hasbri sampsi lyleigh
Eboni Kleifgen
I see it all the time. A new phone launches with every spec imaginable, topnotch everything. But one key component is missing and the community is up in arms. Take the upcoming Galaxy Nexus, for instance. It has it all ... well, except the HDMI out port. It does have MHL support, but it just isn't the same as having a dedicated micro HDMI port. And I'm upset about that for some inexplicable reason.
The idea of plugging your phone (or tablet) into an enormous TV and using a much larger screen for browsing the web, watching movies, playing games and more is hardly novel. It's something I've done with my PC countless times. But it's cool nonetheless. And if it's available, why not? Right?
In short, it didn't work quite as well as I had originally planned. While setup was a no brainer, the experience itself was mediocre at best. At the time, Netflix streaming via tablet wasn't 1080p and came in sort of choppy. And I'm not exactly fond of having to get up to change apps or pause the media. Yeah, I'm that lazy when it comes to down time. A Bluetooth keyboard, which I now have, should fix pretty easily.
Theoretically, this will get better with time as mobile processor and GPU technologies advance. Personally, I'm excited to see what will come of it. Nothing significant has come of HDMI out support on mobile devices yet, but some companies see a need for it in classrooms, potentially as a SMART Board replacement. It's things like this that keep me excited for mobile tech and show promise for the future of mobile devices, especially tablets.
What about you, guys and gals? Have you dabbled with HDMI out on your phone or tablet any? If so, what's the coolest thing you have done with it? Is the lack of a micro HDMI port on a phone a deal breaker for you?
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We will be taking a family cruise soon, including my niece who has a two-year-old. If she purchases the Zoom Surf and Stream package, will she be able to access streaming services such as DisneyPlus and Netflix without incurring extra charges? She has unlimited data through her mobil provider already. She's hoping to be able to stream a few shows for her daughter.
Thanks for any info!
Should not have an issue streaming to a device from one of the streaming services they have a plan with. There is no limit on the amount of data that can be transferred from what I can tell. Most of mine was uploading but we also watched some video's on YouTube from time to time.
And I agree with Jack, unlimited data service plan does not mean they can just connect up to the ships service while at sea and not incur a bill. It's similar to going to another country it would be best to call the cell service provider and get a letter in writing that the time on the ship is covered 100% under their plan and will not incur extra charges for the use. I only mention this because of your niece has unlimited data. If you guys are worried about extra charges on the ship for streaming I would hate for you to have a huge phone bill when you get home.
Also consider downloading the shows you might wish to watch before you elave home. While Royal as the best Internet at Sea (There advertisment tell me so so it must be true) it is wifi at sea. Speed will not be as fast as you normally get at home and at peak times you may experaince some issues streaming. All the popular streaming services (Disney+ and Netlex for example) allow you to download shows/movies to your devices and then access them when you computer/tablet is offline. By downloading a few shows beforehand you essentually have your own backup just in case the ships wifi is not as good as it could be when you are wanting to watch something.
I'm Matt Lee, aka mattl. I'm a filmmaker and free software hacker from the UK, but I have spent most of the last ten years in and around Boston, MA. I moved to the US in 2008 after making a short film about GNU and free software with Stephen Fry. For the last fifteen years or so, I've been working on the GNU operating system in various guises, and in the last eight of those years I started and worked on the GNU FM and (co-founded) GNU social projects. GNU FM is a bit like Last.fm, and the flagship site is Libre.fm and GNU social is a bit like Twitter I suppose. GNU social uses the OStatus protocol, which is also used by Mastodon to build a federated social network.
Previously I was the technical lead at Creative Commons for a number of years, and before that I worked at the Free Software Foundation for about five years. But I recently retired from the GNU Project to concentrate on my current passion project, which is film. My first feature film, Orang-U: An Ape Goes To College came out on July 8th, and is the first in a series of movies I'm making. Uniquely, my films are made with entirely free/open software, have proper paid actors in them and when we release them we give you all of the source materials too, so you can really remix and do something creative with the end product. It has taken a while to get here, but we're finally ready to show this to the world. And along the way, I wound up writing a novelization of the movie, so we're releasing that as well. It's all Creative Commons ShareAlike licensed, so even commercial use is okay. But no DRM, so we won't be appearing on Netflix anytime soon, which suits me.
