As we prepare to give thanks for all the things we’ve been blessed with over the past year and eat a bunch of food, I was thinking of one thing I am most certainly thankful for and that’s Open Source Software.  Without it, I could not be writing this post as we are a user of FOSS or Free and Open Source Software here at Gear Diary.  Most of us use Firefox and the software that runs it is WordPress.  With out FOSS, much of the internet wouldn’t exist. So I thought it appropriate to list and write about 10 things in the FOSS community I am most thankful for.

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The winner of the Neuros OSD giveaway is none other than Dann Washko of the Linux Link Tech Show.  The comment my son pulled out of the hat is below:

I did not see if the Neuros had a built in webserver but that would be great. To be able to stream the movies over this server like MythWeb does. As for home movies, having the ability to easily upload to youtube would be beneficial. Support for file systems other than fat32 to avoid the 2gb limitation. As a Linux user I would like to see more documentation on their site about using the device in Linux. Right now I see a lot of Windows and OS X docs. Transcoding into other formats would be nice too instead of just mp4. This may tax the device though. Fuser support, particularly sshfs.

Enjoy your OSD!

This contest is now closed, and a winner will be announced shortly. Thank you for participating!

As a fan and advocate of open source software, I’ve got a lot of love for companies like Neuros.  Now I have another reason to love them: Neuros is sponsoring an OSD give-away on Gear Diary!

To win, all you have to do is post an idea of something you would like the Neuros OSD (or the as yet unreleased OSD2) to do out of the box that it can’t do already.  For example, my wish would be that it include a web browser.  You can’t steal my idea, so come up with one of your own!

The contest starts right now, and it will end on Sunday the 9th at midnight; a winner will be selected shortly after.  The winner will be selected at random from all entries, and they will be notified via e-mail by Judie (so add judie@geardiary.com to your “safe” list, ASAP). Since Neuros is shipping directly to the winner, this contest will be open to participants in the United States only.

So let’s get those brains going, and be sure to go over to the Neuros Technology website to check out all the cool stuff that the Neuros can already do!

Imagine participating in a chat about the Presidential Debate, or any other live event, and the chat being superimposed on top of your TV.  Sure, it’s been done before, but that’s been controlled by the media.  This is outside of whatever the news outlets will do, and it is provided on your Neuros OSD by a piece of software which runs on the OSD and was created by the community.

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More and more I think we’re going to all be using the web without actually using a browser.  Joe Born from Neuros has let us know that a new feature of the Neuros OSD will be the ability to use wiki’s and other internet sources to look up data about TV recordings on the OSD and more.

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Joe Born let us know the following:

Long time no talk! I hope you are well. I wanted to share with you a piece of news that might interest your audience: Through user contributions, last.fm is coming to the Neuros OSD. If you are not familiar with last.fm (you never know :-)), its a collaborative, interactive internet radio service that’s powered by a large community of users. It’s subscription and ad free, and it learns from your likes and dislikes to introduce you to new music that you’ll like.

Now, a last.fm community member, sponsored by Google, has ported the feature/service to the Neuros OSD: http://open.neurostechnology.com/content/lastfm…

Now the words in this e-mail excerpt that I like the most are, “through user contributions”.  That should mean something to everyone, as it is the power of Open Source and Open Technologies at work.  If you value something, with open source and open technologies you can make it happen.  Try that on an Apple TV!