Posts Tagged ‘iPad’

My good friend Marissa’s Dad received an iPad 2 32gig with wifi as a donation and is raffling it away for our delight. Raffle tickets cost $2 and if you register with the same e-mail address you used to previously buy one of the bunnies (before May 1st of this year) you’ll get double the entries. Also up for grabs are Gears of War 3 Cole Thrashball Plushy codes and Noble 6 Helmet codes both for your xBox Live avatar. The raffle donation money is going to be split 50/50 between Marissa and Joseph’s special needs care. As a bonus, these donations will be corporate matched so the more tickets you buy, even more money goes to helping these two with their needs.

Head over to their blog in order to get in on the action. <-This whole thing is the link go now!

[Re-posted with permission from Marissa's Dad]

We’ve got various iDevices in the house.  An iPad.  Iphones.  We’re Apple junkies, regardless of the effect it has sometimes on the wallet.  All told, the tech has been pretty good to me, I’m sure I’ve made more money supporting it out in town than it’s cost me overall.  My inner cheapness prevents me from buying the whammerdyne max-capacity iPhones, and making do with old tech long after the rest of the world has moved on.

Our video library is hosted on an older machine crammed full of relatively ancient hard drives, honestly, well in excess of what the laws of physics should allow.  I’m fairly sure I can cook a turkey with the waste heat coming off that

The landscape folder view.

machine.  As a result, the DVD rips we store on the iTunes running on that machine for the AppleTVs in the house far exceed the capacity of any given portable iDevice we may have.  The existing iTunes covers streaming to the AppleTV units, but not streaming to the portables.

I did some research, tried some free alternatives, then I found Stream to Me.  Stream to Me, by Matt Gallagher’s Projects With Love, is a combination application for your Mac or PC, and an iDevice (iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch).  The Serve To Me part of the application is free for download- it’s the iDevice app that’s very inexpensive.  Given my limited budget, Isplurged for it anyway when an iPad ostensibly to be used for Marissa and the Brother arrived in the house.

Landscape view of a movie playing.

It’s an amazing, seamless solution for streaming entire libraries over a LAN to an iDevice.  The server application runs quietly and with very little footprint on our streaming computer running OSX Leopard.  The Serve to Me part of the application has transcoded on the fly many different containers, I’ve used MP4 H.264, AVI, and MKV files, all in 720p resolution and streamed them to the iPhone/iPad application with minimal pre-processing delay and no hiccuping in the video waiting for the 802.11g stream to catch up.

Before you freak out on me, and say I’m pushing all this on you just because the developer gave me the app for free- he didn’t.  I purchased the app in the beginning of April after I thought it would be best for my problem.  It’s streamed the Brother’s baby signs DVDs as well as some Baby Einstein for Marissa.  It’s an awesome solution for a portable video player for us inside our network.

BoyGenius is reporting that there is code deep within iOS 4 that suggests the CDMA version of the iPhone and iPad is ready to be tested by carriers very soon.

This code allows certain units to bypass otherwise mandatory activation steps, allowing the use of the phone by partners and carriers for testing purposes without any hassles. The source cited in the article states that this sort of code always precedes the release of a new product and is promptly removed just before launch.

It should be noted that this is not a guarantee that this is the long-awaited Verizon iPhone, as Sprint’s network is also based on CDMA technology. Then again, who are we kidding?

Let’s just hope that this time around, Apple has a tighter grip on their testing units, so we don’t have a leak like the last time around…

[via BoyGeniusReport]