Thanks for that! It made for a very nice presentation.

This is probably it. Thanks.

For something ontopic. What's all that stuff about morse code in the source then? Are they providing several challenges so they can recruit people of different skill levels and I indeed different areas of expertise? It would seem the logical thing to do. Maybe there is even another even harder challenge in there to get the really really clued up people? Maybe there's a code hidden In the white space of the source code? (Just throwing down the gauntlet and teasing people).

Fraps doesn't do Linux. Whatever was used here was on Linux. That's what I want it for as well.

So what screen recorder software did the author use? It plays back nicely.

A what cost to the economy? The assumption is that the economy won't be affected by pushing cars out of the rush hour areas. What a wholely niave assumption. If people had the choice to be just as economically viable and live in quiet areas they would probably already do so. What a dangerous gamble this would be. Especially in times when people are already under huge economic pressure. It'll probably be a congestion success and the economy of the Netherlands will nose dive.

Your welcome. We developed it initially to solve specific security problems. But it is indeed very generic and includes some simple to use but none the less quite flexible state control so as to keep it's potential applications flexible. We'll see what kind of things users are interested in.

We will try and generate as much news as possible when we launch, so hopefully you will notice :-) As we will be amongst the very first consumer hardware products to support WebM this shouldn't be too much trouble.

Cheers,
Kim

It is a Sheevaplug under the covers, but it's not designed to be user customisable product as in the users can login and do things in the OS. It's not using OSGi. It's a standalone appliance (Black box). However, we have designed it to be very flexible. There are several different types of inputs that a user can provide to the box as events

        * X10 events from wireless PIRs
        * HTTP events as in a user can define button groups and button titles and then we provide a link that will provide the user with a page of buttons on the smart phone that send the events they have defined
      * I/O events from a phidgets 8/8/8 interface card, which can be used as physical button events or outputs from an existing alarm system can be fed here for example
    * Scheduled events. You can setup events that will fire regularly into the system, as in a calendar
  * Network camera input. This is continuously monitored and one of the other events can trigger capture of one or more cameras. The user can specify the capture to start in the past so you can see what happened before the event was triggered. For example, 5 seconds before the user triggers the PIR so that you can see the intruder traverse past the PIR.

the device then provides flexible event processing where you can trigger many output events, along with a lot of qualifiers, such as time of day constraints, the presence of certain "state" (Which can also be added by the event processing engine) and finally it then triggers the output events, these include:

    * X10, i.e. switch on/off/dim appliances or trigger the X10 alarm module
    * I/O trigger on/off of a port on the phidget 8/8/8 or send a custom defined pulse train
    * Send an E-mail event. This contains the name of the event and links to any video that triggered by the event (Viewable as either mjpg or pseudo mjpg which is viewable on Android or Windows 7 phones)
* Send an SMS event, same as an E-mail event, except via SMS
* Sent a custom HTTP event. The user can setup key/value pairs of parameters and a target url and method. This provides a very easy to use gateway facility to your own application.
* Trigger video capture of one or more video streams.

The freaks can be linked together. For example, one freak could send an event to another freak across the net so that the remote freak can turn on a panic light for example. In addition to whatever other output events are triggered locally. They are also linked for video capture, so that one freak can trigger the video that is being captured on a remote freak and we provide a webpage that will provide you with a synchronised and merged view of the video that is captured across a specified "slice" of video cameras you have chosen across your collection of freaks. This is also good for a neighbourhood watch scenario, where you have a PIR sensor at your place, but your neighbour places the camera on their window sill where it can see you place. When someone enters your place, you can an SMS with "guest video" from your neighhour where his camera can clearly see the intruder enter your place. When you combined this with the video buffering you could see the person enter your place even if the sensor was not triggered till several seconds later.

Once a capture period has been captured, the system encodes this into WebM video, which is great for remote viewing of large format video sections, saving events. The video that is captured is instantly playable even as it's still capturing, so you can view the intruder within seconds of the intruder triggering the sensor.

A description just doesn't really do it jusfice, but we will be preparing some video of it's operation that we will put online when we are closer to releasing. That and additional documentation, examples of use etc. Right now we are working hard to try and get it in the shops so to speak within the next two months.

I've heard about products that do that. Of course you can't let them in. Out product doesn't do that.

