Last week, I attended #CES through my work. Here are some of the interesting things I found:

1. Vidtonic - homebrew/DIY Android-powered TV panel kit
2. Recon Instruments - sports goggles with GPS and display functionality, Bluetooth video coming soon
3. AR.Drone - remote control helicopter (actually, quadricopter) using an iPhone, but wait, there's more! The iPhone app is also a viewfinder to the onboard camera, and the app overlays a shootem-up video game!
4. Cideko and Dexatek - after new Apple TV and Google TV failed to provide an fully open TV app platform, on Facebook I lamented that I just want a very simple box running Android with network and HDMI out. I found one online from a Chinese company named "HD Digital Technology" a.k.a HDX1080.com and ordered one, but they failed to send it. Cideko, Sony, and at least one other showed such little TV app boxes - nothing for sale yet, just prototypes and concepts.
5. Wireless Media Stick - not exactly sure what it is or how it works. I asked the guy at the booth, and he said "it's just like it sounds; it's a wireless media stick!"Okaaay... :-) It is a little USB stick/dongle/thumb-drive device that looks to the host like just any old USB memory stick with files. Except it does not actually have files on it. It has Wi-Fi, and exposes your file server, PC, smartphone, or tablet's media as a virtual file system to the device into which it is plugged such as a game console, Blu-ray player, or newer TV. 
6. Keytec OPTIR - turn any flat panel display into a touch screen. For example, you can get one for 46" for less than $1000. It is a modular frame of IR transmitters and sensors that wraps the frame of your existing panel.

Today, at work, I received the new Android tablet that Neuros Technology is selling. I had a multi-screen convergence project I was working on that needed a tablet, and we were scrambling to get a decent Android tablet to show it on. So, last week we got a bunch to try. We ended up using something which is really sweet, but I can not talk about it as it is not in the market yet.

Meanwhile, we tried out the Augen, Archos 7, and I ordered Neuros', which did not come in until today. I did not like the Augen at all for reasons already covered well elsewhere. The Archos looks and feels quite nice, but I had issues with the responsiveness of the screen and does not support rotation and orientation. Well, this Neuros one has a good screen, and it is very inexpensive. For the money spent, it is not only good value but actually usable - well, for certain apps. It is not good at all for video playback, but for light web browsing, photos, music, it is decent. It ought to work quite well as a remote control for DLNA, XBMC, Boxee, etc. I will try to use it as a DLNA controller for a new Samsung TV we got at work. Of course, given the cost, construction quality is not great, but I wish it had a kickstand like the Archos. My work has these cell phone holders that look like Barbie doll beach chairs, which I have found works fine as a substitute (and replaceable unlike inbuilt cheap plastic).

There is a neat app that it comes with called Magic Album, that makes a nice side-table, companion-device-like experience. It comes with a very slim App Market because it is not allowed to use the Google Market, of course. That made me wonder about the AppsLib market I found on the Archos, and what options there are in general. Well, AppsLib only works on Archos and AndSpot is a limited beta. I am trying out SlideME, but I need to get a microSD card as it does not work without it. In particular, I am interested to try Subsonic on it for use with my personal music collection.

So, yeah, if you are looking for an inexpensive but usable Android tablet, then I recommend it except if you want to do much video playback.

 Through my employer, MobiTV, and pleased to tell you that the newly designed MobiTV app for the iPhone has been approved and is available in the store now. My work was to design the architecture for encoding and delivering the HTTP Live (segmented transport stream) streams for bandwidth adaptation. That work was mainly done on previous sports-related apps we produced, but for this MobiTV app, we extended it to the on-demand clips as well.

It appears the herd is deciding to trade off verbose, repetitive tags (XML) for this nasty morass of quotation marks, quote-escaping, matching braces and brackets, and stray commas (JSON). I thought it was bad practice to just eval JSON negating much of its convenience trump. I am taking a liking toward YAML Tiny for which I can write a parser and serializer where needed without taking a sabbatical. This determination is based on my experience using ExtJS to make a complex web application in JSON and with using YAML Tiny in MLT.  

I am very proud of my wife, Bonnie, winning water treatment lab analyst of the year for northern California. Congratulations!

The aim of this post is to point out there has been a definite, not-so-recent uptrend in writing to use the phrase "aims to" or "the aim ... is." This follows other trends of using "That said," preceded by a trend of "All in all" preceded by beginning most posts or lines of speech with the word "So." Don't 'cha know?