Dessert in Amsterdam

June 22nd, 2008

I was recently invited to speak at the XBMC Devcon hosted by Boxee in Amsterdam. It was a privilege to meet the talented and hard-working team behind XBMC and boxee. For those unfamiliar with XBMC, it is a homebrew media center application for hacked Xboxes that rivals anything created by a commercial organization; you haven’t experienced digital media until you have used XBMC. Boxee hopes to do what Firefox did for Mozilla, or what Ubuntu has done for Linux: bring the application to the masses. They currently have a port for the Mac Mini available for limited Alpha testing (unfortunately, it looks like all of their Alpha invites have already been exhausted…for now).

I must give props to Avner and his team for hosting a proper event for hackers — like the last Toorcon Seattle, the entire event had an open bar, all day and all night, with an appropriate mix of caffeine and alcohol available at all times (and who said athletes were the only ones who use performance-enhancing drugs?).

At a conference dinner event at the Supper Club, dessert was presented in a … novel … fashion: on a naked woman. After dinner was served, a man dressed in leather walked in and laid down on the table what looked like a body wrapped in cloth; the cloth was peeled back to reveal a (mostly) naked woman. He then proceeded to paint her entire body with chocolate, and then topped her off with whipped cream and chocolate ganaches, all to a soundtrack spun by a funky house DJ. Of course, you then had to get your dessert — no hands allowed. The chocolate was quite sticky, which made for a number of hilarious photos.

Thanks again to Boxee for the conference and my respect to team XBMC for showing the world what kinds of incredible applications the homebrew scene can create.

Name that Ware May 2008

June 12th, 2008

The ware for May 2008 is shown below.

I was originally thinking about just using the lower image only for the Name that Ware hint, but I decided it was a bit too hard to tell what it was from that alone, so I included a photo of a (carefully cropped) portion of the top side of the PCB. Hopefully I haven’t revealed so much that the contest is trivial, but there is still enough to make a solid guess as to what this is.

Thanks to everyone for playing and your patience with the tardiness of the competition postings. It’s literally Christmas in June when you’re in the consumer electronics business, so things have been very busy. Also, I will be in Amsterdam this weekend for the XBMC devcon hosted by Boxee. If you’re in the area drop me an email!

Winner of Name that Ware April 2008!

June 12th, 2008

I’m always impressed at how someone manages to nail even the most obscure wares — this one never made it into production, although its details are searchable in Google. Alex Badea is the winner for correctly naming the device first in his May 19th post. Congratulations, and email me to claim your prize!

The ware for April 2008 was the motherboard from the ill-fated HP Xpander project. Since it’s a reader-submitted ware, I’m not too familiar with the history of the project; it was apparently some kind of a graphing calculator plus Windows CE device. Talking about HP graphing calculators does bring back some nostalgia, though — I still have my old HP 48gx graphing calculator from my late high school days. Thinking back, I can’t believe how much of a nerd I was to carry that thing around with me everywhere in my front pocket (and that thing is not small). You couldn’t separate me from my graphing calculator. I guess I was one of the un-coolest guys in high school for a reason — but, I did score points for being able to fix other people’s graphing calculators when they got crushed at the bottom of a backpack.

Again, thanks to 92915810cf6b9f60b0bb06bc498ea884 for sharing the ware!

PS: previous winners, I finally mailed out your prizes, with the exception of Sii — I got an email from you and I responded, but I never heard back with your address. Maybe it got swallowed by the spam shark?

Name that Ware April 2008

May 19th, 2008

The Ware for April 2008 is shown below. Click on the images for a larger version.

This ware is actually a reader-submitted ware, thanks to 92915810cf6b9f60b0bb06bc498ea884 for the ware! I love one-way hashes, don’t you? Protecting privacy while giving attribution…it’s great. The ware is actually a prototype of a device that was never made available on the market for sale, although when I poked around a bit I found enough documentation here and there on the web to make the contest solvable. The company that made these boards was clearly not shy about applying their logo liberally all over the board.

My apologies for the tardiness of the ware. This is one of the first times I’ve actually slipped well into the next month, but I hope to get back on track soon. Being at the Maker’s Faire in San Mateo earlier this month completely wiped out the weekend that I usually do the posting, and then I had a very busy couple of weeks.

Winner Name That Ware March 2008!

May 19th, 2008

The ware for March 2008 was a GE Skype DECT Phone, model 28310EE1. mangel gave a great analysis of the images and also nailed the exact model number of the phone! Congratulations, email me to claim your prize.

I thought one of the interesting features of this board is the fact that it doesn’t bear a GE logo. I had pixelated the logo on the initial photo to try and make the competition a little bit more challenging, but as you can see below the board bears an “RTX” logo.

RTX is actually a Danish company that specializes in ODM product design, and they have several SIP/Skype phones in their portfolio. This is quite typical of a trend that I find a little bit puzzling in US retail. Many of the major brand names, such as Westinghouse, GE, and Kodak do very little consumer electronics product engineering; it’s more typical that the core IP is generated off-shore, either by a European firm or an Asian firm. How these big brand names manage to maintain a grip on the market despite the fact that a smart competitor could easily source the same design and sell into the same market is a testament to how much marketing matters over actual product functionality or usefulness.

I also thought the board was fairly interesting for its integrated antenna structures. The cut-out regions presumably help tune the antenna’s performance and the two elements are positioned at right angles to increase their diversity.

Also, February’s contest was undecided as of the last posting; based upon the revealed plaintexts, Sii is the winner. Congrats, and please email me to claim your prize! I’ll try to get more silicon contests up in the future.