After my good old TomTom Go 700 passed away I got a new TomTom Go 740 Live and soon found out it’s really easy to play video on a TomTom navigation device. This way you can use your navigation as an in-car entertainment centre. With TomPlayer you are able to watch full screen video’s in AVI (divx or xvid) or MPEG video and listen to mp3 or ogg audio files.

The documentation on tomplayer.net can be a bit confusing and installation is not the same for all TomTom models. In this post I will explain how to install and configure TomPlayer on an external MicroSD memory card. This method will work for models Go 740/750/930 Live and will probably work for a lot of other models. At the end I will explain another configuration which might work for your model.

Installation

1. Insert SD-card into TomTom slot
2. Download the Tomplayer zip archive and extract it
3. Connect TomTom to PC and quit TomTom Home
4. Copy The Following folders to your external SD-card: audio, tomplayer, video
5. Rename the folder “SDKRegistry” to “SdkRegistry” and copy this folder to the root of your TomTom internal memory

I’ve read the different descriptions for installing on the internal memory and on an SD card, and I was still a little confused by the terminology… especially references to /mnt/movinand and to /mnt/sdcard.

It seems like:
1 – /mnt/movinand refers to the removable storage (i.e., SD-card)
2 – /mnt/sdcard refers to the internal memory.

On Windows PC, these show up as external drives H: and I: respectively. So when we modify the configuration files taking these assumptions into consideration, Tomplayer worked correctly.

Configuration

1. Open tomplayer.ini (the file is in tomplayer/conf/ folder)
2. Change:
   video_dir                      = /mnt/sdcard/video
   audio_dir                      = /mnt/sdcard/audio
   to:
   video_dir                      = /mnt/movinand/video
   audio_dir                      = /mnt/movinand/audio
3. Open tomplayer.cap (the file is in SdkRegistry folder)
4. Change:
   AppPath|/mnt/sdcard/tomplayer/|
   to:
   AppPath|/mnt/movinand/tomplayer/|
5. Disconnect your TomTom from PC and restart it

Now you will have a fourth screen in your TomTom main menu. Start TomPlayer by pressing the icon. On first start TomPlayer will start with screen calibration. Touch the crosses and proceed. Last thing to do is to copy some audio and video to their respective folders on the SD-card. Have fun!

An alternative method is to copy all files of the distrib folder to your external SD-card. The ttfilesytem (do not copy this to your TomTom internal memory!) will load your TomPlayer as soon as the SD-card is inserted and normal TomTom will load when it’s ejected. This didn’t work on my TomTom Go 740 Live, even worse it made it crash, but I have read this method should work on most TomTom models. You can also install TomPlayer to your TomTom internal memor. I did not do this because I don’t to run out my internal flash read/write cycles. If you have any problems installing or configuring TomPlayer visit the tomplayer.net forum for more help.

If you want to watch video on your TomTom convert your video’s to avi or mpeg. Try MediaCoder as it’s free and it has everything you need. TomTom screen resolutions are 480*272 for the widescreen models (TomTom XL or GO) and 320*240 for fullscreen models (TomTom ONE).

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First the ‘ easy updating’  part. I found a great service that does all the hard work for me, Pixelpipe. This great service allows you to upload messages and multimedia to a lot of services. More than 120 services as we speak! It works very simple, before you begin you have to add your profiles and services to PixelPipe and add some tags to them (eg. Photo, Family, Blog, FTP). After this first step which takes a bit longer to setup it is very easy to post to multiple destinations using the tags you have entered before. So when I want my family to see my newly uploaded photo I send my picture with the @family tag and Pixelpipe knows where to send it. Another big advantage of PixelPipe are the numerous possibilities for uploading your content, this can be done via e-mail, mobile phones, Firefox plugin, Picasa, Windows context menu plugins, sms/mms or the website itself.

