Communications Technology

Gizmodo: RSS
Gizmodo posts tagged ‘RSS’

MSNBC Newsreader Will Vomit Stories From Household Objects

newVideoPlayer(”msnbc_reader.flv”, 506, 316,”"); MSNBC’s new flash-based “visual newsreader” (as opposed to?) presents headlines by either spinning them off of a colorful 3-D spiral or spawning them from the dominant colors in front of your webcam. The service, called Spectra, is one of the most ridiculous ways to communicate information I’ve seen in a long time. So I gave it a go, and as you can see, it’s pretty out there. While the New York Times wants to turn your computer into a newspaper, it looks like MSNBC wants to make it into a hallucinogenic drug. [MSNBC Spectra]

TiVo Discovers Really Simple Way to Get Syndicated Web Vid

Yes, you guessed from my carefully coded headline there that today TiVo announced the capability to download video from RSS feeds on the web, by way of updated TiVo Desktop Plus software for Windows. You’ll have to pay $25 for it, but just once—it’s a free update to those who already use TiVo Desktop Plus to bring recorded shows over to their PCs, iPods and PSPs. Jump for details in an excerpt from the press release.

Starting today, TiVo users can subscribe to and watch a broad range of video content available through Real Simple Syndication (”RSS”) feeds, including everything from network nightly newscasts and The Sesame Street Podcast to Daily Headlines from MTV News and College Humor from CHTV. The application also gives consumers access to niche interest and hobbyist videos covering areas far more specialized than cable and satellite channels.

The new Web video capability requires TiVo Desktop Plus 2.6, an update to the Windows application which also converts TV shows recorded on a TiVo DVR for viewing on portable devices including iPod and Sony PlayStation? Portable. TiVo Desktop Plus 2.6 is available for a one-time fee of $24.95, and is a free upgrade to earlier versions. “TiVo continues to work with Roxio on delivering equivalent functionality on the Mac platform.”

With this new feature, users can choose web videos downloaded on the home PC using web browsers, RSS video clients such as iTunes podcasts, or other video download software to automatically copy to their TiVo DVR’s Now Playing List alongside recorded broadcast and cable TV shows. TiVo is also providing an on-screen guide of select Web video sources for users to browse and select as individual episodes or get a Season Pass?. Subscribers can even use the TiVo service’s Season Pass functionality to get their own personal video folders on their PC, where they save their home movies and other video downloads. High Definition television enthusiasts will appreciate that TiVo preserves the original quality of high-resolution web videos, up to 720p, when delivered to TiVo Series3 or TiVo HD DVRs.[TiVo Desktop]

Dash Navigator Now Open to 3rd Party Apps

The eagerly anticipated Dash connected GPS navigator just made another extreme promise, offering third parties a chance to develop for the system. The example Dash uses is the real-estate value database Zillow—you can use the tool to check values of homes in the vicinity, as you see in the above pic. Dash will also encourage data providers to share data in standard formats such as RSS and KML (Google Earth files). After the jump, you can see a shot of the tool used to turn tags into Dash buttons. The company has lots to deliver on—we’re expecting review units in late December or January. [Dash] Thanks Gina!

News Brews: Turn Depressing World Affairs Into Coffee

I like coffee. I like RSS. So naturally, I dig Benjamin Brown’s News Brews project, which crawls through RSS feeds and takes “the relative frequency at which different coffee-growing regions are mentioned” to determine their respective bean proportion in the blend.

In English, that means if Ethiopia is mentioned 30 times, Kenya 20 and Colombia 50, your brew would be 30 percent Ethiopian, and so on. (You could, of course, fill the respective canisters with all the same bean to make a standard cup, but where’s the fun in that?)

On top of flaunting the ever-popular steampunk look, it grinds the coffee fresh before it brews, so you don’t need a separate grinder. The only downside is that it’s drip—he told me he thought about French press, but the mechanics didn’t work out. It still made a pretty damn good cup at the show, though. – Matt Buchanan

News Brews [Project Page]
NYU ITP 2007 [Gizmodo]

Google Reader Gets Optimized for the Wii

If you insist on browsing the web on your Wii like some kind of stubborn myopic, now you can read your RSS feeds there as well. Google Reader just released a Wii-optimized version of their site, which you can view directly on your TV. And if you’re new Google Reader, glance at the video above to see the awesome chin beard sporting Google Reader developer Chris tell you about the project. – Jason Chen

Google Reader Wii [Google]

Clickity-Clackity Steampunk RSS Reader

Forget Google Reader or Feed Demon for your RSS needs, this modified telegraph sounder taps out RSS feeds using MagpieRSS PHP script to grab them and Morse2LED to make them tappable. It’s a little useless if you don’t know Morse Code, but it looks pretty sweet next to its steampunk keyboard counterpart. – Matt Buchanan

Telegraph Sounder clicks out RSS Feeds [Steampunk Workshop via Boing Boing]

Apple TV Hack Brings RSS Feeds to Your Living Room

So now that Apple TV has gotten the mandatory Mario hack, the guys at twenty08 are giving Apple’s slim box another feature, the ability to read basic RSS1.x/2.x feeds. Once downloaded, the plug-in gives Apple’s box an extra channel, letting it display your favorite news headlines. ATOM feeds and video RSS support are coming soon. With all the new hacks, suddenly that $299 doesn’t seem so bad after all. – Louis Ramirez

Apple TV RSS Plugin Beta 1 [twenty08 via GetUSB.info]

Samsung SPH-72x Photo Frames: Up To 12-inch With Wi-Fi and RSS, Will Get You …

Later this year, Samsung will release 8- and 12-inch version of their new 800 x 480 pixel 7″ photo frames. They don’t only look like the lost son of an old Apple Cinema Display, but they are also Wi-Fi enabled and will automagically search for PCs with Vista, displaying photos, movies and MP3s stored on the PC via Windows Media Player 11. And images from the Internet, via RSS.