My main laptop these days is a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, kindly donated to me by GitLab. It has a 4K touch screen display, 16Gb of RAM and a half terabyte of SSD storage, as well as an awkwardly placed webcam. It's okay to type on, but I mostly have it connected to a Dell 4k monitor and a WASD mechanical keyboard in the office. I'm also lucky to have one of Dell's Project Sputnik developers as a friend of mine for support, if I ever need it. I also have a ThinkPad T440S, also with 16GB of RAM but a full terabyte of SSD.
The movies are filmed using a Canon XA10 camera, which I picked because it has XLR inputs. Sound is recorded using a Rode shotgun microphone or a Xoom H4N recorder. I have a shoebox full of USB hard disks, brand new SSDs and SD cards in various sizes from 32mb to 128gb too, just in case.
The box also contains all the Raspberry Pis and Firefox OS phones I'll never get around to doing anything with. I have a Google Pixel phone, which seems to lock up about once every two days, and a couple of Apple products that don't get used much at all, but it can be interesting to know what they're up to. I also have the final model of PowerBook G3 running Mac OS 9, so it's a bit of a screamer. I picked that up to attend the Web 1.0 Conference at MIT last year, and its still on the floor of my apartment. Oh, and there's a random $30 tower PC I picked up on eBay to run OPENSTEP too. I suppose I'm a bit of an operating system nut.
Pretty much everything I've ever written down on a computer since the early 1990s has been in GNU Emacs. When writing scripts for the movies, I use a format called Fountain, which is essentially just Markdown. I usually don't even have the Fountain mode turned on in Emacs, but it can be useful to check things sometimes. I use a script called Textplay to turn the Fountain markup into HTML. I also use a tool called Pandoc for doing things like producing PDFs of books from Markdown. Everything is stored in both git and Dropbox -- git for myself, Dropbox for non-hackers. I make a lot of notes on my phone, emailing them to myself and then turning those into folders for later projects.
Video editing is done entirely in Blender, which is by far the most stable video editing tool I've used on GNU/Linux. Titles and credits and things like that are made using GIMP and Inkscape, and then animated using Blender's more famous animation capabilities. I'd like to find an alternative to Audacity that doesn't lock up the sound on my computer too.
To support all these tools I run GNU/Linux on all my day to day computers -- Ubuntu on the Dell for the better support for HiDPI displays in Unity, and Debian on the ThinkPad. Once GNOME has better support for HiDPI displays I will put Debian on the Dell, so I don't have to think too much about what I'm doing. My desktop needs are pretty basic -- a browser, several terminals, GIMP/Inkscape or just Blender for when I'm editing.
My dream setup would be a super fast laptop with excellent build quality and a touchscreen. The Dell XPS comes pretty close. Maybe Apple will produce a decent MacBook Pro that can run GNU/Linux well, but I doubt it. I'll probably wind up building a new PC soon for rendering. I'm a little bewildered by the parts in my local Microcenter -- I know I want a screamer, but I need to be careful to not buy a video card that requires proprietary drivers. I'd like to see better support for HiDPI displays in free software, and I'd like to see more people using Blender to edit video, so that Blender itself becomes better and gets more features for video editing and video editors. I'm very happy editing my own work right now, but if that ever changes, I can see it taking a little while to get someone else up to speed using Blender.
I think one way to make free software tools better for artists is to get more artists to use the tools we have currently, and then see what can be done to improve them later. But I am just very happy to have made a feature length movie using free tools. It gives me something to do between watching Law and Order SVU episodes and tweeting the CEO of T-Mobile
To be able to connect the iPad 2 to a TV via HDMI requires the Apple Digital AV Adapter (In typical Apple fashion it is overpriced at $39.00). Simply connect the Adapter to the iPad. There is then a input on the adapter to connect the HDMI cable to with the other end of the HDMI cable going in to the TV or Receiver (in my case it went directly into my Onkyo Receiver)
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