0Technology Wish List

One of the best things about the Inter­net is that one can find almost any­thing. Sadly, there are some things that can­’t be found (at the time of writ­ing). Below is my per­son­al list that I’m hop­ing to even­tu­ally find…

Update 1: 5‑Oct-2010
Update 2: 26-Dec-2010
Update 3: 30-March-2011
Update 4: 30-May-2011

Update 5: 26-Dec-2011

1. Tom Tom Nav­ig­at­or (with IQ routes and ALG) for Android!
I’ve declared a stand-in win­ner by using Google Nav­ig­a­tion in com­bin­a­tion with Cam­erAlert.  Second prize goes to CoPi­lot Live, but I’d much prefer TomTom. Garmin seem to have snatched defeat from the jaws of vic­tory by releas­ing their own Android based Nuvi­Fone but no app for all the oth­er Android phones.

2. A Stand­ard, Media Cen­ter com­pat­ible Remote Con­trol with QWERTY keyboard.
I’ve got even closer to a win­ner with the Motorola NYX­Board.  It would be a con­vin­cing win­ner, except that the build qual­ity is rather dis­ap­point­ing. I pre­vi­ous declared a stand-in win­ner by buy­ing a boxee remote from Amazon US for £40 shipped, how­ever the boxee does­n’t quite do the job — it does­n’t have enough but­tons to be fully func­tion­al. For more inform­a­tion have a look at this [int­link id=“46” type=“post”]article about remotes[/intlink]. Third place now goes to RemoteDroid.

3. A way to prop­erly share my Media Cen­ter sys­tem on my LAN includ­ing Live TV.
Update: I’ve coughed up for DVBLink 4, which has proved a really excel­lent solu­tion. My ori­gin­al thoughts are below in italics…

The “softsled” soft­ware media cen­ter extender dream which seems like it wont ever arrive. There are vari­ous options — one looks to be poten­tial in mov­ing away from Media Cen­ter to an altern­at­ive like Myth­TV DVBLink ή oth­er altern­at­ives, but whilst I have a busy record­ing sched­ule (Ashes crick­et and Top Gear) I’ve put any exper­i­ment­a­tion on hold. Even­tu­ally I’d like to move to a cli­ent-serv­er sys­tem, as I already have a serv­er on 24.7. Oth­er inter­est­ing tech­no­logy which may feed into my think­ing includes an AppleTV run­ning XBMC (at least when a next gen AppleTV arrives which is power­ful enough for high bitrate 1080p).  The Apple TV has vari­ous issues, typ­ic­al of Apple, which have ended any interest I might have had in it.

4. A Photo Shar­ing site that allows me to tag my face­book contacts.
Update: Whilst there is still no win­ner, google picasa 3.9 com­bined with picasa web / google+ pho­tos is close. In the­ory it should do the job, how­ever there are ongo­ing issues with face tags that google don’t seem to have any interest in resolv­ing. Flickr also has reas­on­able tag­ging options now, but it does­n’t seem to be pos­sible to upload face tag inform­a­tion to flickr from either picasa desktop or WLPG. My pre­vi­ous com­ments are below in italics…

This would have been won by Expo­no which offers all the required fea­tures. Sadly some of the fea­tures are dys­func­tion­al and updates seem very sporad­ic. Once-upon-a-time a com­bin­a­tion of Flickr and Polar­Rose had poten­tial, but Polar­Rose has been bought by Apple and is no more. As a res­ult there is no prize for this at all at the moment, altho I do wish to offer a note of con­grat­u­la­tions to google for the accur­acy and speed of Picasa. I also like Win­dows Live Photo Gal­lery for its face recog­ni­tion plus the way it embeds the tags into the pho­tos which is a bonus.

5. An x64 Tag Extender
As it stands play­ing back FLAC’s in Media Cen­ter x64 requires sig­ni­fic­ant “hack­ing” of sys­tem files. It’s about time we had a flac extender for x64

6. A win­dows util­ity that sup­ports Areca raid con­trol­lers and can issue smart commands
Smart­Mon­Tools is close but does­n’t yet sup­port Areca con­trol­lers in Win­dows. Second Prize goes to chan­ging my entire stor­age sys­tem to Unraid.  I’ve got more detailed inform­a­tion about this issue in my [int­link id=“90” type=“post”]article about RAID prob­lems with desktop drives[/intlink]