So after making it a bit easier for me to post content to my social networks I want my networks to grow and be able to follow them easily. Here’s where my new lifestream comes in. This lifestream will be an automatically updated stream of all (well, at least most of) my online social activities. I currently have updates installed for Youtube, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Wakoopa, LinkedIn, Blip.fm and Hyves. My lifestream still needs a lot of tweaking before it’s finished but is working good enough for going public with. Be sure to add it to your favorites because I will be adding more social services and functionality soon! One of which will be a new website header showing generated polaroids from images found on my social accounts.

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I’m very excited about it and very happy to be given the chance to work on internet applications (on all platforms, including webbrowsers, mobile phones, game consoles and more) using new technologies. In example the NOS are the first european broadcaster who offer an iPhone application with live videostreams of the Tour de France. Besides being excited about my future work it is very cool te hear that an organisation as the NOS thinks you are the best of all people who sollicitated. Even you guys helped out a little withouth even knowing! When asked for some html/javascript work I have been doing this blog was one of the items I submitted. So thank you for coming back here and reading my articles.

So if you like my articles there’s a new blog to follow: http://weblogs.nos.nl/nieuwemedia/ . On this blog M. Stekelenburg will write about all the fun stuff we will be working on in our department (New Media). For all people who are shitting their pants right now because they are afraid my current work and services will be stopped or deleted can take a breath because I won’t do that. Altough I will not accept any new projects (unless extremely well payed or challenging of course ;p) support will be there for projects I have done.

Congratulations are more than welcome in the comments… ;p

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We went to TT Assen yesterday to go see Valentino Rossi win his 100th Grand Prix in the MotoGP race. We had a great time and were able to see Rossi celebrating with a big banner showing photos of all his wins because we where next to the special “Rossi” stand.  Luckily the rain came just after we left the circuit. My video report is on youtube and I’ve created a celebration wallpaper for Rossi’s 100th GP win. You can download the wallpaper at: www.baronsoze.com

Click here to view the embedded video.

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When visiting my blog the last few months people might have asked themselves, so where’s Kaiser? Well, I know I haven’t posted anything for about two months and I’ll tell you why. I have been in surgery twice which cost me a lot of effort to recover from. Luckily I fully recovered and I’m feeling better then ever!

So although I was at home I didn’t had a lot of time to write articles for my blog I didn’t. This is because I was working on a few big projects. The first one I’d like to tell you about is WDTVC.com, this is a brand new community for owners of the great WD TV HD media player. I started of coding an AJAX/PHP movie thumbnail generator for the WD TV which became insanely popular within just a few days. Because of this I decided to put some more effort into it and build a whole website around the thumbnail generator. Currently we we have about 3,000 unique visitors and still growing everyday. We offer tutorials, forums and a wiki so come visit us soon!

Another project I have been working on is the website for the beautiful Yachtclub Restaurant Bonaire. This restaurant was opened last year by my good friends Rick van den Broek and Kim van Dijk. As you can see it is located on the island of Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles. It’s a popular holiday destination and if you’re lucky enough to go there don’t forget to stop by the restaurant.

Some of you might know I’m a Dutch multimedia student. Although I almost finished my studies at the Hogeschool of Arnhem and Nijmegen I decided to quit for while. This was because of numerous reasons, and looking back at it, it was the right thing to do. But after some time I knew I had to go fiend an internship and finish my study. So I did, I’m currently employed at Instore Broadcast who offered me a great Internship. I have to do usability research on the current online video manager. I’ll also be designing a new GUI for a new version of this system. If allowed I’ll post some screenshots on my blog when it’s finished.

Last but not least I have been working on an vista look-a-like AJAX menu but I will tell you more about that on my next blog post. First I have to get the demo up and running. Anyways, now you know what I have been up to lately and why there weren’t any blog posts last two months. All I can say is I’m back and I will be writing for my blog again soon!

