Kinoma Notes

If you hang around technical people, you’ve probably seen those computer books with the funny-looking animals on front.

They’re from O’Reilly Media, best known for great books on everything from super-technical topics like programming, to their “Missing Manual” series for the rest of us.

What you might not know is that O’Reilly creates lots of really interesting video content as well. Today, you can watch hundreds of O’Reilly videos on your phone with Kinoma Play!

Here are the new categories now available in Kinoma Guide > Providers > O’Reilly TV:

• Gov 2.0 Summit 2009 and Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase 2009 — Want to see what happens when you bring together government and technology thought leaders to reshape government for the better? Here are 84 videos from O’Reilly’s 2009 Gov 2.0 conference.
• O’Reilly Conferences — 200 “best of” videos from various O’Reilly conferences and events, including ETech, OSCON, RailsConf, Foo Camp, Sci Foo, Ignite, Web 2.0 Expo, Web 2.0 Summit, MySQL Conference & Expo and Expo Where 2.0.
• O’Reilly Interviews — 50+ interviews with notable authors, editors, and innovators, including Tim O’Reilly, Sarah Millstein, Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, Larry Wall, Pia Waugh, Nat Torkington, and more.
• O’Reilly Webcasts — 140+ webcasts that put you in touch with experts from every area of technology: programmers, web designers, digital photographers, social media gurus, iPhone hackers, open source mavensand more. Each webcast is a recording of a live, online event including Q&As from the audience.
• Tim O’Reilly — 34 talks and interviews with the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, who “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is an activist for open source and open standards, and an opponent of software patents and other incursions of new intellectual property laws into the public domain.
• Web 2.0 Summit 2009 — 40+ videos featuring the intelligence, innovation, and leadership of the Internet industry, gathered together in one place at one time. Watch incisive plenary sessions, frank onstage conversations, rapid-fire “high order bits”, and Launch Pad, where visionaries and executives from Internet businesses present their unique perspective on the Web’s future-in-flux.
• All O’Reilly TV Videos — Browse through all O’Reilly Media videos, including those that don’t fall into one of the above categories.

Enjoy!

As usual this new Kinoma Guide content is free for all Kinoma Play customers. It’s available right now at Kinoma Guide > Providers > O’Reilly TV.

If you have favorite podcasts, radio stations, video streams or other media, send a URL and short description to content@kinoma.com and we’ll add them to Kinoma Guide for everyone to discover and enjoy.

Kinoma Guide’s SKY.fm category is a great collection of streaming radio stations. There’s lots of genres, and yet the refined selection makes it easy to find the kind of music you’re in the mood for.

We’ve just released a new Kinoma Guide update that adds all currently-available SKY.fm and DI.fm (Digitally Imported) stations in all available stream formats — including aacPlus.

aacPlus?

AAC is the standards-based successor to MP3. It offers far higher-quality than MP3 at similar bitrates.

Kinoma Play is the only mobile player that supports not just AAC, but also the even more-advanced aacPlus and aacPlus v2 (a.k.a. HE-AAC and HE-AAC v2) formats.

The SKY.fm streams are available in both MP3 and aacPlus formats. Even though the aacPlus streams are 75% smaller (!) than the 96 kbps MP3 streams, they still sound great. Such a low-bitrate stream makes for great reliability, even in very poor network conditions.

Wow, great! Where do I find it?

You can find SKY.fm in Kinoma Guide > Radio.

Got favorite podcasts? Radio stations? Video streams?

Send a URL and short description to content@kinoma.com and we’ll add them to Kinoma Guide for everyone to enjoy!

Good eeevening, boo-s and ghouls!

Your timing is perfect — we’re handing out treats a night early this year. You’ll find them in Kinoma Guide > Featured > Halloween Treats.

• Big R Radio Halloween Channel — A streaming radio station featuring songs like Ghostbusters, Elvis singing (You’re The) Devil in Disguise, Neil Sedaka’s Little Devil…you get the idea.
• Coverville Annual Halloween Shows — Spooky cover versions of songs from some of the podcast’s annual Halloween shows, including Dead Man’s Party, Ghostbusters, The Theme From “The Munsters”, Monster Mash, Thriller, and selections from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Nightmare Before Christmas.
• Halloween Atmosphere — Play this streaming radio station for a spine-curdling soundtrack to your Halloween activities. (Dare you to listen to it in the dark!)
• Halloween Radio and Halloween Oldies — More streaming spook-tastic Halloween radio.
• Thriller — Not only do you get the great cover version above, but you also get the entire official Michael Jackson video opus. This scared the candy corn out of my sister and me when we were kids, and it’s still frighteningly fun.
• War of the Worlds — This is the entire 1938 radio dramatization that shocked the world and created nationwide panic among confused listeners, many who missed the warning that it was a dramatization since they tuned in after listening to Charlie McCarthy on another station. For those people, it felt like the beginning of the end.

Have a happy, safe Halloween!

The Palm LifeDrive and Palm T|X were introduced in 2005 — ancient history by device standards.

You’d think both devices be hopelessly out of date by now, but they’re still very useful and (with Kinoma Player 4 EX) still make great media players. The LifeDrive’s chubby chassis is pretty dated, but the ahead-of-its-time Palm T|X was clearly the pinnacle of Palm OS device design. The hardware still looks and feels like it could’ve been released this year.

They both have built-in Wi-Fi, which was still pretty unique back in 2005. Sadly, their Wi-Fi support is showing its age, and the LifeDrive and T|X are unable to connect with more and more modern Wi-Fi routers and access points in their out-of-the-box configurations.

The solution

For my D-Link DIR-825, the solution was to go to Setup > Wireless Settings > Manual Wireless Network Setup and choose “Mixed 802.11g and 802.11b” as the 802.11 Mode for the 2.4 GHz band. (You don’t have to worry about the 5 GHz band if your router supports it, since the devices don’t.)

Also, remember that the LifeDrive and T|X only support older WEP and WPA-PSK wireless security modes. I recommend temporarily turning off wireless security altogether, and then turning it back on once you’ve figured out how to get your device to connect to your Wi-Fi network.

Other routers

If you’d like to share specific instructions for configuring other routers, you can email us at content@ our domain and I’ll gladly add the details to this post.

Palm Addicts recently announced the winners of its 2008 PalmAddict Reader Awards. 

We’re excited to announce that Kinoma Player 4 EX won both of the categories it was nominated for!

• Best Palm OS Software
• Best Multimedia Program for Palm OS

Over 80,000 votes were cast in PalmAddicts’ year-long reader survey, and the other nominees we were up against were the best-of-the-best.

Many thanks to everybody that voted for us!