All photo frames come with a 4-in-1 memory card reader and a USB port for cameras and portable storage devices. At $305 for 7″, I won’t risk a divorce pointing it to the wrong image feed, but you can also try the non-Wi-Fi one, the SPH-72H, for $238. – Jesus Diaz

galleryPost(’SamsungSPH72V’, 5, ‘SamsungSPH72V’);

New, Larger Samsung SPH-72P and SPH-72H Digital Photo Frames debut [Techshout]
Samsung dévoile deux cadres : le SPH-72H et le SPH-72V [GenerationMP3]

UPDATE: apparently, there was a mistake in the original report and these frames don’t support MP3 or movie playback. Too bad, really.

Asus ScreenDUO: A Place for Widgets, RSS Feeds and More

These little secondary displays seem to be cropping up lately—in fact, we were mooning over the WidgetStation just yesterday. Now here’s the Asus ScreenDUO, plugging into your USB port, syncing info from that PC, RSS feeds, or even letting you put a widget or two on its tiny screen. There’s no word on pricing or availability yet, but the more of these secondary displays we see, the more we want one sitting right here. – Charlie White

Asus ScreenDUO [MobileWhack]

RSS Issues Fixed Better Than Heavyweight Boxing

Hey faithful RSS readers. Our recent backside troubles gave you two or three times the Gizmodo that you bargained for. Lucky you. But your free ride is over! We’re back to one RSS entry for every post. Sorry suckas.

For those of you still having problems, send an email to tips at giz, and we’ll see about passing the buck to whoever’s manning the Gawker intertubes today. – Jason Chen

The Internet: Hard Enough Without RSS

Hey, thanks to everyone who let us know there are some RSS duping issues going on. Apparently many of you are lucky enough to be getting double posts of everything we write. All I can say is that you’re welcome and we aren’t charging anything more for the bonus posts.

We know about the “problem” and hopefully the house IT elves will get on the issue soon. Feel free to hit the comments if you are having issues. Aside from tearing us a new one, if you could be so kind as to list your OS and RSS reader of choice that would be fantastic. Because apparently all of your stuff is broken and we want you to know. – Mark Wilson

FeedVision Mister Tipster: Skims RSS Feeds for Your Favorite Keywords

Here’s the FeedVision Mister Tipster, a little watchdog that lets you go on about your business while it watches out for your favorite keywords in all of your RSS feeds. Plug it into a USB port, map a keyword to each of its three blinking lights, and a light will flash when that word floats down your chosen river of info. The full story is just a couple of mouse clicks away. It’s $135.

This looks like a efficient way to keep on working while keeping an eye on what’s really important at the same time, such as our favorite keywords, the three Bs: babe, busty and butts. – Charlie White

Product Page [Feedvision, via Newlaunches]

First Look at Chumby: the Huggable, Hackable Information Device

Chumby is an information device that, given its developer-approved hackable nature, is destined to become the Furby or Tickle Me Elmo of the gadget/geek world when it’s released en masse in March 2007. The Chumby doesn’t look like much when first plugged, but after registering it on Chumby Industries’ Web site, the possibilities are seemingly endless, thanks to widgets. Nothing more than mini-programs, Chumby’s widgets let you use the little device just the way you want: load up the appropriate widget, and the Wi-Fi-enabled Chumby taps into your Flickr account, displaying your terrific pictures on its 3.5-inch touch screen. Or, why not have it display the latest Google News—nay,Gizmodo!—headlines?

Given the open nature of the Chumby, it’s trivial to load up a USB thumb drive full of MP3s and have a custom-made MP3 widget. It’ll even play Divx (and presumably the more popular Xvid) files, though the screen’s resolution is only 320×240.

Basically, Chumby has the possibility to be whatever your sordid little mind wants it to be, which is simultaneously frightening and wonderfully forward-looking. If all goes according to plan, it should be widely available for around $150 in March 2007. – Nicholas Deleon

Chumby Home Page [Chumby Industries via Crunch Gear]

Sony Ericsson Launches Z610i Complete With Mirror-Like Finish

Just officially unveiled in London a short while ago, the Sony Ericsson Z610i is being positioned as the cellphone perfect for people who expect a little more out of their cellphone than just the basic features. To that end, the Z610i, looking at the stats alone, does a fairly decent job. The 2-megapixel camera isn’t a piece of junk like most cellphone cameras and its 2-inch, 220×176 pixel resolution display, while not ground-breaking, gets the job done admirably. Besides, the Z610i’s has a mirror-like finish, which is just the type of thing that cellphone’s have been lacking: more tacky aesthetic devices.

On the multimedia front, the Z610i also tries to perform like a champ; never having used it, I can’t say for sure one way or another. There’s support for MP3, AAC, AAC+ and eAAC+ digital audio files and pictures taken using the aforementioned camera can be uploaded to a Photo Blog application (”this is when the cops showed up…”). Sony Ericsson graciously includes a 64MB Memory Stick Mico (M2), but users can plug in cards up to 1GB in size. She even reads RSS feeds.

The Sony Ericsson Z610i will be available in black, blue and pink when it ships later this quarter. – Nicholas Deleon

Sony Ericsson Launches Mirror-Like Z610i [MobileBurn]

Google Reader Available For Cellphones

Subscribe to RSS feeds on your phone with Google Reader, now available on mobiles. Catch up on all the newest Gizmodo news on the toilet, in the car, on the bus, at work, even making love with your wife—Honey, a little lower…whoa those are some hot Samsung models…Ow!

Google Reader Mobile [via GeekZone]