Greets,

KaiserSoze

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Hmmm, not much clearer right? Well for me Ubiquitous computing was the name of a school semester I did about a year ago. For us ubiquitous computing was the ability to mix soft- and hardware into real life objects people use every day. This could be anything like running shoes collecting data about your steps, glasses gving you extra information on what your seeing or games and interactivity in the elevator mirror you look at avery day. After nine weeks following different courses on the subject, we were given nine weeks to do a project and realise chosen concepts. The concepts had to be usefull for the re-opened Luxor Live theater. Some great ideas we worked out were LED-glasses reacting to surrounding music and a control board, the elevator mirror mentioned above using Wii controllers and touchscreen tables showing you information and options to order drinks and vote for music. So what about agmented reality? The wiki sais:

“Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.

At present, most AR research is concerned with the use of live video imagery which is digitally processed and “augmented” by the addition of computer-generated graphics. Advanced research includes the use of motion-trackingfiducial markers recognition using machine vision, and the construction of controlled environments containing any number of sensors and actuators.”

So augmented reality is not the same as ubiquitous computing but it sure is a great example of it. I could explain augmented reality in my own words but as my english is okay but not great i’d rather show you two video’s which should make you understand both terms a lot better. These two video’s were the reason of writing this article to be honest. The first video is a great presentation of augmented reality I remembered from the beginning of the semester. I watched the second video today, it is an example of Microsofts interpretation of ubiquitous computing.

1. Augmented reality demo by Total Immersion:

Click here to view the embedded video.

2. Microsoft ubiquitous computing and augmented reality example:

http://webwereld.nl/multimedia/55854/microsoft-toont–augmented-reality—video-.html

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These rules are private files, not meant for anyone outside the scene. But as they are found very easily on the web, here they are:

update:

• XviD Release Standards 2009
• The 720p x264 TV Releasing Scene Standards 2008

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• Create a file in notepad with the following line: command.com
• Save this file as cmd.bat
• Execute the cmd.bat file and you”ll see the  command prompt.
• To create a new user in command prompt: net user username /ADD
• Enter net localgroup to find out the name of the local admin group In most cases it´s administrators.
• To grant the user you have created administrative rights enter: net localgroup administrators username /ADD
• Log off and login with new username , enjoy with
  administrative privileges. If you want to delete created user just type net user username /DELETE

This will come in very handy when you want to install your own software to work with on your work or school pc.

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For those of you looking for a javascript redirect script, here it is:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function visitorwarp()
{
var location     = '<!--#echo var="REQUEST_URI" -->';
var newlocation = location.replace("/blog", "http://www.kaisersblog.com");
document.write     ('<META name="robots" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">');
window.location = ""+newlocation;
}

function waitingroom()
{setTimeout("visitorwarp()", 5000);}
//-->
</script>

Don’t forget to call the waitingroom function in you body tag:

<body onLoad="waitingroom()">

You also might want to change a few things as this script recplaces “/blog” to “http://www.kaisersblog.com” from the location variable. The location variable is the apache SSI  “REQUEST_URI” variable.

Change waiting time in waitingroom function, current is 5000 (5 secs.)

I don’t really know if google bots will like this script. For me it’s only temporary untill search engines and visitors know my new domain.

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After you’ve downloaded and registered your account at WhatPulse join the CLnet team ! Try go and catch up with my 9 million + keys and over 3,5 million clicks

The password for enrolling the CLnet team is: heineken

And for all you people who are thinking “oeh mi god a keylogger, no way!”, well, exactly, No way. WhatPulse is not and never will be any sort of keylogger, it does not collect the keys you type, but only how many keys you type.

So how does it work?

WhatPulse opens a so-called “keyhook” when it’s booted, which listens to incoming Windows messages about the keyboard, the keyhook sends these messages to the program itself, and the program first determines if the key pressed is a proper key (Every standard keyboards’ keys are counted) and then simply does PreviousKeyCount + 1.

Pulsing: When you “pulse”, you’re actually sending your keycounts in the program to the server along with other information about your Account, so the server can decide where to put the keycount. If the pulse goes according to plan, the server sends back an “OK”, and the client’s keycount is reset to 0 (zero), and your previous keys are added to your profile in the server database!

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