Nov 292012
 

raspberry

If in these days you take a look at the list of possible gifts/gadgets that will be hot in the next Christmas you’ll find almost for sure the Raspberry Pi.

This is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also able to play high-definition video and sending the output through an HDMI interface to a TV or a monitor and all of this at a starting price of around 25$.

The design is based around a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, VideoCore IV GPU, and 128 or 256 Megabytes of RAM, with two USB ports and a 10/100 Ethernet controller. The design does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD card for booting and long-term storage. The board is intended to run Linux kernel based operating systems and there is a lot of interest on the open source community with many small distro born to support this new hardware such as raspbian, a free operating system based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware.

Recently the Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM has been announced and put on the market.
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Jan 232012
 

Do you have a nice TV or projector? You are in the right place. Today we will see how to make an incredible and surprising combination of a low-performance PCs and a nice TV or projector. Our goal is to turn that old PC into a fantastic Media Center, which will give you many possibilities. From the view of Film and/or video, to listen to music (excellent if you have connected a good sound system), an excellent way to show photographs and browse the web with a simple click .

All of this will be possible with XBMC

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Aug 192011
 

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OpenELEC is an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub. The idea behind OpenELEC is to allow people to use their Home Theatre PC (HTPC) like any other device you might have attached to your TV, like a DVD player or Sky box.

But before continuing with OpenELEC i do a step back and say a few words about XBMC.
Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is an open source program created for the Xbox and now available on xbmc.org for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, Apple TV and Xbox. On all platforms other than Xbox, XBMC acts as an application, possibly launched at boot time or later.

XBMC can play most formats of audio/video, and if there is an internet connection it’s able to use network services, such as getting movie and album reviews, or view movies in streaming.
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