I came home last week to a Raspberry Pi waiting for me. Work, family visits and a bout of illnes means I only managed to take a peek, that is until yesterday evening. I rummaged around in the bits box for a £1.50 HDMI cable, a micro USB cable and a wireless USB keyboard. Then I set about giving it a quick go.

Today I read an article in Nature Climate Change that I found rather thought provoking. It reports the findings of a social psychology study into the effects of science cognition on perceived climate change risk, and it had some very interesting results.

This is just a shout out for af123 over on the hummy.tv forums, who a couple of months back released a firmware patch for the Humax HDR-Fox T2. The major modifications visible after installing the firmware are telnet and a package management system (opkg). This opens up a world of possibilities, and the guys on the forums have indeed been busy... In fact the results are very polished and packages of good quality and very easy to install.

Having recently acquired a Humax HDR-Fox T2 (a Freeview+HD PVR for the uninitiated), I have been spending some time exploring its capabilities.

A while back I was playing around with developing Chrome extensions and very quickly hashed up one to search the European Bioinformatics Institute's web site. It works by providing a context menu item when you select some text on the page. It also works in the omnibox: if you type "EBI" before your search term you will be taken directly to the search engine.

I have attached the extension here for posterity.

When my iPhone contract expired, I decided it was time to stop handing O2 wads of cash in return for not-very-much, and happened upon a mention of giffgaff in some forum or other.

With Amazon having released its CloudPlayer service this week, I thought I would give it a go. You can upload 5GB of your own music in the Cloud Drive (backed by Amazon S3) using your browser, and play the music back from anywhere using a web browser or, for those in the US, the Amazon MP3 Android app.

I already had a PS3 and a Humax HDR, both of which have DLNA capabilities. But when I got a new Sony Bravia KDL-40EX503 TV, I gave it a whirl to see what it would stream and what it wouldn't. Sony's documentation on the topic is predictably sparse, but it did imply support for AVC/H.264 and MPEG2 encoded HD video. I was therefore disappointed to find that only the SD MPEG2 files on my ReadyNAS Duo could be accessed through the Bravia's UI. The H.264 encodes would not show up, now matter what container they were in.

It may seem an odd juxtaposition to place together as the title of this post the words "Freeview" and "encryption" -- after all, surely the point of Freeview is that there are no restrictions, no contracts, no terms & conditions, etc? Well, that was indeed true until Freeview HD launched in the UK. Freeview HD broadcasts, including those from the BBC, are now broadcast with encryption.