With the ability to watch movies and TV series on Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, those of us without an Internet-ready TV have been settling for watching at a computer desk or on a smaller laptop screen. One way around this is to get the video from your computer to the TV as seamlessly as possible. Last year, I reviewed Warpia’s USB PC to TV video adapter, which provided decent wireless video up to 720p. After that review, many people asked about 1080p video and other features. Today, I reviewed Warpia’s latest product in this line, the ConnectHD.
1080p HD USB PC to TV Video Streaming
Like other streaming products, the ConnectHD includes a USB adapter for sending video and a receiving unit on the television end to convert the signal and display it on your TV. This is accomplished by Windows treating the Warpia adapter as a duplicated monitor and feeding it all the video you see on your screen. That video image is then streamed wirelessly to the receiver and shows up on your TV. I tested this with video in 1080p and it streamed very well. At the request of my wife, several additional tests were conducted with full episodes of Sons of Anarchy from Amazon.com. The 1080p video testing from YouTube looked great and the additional tests passed Michelle’s scrutiny.
HD Video Conferencing
The premier feature of ConnectHD is the ability to, well, connect in HD to others. The TV adapter includes a 720p HD video camera and the ability to stream video both ways. On your computer, the camera shows up as any other camera you might connect directly. This makes the ConnectHD uniquely suited to act as video conferencing hardware for applications like Skype and MSN Messenger. I tried it with Skype today and was pleased with the results. The video quality showed some signs of compression, but that may have been more Skype than the camera as the image was crystal clear in Skype’s video settings panel.
Warpia ConnectHD Video Demonstration
During my testing, I created video of some of the process, showing how well the ConnectHD works and demonstrating the features as seen below:
Conclusions
Listed on the Warpia site with a sales price of $199.99, ConnectHD is a good bundle considering the $100+ prices of most HD PC to TV video solutions and the cost of a good HD camera. ConnectHD bundles both to ensure they will work well together. If video conferencing is something you won’t likely do from the couch, $199 can seem steep, so Warpia and other companies offer cameraless solutions for a lot less cost. This solution performed very well in all of my testing and works great for the task at hand.
If you haven’t heard about S.O.P.A. yet and why it needs to be stopped, spend five minutes and read on.
What Is S.O.P.A.?
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the less known PROTECTIP (PIPA) are proposed legislation that aim to give more control to the U.S. government and copyright holders to thwart piracy online. Sadly, the legislation will instead give our government the power to blacklist sites that allegedly contain any small amount of infringing content, thereby blocking the whole site from users. As an example, if I post a video on YouTube of my cat being funny and it happens to have a pop song playing in the background, YouTube has to remove it quickly or face harsh consequences. And if they’re not fast enough? That’s when Uncle Sam gets to start messing with DNS (the naming system of the Internet), making the site unreachable by normal means to most people in the U.S. If that doesn’t work, private companies (RIAA and MPAA, for example), can get advertising and payment companies like Google and PayPal to shut down the accounts of the allegedly offending site.
In this case, YouTube could vanish to anyone in the U.S. and lose all advertising revenue if I don’t edit some music out of my kitty cat video. Sounds reasonable, right?
And if you want to read the full text, here’s H.R. 3261
Pay attention to 102(c)(2)(A)(i) regarding DNS re-routing and 102(c)(2)(B) regarding search engines.
If all that’s too much to read, check out the SOPA infographic from Mashable or watch a video about the legislation below:
Wikipedia And JoeTech.com Are Going Dark In Protest
At 12:00 AM on January 18th, 2012, the English version of Wikipedia will go dark for 24 hours, and so will JoeTech.com and we’re certainly not alone. Reddit got the SOPA Strike rolling, and Mozilla has been vocal about this for a while. My dedicated server provider, Codero, voiced their own opinion about SOPA/PIPA, urging customers to get educated.
During that 24 hour period I’ll have a blackout page up, but as of 12:00 AM on January 19th, 2012, JoeTech.com will be back to normal.
Even if you don’t have a site, you can make your voice heard. That link will do the work for you to connect you to your senators to voice your opinion about SOPA/PIPA. Politely urge them to consider the freedoms we fight so hard to protect before voting on this horrible legislation.
Share this post on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +. Better yet, share any of the helpful links above.
Stop waiting for bad ideas to become laws.
Update: It looks like our politicians are listening, promising to make changes to the bill to help with our concerns, but we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of it. At this point, the bill may be vastly changed for the better or may just die completely.
A while back, I ditched Cydia and my jailbreak on my iPhone 4 (Verizon) for the bells and whistles promised by IOS 5. At the time, I thought about all the advantages of my jailbroken IOS and decided that the new features of IOS 5 outweighed the features I was actively using from being jailbroken. Then came Siri and this month, I learned that Siri was soon to be ported to jailbroken iPhones running IOS 5.0.1 and couldn’t wait to jailbreak again. This morning, the untethered IOS 5.0.1 jailbreak AND the Siri port (named Spire) are both available.
How To Jailbreak IOS 5.0.1 Untethered
First, make sure you have one of these supported devices:
- iPhone 4 (GSM – CDMA)
- iPhone 3GS
- iPod touch 4G
- iPod touch 3G
- iPad 1
You’ll also need to make sure you’re on IOS 5.0.1 If not, update your device now, because Apple is sure to release a new version soon to close up some open doors.
Got everything you need? Good, you’re ready to begin. Just follow these steps:
1. BACK UP – You don’t know how many times this has saved me. Do It!
2. Download Redsn0w 0.9.10b1 (Windows – Mac OS X).
3. Unzip the Redsn0w archive you downloaded and run Redsn0w 0.9.10.b1.
4. Click the button to Jailbreak and follow the on-screen instructions.
After a couple minutes and a reboot, you should be jailbroken. Props go out to pod2g for making it possible.
How To Install Siri On iPhone 4
Ryan Petrich and chpwn have released a port of Siri, called Spire, to Cydia. This is about 100MB, so you really should install via Wifi. To find it, just search for Spire in the BigBoss repository.
This is the best port of Siri to date, but it still requires authorization from Apple to run. This means that you have to find and use a proxy in order to use Siri (for now). For more information on how to get a proxy, see this post from cydiahelp.com.
Unbrick Your iPhone
Just like anyone, I can make mistakes. Sure enough, while trying to re-jailbreak my iPhone, I wound up turning it into a paper weight when I did something wrong and it wouldn’t boot up. If this happened to you, don’t worry because there’s hope. Sadly, it will take some time to restore and you may lose some settings, though. If your phone is stuck with error messages or won’t boot, you can start by doing a factory restore. This will reset the phone to the stock or latest IOS install. After this, you need to restore from your latest backup. You did make a backup, right? Once the backup is in place, you’re ready to jailbreak again. Good luck!
In the past, I had a chance to play with a pretty cool cell phone watch from China, but today I’m looking to another part of the globe for an even cooler offering.
I’m Watch, from Italy, seems to be turning some heads lately. This watch from a company called Blue Sky disguises all the tech savvy of a full sized Android or IOS smart phone into a beautifully designed watch. Looking more like an iPhone for your wrist, this Android powered smart watch is set to hit CES in January while it simultaneously opens up for U.S. sales.
The watch will boast an app store filled with applications and compatibility with IOS, Android, Symbian, Bada, RIM, and Windows 7. The I’m Watch also features “the first ever capacitive touch display on curved surface”. This all fits in a device a little bulkier than a normal watch and at a price not too far off from an iPhone. I’m waiting for the availability of review units in January, but until then, the video below offers a pretty good preview of how I’m Watch works.