Actually, you could with our one. You could let them in because you could control a solenoid with the generic output control (Phidget 8/8/8 board). However, you wouldn't be able to talk to them. If you don't mind strangers wandering around in your house then it can do it for you :-)

We will be releasing a new product in two months time that will allow you to monitor your home before they break. You receive SMSes with links to video trigger from sensors outside of your house and then you can set off flood lights, alarms, send SMSes, E-mails, gateway to other systems of your own etc etc. It encodes the video to WebM (I expect it's the first security product to do that) so you can save the events and all this is under your own control, not an external company. It's highly configurable and you can take input from and control devices connected via X10 or via a generic digital I/O board (Phidgets).

http://www.hydracontrolfreak.com/

Note, the website is in pre-release state as we haven't released the product yet. We expect it to be released in about 2 2/12 months.

Cheers,
Kim

> If it weren't for the fact that there are custom firmwares and a great deal of hacking and customizing going on, I would agree with you.

Yeah, there would be a lot more interest in that for a phone that a media player. The hardware is good, shame they feel they have to play it dirty.

I tried the clock thing because I found it odd how the software could stop working when it and the phone had not been updated and I'm not in the habit of downloading and running a lot of windows software. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software from the original shipped cdrom to no available.

So I guess I've just taken the easy route and letting people know about it when opportunities like this popup. Certainly taking the phone back to Tottenham Court Rd, London would have been a big waste of time.

I found someone else complaining about it with a search below, but their take is that the software is buggy, as in below:

        "The software for the Samsung P2 is extremely problematic. It will attempt to update, it fails, it will attempt to download new firmware, it fails, it will even try and convert movies, and guess what? it fails. The bundled software is horrible I couldn't get it to work. If you download the latest it works but I noticed many features are missing like datacasts. And still time to time it will fail. When it says the device supports so and so format it means the software supports that format and will gladly attempt to convert the video for you"

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-YP-P2JAB-Widescreen-Screen-Player/product-reviews/B000VQ7ZJM?pageNumber=2

Yes totally. I didn't like it but it would just a take a lot of work for me to do anything about it. It's a shame because the hardware was great. On the subject of Android phones now though, I would tend to favour pure Google phones over those from Samsung for this reason. Before that I had been warming up to Samsung. I still think their hardware is pretty good, but don't like deceit like this and if you were to view a device knowing it would not last as long as the build quality would imply you would view it with different eyes.

It was a YP-P2JAB. I bought it because it supported Linux ogg. However, it was a bit of a gamble at the time, because prior versions of the device supported ogg and mentioned this in there manual. I had bought one of those, this looked better so I bought it. I couldn't tell upfront whether it supported ogg or not because some web reports implied it might but the word "ogg" had been banished from all product specifications and any mention in the user manual, unlike earlier models.

It turned out that it did support ogg and would play video on the device, but to play video you had to convert the video to their proprietory container via a program on the PC. This program stopped working for moving video onto it a year later, their was an error message that was misleading, it implied that something was broken, however it could show you what was on the device fine and it would still move the ogg audio onto the device. I put the clock back a few months and lo and behold, it all worked fine. The support site showed that there was an update to the software that also then gave you access to some new music store they had. I'm not interested in the music store and I didn't want to upgrade the software because if they officially didn't support ogg they could just as easily pull support for it in an upgrade. I think that they must have had pressure applied to them regarding their ogg support from their MPEG LA friends.

Anyway, a little later and the trick off turning back the clock didn't work anymore and you could also no longer transfer ogg to the device either. I was quite disgusted with this as I would have thought if you sell a consumer device like this it would be illegal to build it to stop working after a year unless it was made very clear.

That's the only history I personally know of and I think their products are well made, but if they are going to try and force me to re-buy stuff by deliberately making them break after a while then I'm not very keen on the company anymore. Websearches showed other people had the problems but due to the subterfuge in reporting the error they may not have been aware of just what had happened.

I guess now that they are pushing Android they are a little less afraid of admitting that a device supports ogg, but this aside it's the first time I have ever seen a consumer device of this sort with a pre-programmed obsolescence built into it.

Samsun have a history of playing dirty/illegal. I'm somewhat hesitant to buy from them because of this. I bought a music/video pod off them once that had built into the software needed to transfer media to it a fixed time limit to stop working after a year. It didn't popup with an expiry message. It pretended to be a problem. For a limited period of time I was able to get it working by turning the clock back but that stopped working as well.

I'm waiting for Android to support mjpeg streaming as Chrome does. But alas, gingerbread doesn't support it. I doubt this is high up other people's priorities though :-)