Daily Archives: 6/6/2004

Gadget o’ the Day: Hauppauge MediaMVP

Cringely mentioned the Hauppauge MediaMVP gadget in his column. It’s a semi-cute toy: a stand alone box which connects to 10 or 100 megabit ethernet, and streams media files from your PC to your television. It sells for somewhere between $80 and $100, which is pretty cheap.

What’s really interesting is it’s hack potential. According to a users forum, it contains some interesting hardware: a variant of the PowerPC made by IBM for set top boxes, 64 megabytes of RAM and an MPEG-2 decoder. What’s more, it runs Linux using Busybox, which it boots via tftp from the host PC. In other words, you don’t have to do anything amazing to get new software to it, just build the right boot images and place them in the right place. Neat.

Apparently it does not have sshd or telnetd installed on it, only

 [, busybox, cat, cp, date, dhcpc, du, echo, fpage, ifconfig, init,
insmod, kill, killall, linuxrc, ls, lsmod, modprobe, mount, mpgdec,
msh, mv, ping, ps, pwd, reboot, rm, rmmod, route, sh, sleep, test,
umount 

but it does have NFS support built into the kernel, so in theory you could mount media files from Linux/whatever boxes and play them on your TV. Again, nifty.

If this gadget were wireless, I’d be considering it strongly, but I don’t have ethernet anywhere near my television at the moment. I wonder how long it will be before you can buy a television with gadgets like this built in. I’d easily spend another $80 to have this thing inside my next television.

D-Day

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day: the date when the Allies of World War II began their invasion of France to defeat the Axis powers in Europe. It is without a doubt one of the most spectacular battles of all time, and represents probably the single greatest achievement of logistics in warfare ever. It’s been some time since topics related to WWII were at the top of my reading list, but I remember Ryan’s The Longest Day as being informative and a good read. You can look at this Amazon list for other books that might help you learn about the events surrounding June 6th, 1944.