Joe Born at Neuros Technology has always been a supporter of Linux and Open Source technology since I’ve known him.  Well Joe came up with a great idea.  How about using a cheap Android Tablet to control the Neuros Link?  Sounds like a good idea, but did it work?

The Control Tablet 1002 is very similar to the Eken M002 tablet.  In face, it will run the same builds of Android that the Eken M002 will.

Let’s take a look at the specs:

• Slatedroid firmware based off of Google Android OS 1.6

• VIA MW8505 350-400MHz

• 128MB DDR2

• 2GB NAND FLASH, support most TF card up to 32GB

•… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Just getting ready to do a review of a upcoming product that Neuros is targeting for the Neuros Link and I spied a deal!  TODAY only in the Neuros store you can get the ultra quiet Neuros Link “Phantom” for $249.99 with a free upgrade to a 320 GB hard drive.  You will have to add a controller to your order or provide your own controller.

The specs of this machine are:

PC, it is customizable and expandable:

• Dual Core 2.5Ghz CPU
• 1GB DDR SDRAM memory (expandable up to 8GB)
• Up to 1080p H.264 video playback
• Support an extensive list of video and audio formats: MPEG2, MPEG4, .vob, .mp4

Imagine being able to watch Hulu, Fancast, Youtube and many other streaming services on your TV.  How about Boxee?  Yes, that too.  What if you don’t want to share your local video viewing?  XBMC is on it too.  What can do the things I am talking about?  The Neuros Link, one of the latest products from Neuros Technology.

Setup

To setup the Link, you plug a HDMI cable into your HDTV, plug in the power, and then plug in the keymote’s dongle.  If you do not have a HDTV, you can use it with a DVI or VGA monitor, although Neuros states they will not support this. … Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Some of you may recognize the name Joe Born from the company Neuros, whose open source products we’ve been reviewing and talking positively about for years. What you may not know is that Joe also founded the company Digital Innovations over ten years ago.  According to him, he hasn’t been “very active in it since starting Neuros, but recently they acquired a peripheral company called Micro Innovations that makes a host of commodity peripherals, and [he's] very excited about applying the Neuros open innovation formula there.”

Last night Joel and I had an opportunity to take a survey that Joe had forwarded us, showing some USB Hub concept… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

I follow Joe Born(@joeborn) and Neuros Technology(@neurostech) on twitter and I read his blog and generally love Neuros Technology as a company.  They stand behind their products.  They also run open source software on their devices and have quite a community behind their products.  I also own a OSD and one of their original products, a MP3 player.  I still use both on a regular basis.  Well, imagine my excitement seeing Joe’s tweet regarding the OSD 3:

“..it’s probably two years off, but this time Texas Instruments is involved early: discussion of the OSD3: http://bit.ly/Qt5sl”

For those who don’t know, the primary part of the Neuros Link is the Neuros.TV website that helps you find content on your Neuros Link from the web.  Well, Joe has let me know that you are not just stuck with whatever Neuros and their hackers will give you.  Now if you know of a site where a stream of a TV show is, you can add it via a link near the bottom of the page.  The Neuros Link and its companion site are attempting to extend the tradition of users adding content similar to how the cddb (which is now Gracenote) was started.  If you know of a site that carries the content you’ve searched for, you can now added it to the Neuros.TV website… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Neuros has long offered bounties on different development projects that enhance their products; one I have been semi excited for is Netflix Streaming.  Well, sundevil98 has managed to get it working on the Link according to Joe.  He did it by installing Mediamall’s Playon software on top of XBMC.  The next version of the software on the Link should have XBMC built into it.  Eventually, Neuros will have a native client on the Link, but for now, this will allow you to stream movies from Netflix!

Joe Born has posted the first bounties for the Neuros Link.

The first bounty is $2500 for getting Netflix working directly on the Neuros Link, or $500 when working through a intermediary PC.  This bounty has some stipulations: The programmer must beat Boxee, Ubuntu or Netflix themselves with the functionality.  All of these people are working on getting Netflix streaming to work on on Linux.  Once any of them get it working, the bounty is unavailable as they can easily incorporate this into the Neuros Link.

The second bounty is the Move Networks plugin.  The lucky hacker will get $2000 if they get it working and $2500 if it works in Firefox.

The third… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Was going through my feed list and noticed Joe posted a update on the OdNT Blog about Joost and the Neuros Link.  Joost, which came from the creators of Skype and Kazaa, started out as a client you loaded on your computer that was similar to Boxee.  Now it’s a flash video site very similar to Hulu.  Well it too is now supported on the Neuros Link!

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.

Even though most people don’t even have the Neuros Link yet, Neuros is at work adding features to the Link in the form of Amazon’s Unbox video on demand service.  Now you can use your Neuros Link to watch any of the 20,000 titles you can rent via Amazon’s service.  They are still hard at work trying to improve the device as I type this.  The Neuros Link should be THE set top box to order on cyber monday!

Still being very geeked about the announcement from Neuros, at lunch I was perusing the forums on the Neuros site and discovered just how hackable the Neuros Link will be.  The answer is: VERY

The Neuros Link is running Ubuntu 8.10 according to Joe Born’s post in the forum and the specs page.  That means that you can pretty much run any variant of Ubuntu on it.  Joe himself has installed Boxee on the Neuros Link, so it may even be possible to get Mythbuntu running on the box since you can probably add a USB Tuner to it as well.

UPDATE: Found more….the Neuros Link runs a Athlon

Have you ever wanted to watch the stuff on Hulu, NBC.com, CBS or CNN.com on your TV but you didn’t want to build a PC to do this with?  Well, new you can thanks to Neuros!  Neuros has introduced the Neuros Link today on their website and it supports those 4 sites and many others plus local video in up to 1080p on your HDTV!  It’s now available for $299.99 and there is NO subscription service either!  Plus it comes with a spiffy wireless keyboard as well.  Neuros keeps impressing me time and time again!  I can’t wait to look at this device!  Now I really need to get a HDTV…

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

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… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...