midst of a backorder situation is not exactly the ideal way to get out of the backorder as you might expect.

We are working hard to ramp up our production to get ourselves out of this backorder, so please bear with us, orders will be shipped in the order in which they are received and, of course, credit cards won't be charged until the order ships (and you can cancel at any time. Its expected that orders received today will ship in 4 weeks.

Thanks to all for your support and we're very sorry for the inconvenience. I'm loath to post it since I'm sure they will sell out immediately and leave more folks annoyed, but We do have a very small supply of refurbished links available

For those interested, here's the slashdot discussion that deepend the backorder situation

Copies of Orwell's "1984" Dissapear from Kindles

Joe — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:09:18 +0000

You don't have to be a geek to be troubled by this one:

From the Defective by Design mailing list:

Have you seen this story? Last week, Amazon deleted purchased copies of
George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from the ebook readers of hundreds
of users. Yesterday, FSF's Defective by Design campaign responded by
giving the Kindle hundreds of 1-star reviews, but now we need your help.

Can you share our campaign on Identi.ca and Reddit?
read more

No Ordinary Disc Repair

Joe — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:31:57 +0000

For years, I've been trying to convince members of the DIY/Hacker community to commercialize some of their inventions. Too often this pitch comes off as all about dollars and cents, which is a real shame because the real satisfaction in any success comes not from the commerce, but the impact it has on people.

Screen Capture of Neuros LINK v 1.3 release "Hancock"

Joe — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:07:49 +0000

Released almost seven months ago, the Neuros LINK has continued its evolution to bring the comprehensiveness of the Internet's video to a consumer electronics like form (meaning it operates easily with a remote control, etc). The Release of v1.3 of the LINK's software, codenamed "Hancock" marks an important milestone in that evolution.

Hancock is important because its the most comprehensive Internet video navigation available with a remote control. We finally got to a point where the amount of content you could navigate with a remote was sufficient that we felt comfortable promoting that as the initial boot interface. Of course, no content has been removed, everything the LINK was ever able to access is still there. The only difference is that the device now starts up with a beautiful new front end that suits a piece of "electronics" rather than a PC. Naturally, there are still plenty of times that a free form mouse interface is handy, so the remote is RF and has a trackball. Most users will still have a need for a keyboard at least occasionally, but what the new interface does is allow the device to be usable by many more people in many more casual situations. Basically, the remote gives you access to a pretty rich set of content and features, and the keyboard gives you even more including the ability to configure the box to your heart's content.

Hancock is largely the product of the mass of 3rd parties working on this, The front end is XBMC with a modified Mediastream skin. In future releases, you'll see Boxee and Miro pre-installed (they both work well with the box today).

Twitter Free Stuff Rules

Joe — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:06:15 +0000

Follow neurostech on twitter, retweet a message about the free stuff within 30 minutes and we'll select a random winner (via random.org) from the list (the 3rd retweet system was too easy to game). We'll DM you that you won and get your address and mail it to you.

No whining, complaining if it doesn't work, is scuffed, sucks, whatever. All this stuff is randomly collected around the office, most is used, some is broken, but all of it is completely free, use them as doorstops if they don't work, we're sorry.

That's really it.

OSDng- Community Developed Next Generation Firmware for the OSD

Joe — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:51:06 +0000

This update that its almost impossible to really appreciate if you haven't been a part of Neuros for a while. After years of teeth gnashing about the read only file system and and lack a package manager fully implemented, a new community member bmc has released software that solves these issues called OSDng.

Neuros LINK Gamma User Manual

Joe — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:28:51 +0000

The LINK has quietly generated more hacks and experimentation than any product in Neuros history. Thankfully, I have managed to do an equally historic job in dropping the ball on promoting these hacks. This strategic ineptitude on my part has saved these noble (but private) hackers the undesirable attention that they otherwise would have gotten, had I been more attentive, they might now be suffering from the blinding glare of the FOSS spotlight.

Regrettably, we can no longer hold back the floodgates of the free software paparazzi. They have uncovered the hack the duck mugs silently perched on the desks of the otherwise anonymous heroes fighting for the freedom of your television set.

Ok, I've beat this joke to death. Bottom line is that I created a wiki Gamma LINK Hacker User Manual that begins to attempt to catalog the results of the hacks that are spread out among the forums, mailing lists, etc into one place that the bring the next Greyback or ChadV up to speed, without having to dig through the entire history on the forums. Really it's for anyone that wants to go a bit deeper in using the LINK, and obviously the device is still evolving too rapidly to put this in a printed manual anyway.

Please make sure your favorite hacks, tips and tricks are there, and remember DON'T PANIC!

A New Partnership with DVRupgrade and Neuros

Joe — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:10:50 +0000

Those of you that follow Neuros know about our longstanding relationship with DVRupgrade, which has even included co-sponsoring some bounties with the Neuros LINK, we've begun to forge an even tighter relationship. As I said nearly 18 months ago, I believe that open electronics will follow the path of PCs in many ways, and one of those important ways will be with value added resellers. The concept of openness goes hand in hand with customization. Obviously much of that customization can be done easily by users themselves with simple plug ins and third party apps. But, it's clear there's also a place for more complicated customization that many users will be looking for the convenience of a reseller for.

In the nascent field of open electronics, there are few manufacturers, let alone the infrastructure of resellers, but Neuros happens to have the good fortune of being within a few miles of one of the world's few "electronics value added resellers." or eVARs Expanding on that luck is something we've been working on for years, and I'm proud to announce it's starting to bear fruit. So what does it mean to be an eVAR? and more importantly what does it bring to Neuros customers?

User Contributions enabled on Neuros.TV!

Joe — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:54:39 +0000

User contributions have been enabled on Neuros.TV. This means that you can help us make the dbase more comprehensive by adding your own sources. While the process isn't fully automated, it does draw from the database to help you populate entries. So please try it out and give us your comments.

As I don't have to tell our readers, user contributions have a strong history of creating big comprehensive databases of content. Just look at gracenote and freedb with millions of entries for songs. The challenge of cataloging tv shows is nowhere near as great, so we hope that with a bit of user contributions, we can build a database that is not only comprehensive but international as well (although the first focus, as you'll see is US shows).

Hopefully using the system will be pretty self-explanatory: Search for a show and you'll see the "Contribute" link at the top of the page. Some of the fields will be automatically populated. Basically you have to pick the show and season, and input the URL. The "channel" field is basically the website. Sometimes it will be automatically populated and other times you'll just have to enter a name for the website.

As always, it's evolving, so we're eager to get feedback.