Firmware upgrades for the BlueAngel Q7 – A HowTo

At COMEX 2009, I picked up a Chinese-made set-top media player, called the Q7. Made by a company called Blue Angel, the tiny box packs in an amazing feature set: Supports RMVB,AVI,DIVX,MKV,MOV,HDMOV,MP4,M4V,PMP,AVC,FLV,VOB,MPG,DAT,MPEG file formats Does HDMI Output upto 720P Built-in Flash memory of 2GB and USB-Host Support The feature I …

This is what a hacked together push solution looks like

Sitting at home and trying to beat a particularly nasty throat infection, I decided to follow-up on a tweet of mine and put together what my push-email/calendar solution looks like: To summarize, it currently uses: 6 different sites for the Calendar – Dopplr, Upcoming, Remember The Milk and fbcal feeding …

On the state of location networking

Location-networking is meant to provide two experiences: 1. Broadcast your location to your friends and FoaF network in the hope of making unexpected connections; and 2. Share comments and rich media (photographs, video, voice etc.) about your experiences at a particular location. This then, is the state of my location …

A 1000 years of History – Barely remembered

Part of my 3 week trip to India earlier this year included a visit to a series of temples in Tamil Nadu – popularly known as the "Navgraha temples". I came away from that trip amazed at the enormous potential for tourism in Tamil Nadu and saddened by how much …

Pondering Friendfeed and Twitter (maybe a little too much…)

Ruminations on Friendfeed after making my first “block”: Since Friendfeed allows for “fake follows”, should I just follow everyone who follows me? After all, I never need to see their updates. I finally understand the power of lists in Friendfeed. With every other tool, S/N ratios have to be controlled …

Getting it wrong – Twice

Browsing through the Straits Times this morning, I came across a photograph that was attributed to “flickr.com”: Attributing the photo this way is wrong in a couple of ways: 1. Flickr is not the organization that “owns” these photos, it’s merely hosting them. 2. If the photo was licensed under …

A change of address

A note for folks who subscribe to the blog via RSS: Thanks to the Google-Borg  buying out Feedburner, I’ve had to change my Feed  URL slightly. The new address is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Balajis_Blog . Please update your subscriptions accordingly (and hopefully you won’t take this as the oppurtunity to unsubscribe from my …

Fake story, real UI –Photoshop in the movies

From the Evernote archives… Hollywood is well known for fake UI in movies – you know, “Unix is easy“ (( Whoa! I did not realize this, but apparently the UI on screen during this screen is real! See this wikipedia article. Thanks Ashwin! )) or the “VB GUI Interface“. I’d …

Information Overload and Creativity – Simplicity is the key

A combination of events got me starting the New Year reflecting on attention and personal creativity. The first event occurred while listening to an episode of the Brainy Gamer Podcast.  At some point during the podcast, every journalist interviewed mentioned being on Twitter. Having found their viewpoints interesting, my first …