Flare Play Microconsole - General Questions and Answers

So, I just found this thing called Flare Play at goodwill for $6. I didn't know anything about it and wanted to learn more, but it turns out that the cable provider, Cox Communications discontinued the Flare Play services, including all near all youtube videos for it, the official website and the facebook page, leaving next to not information about the system at all.
What I was able to extract from the internet is that it was apparently a game streaming service. When it was first released, it was priced around $80, which isn't too bad when competing with onlive and others back in the day. Though, there was no word on how much the streaming cost per month.
So, with the service discontinued, I wanted to see if there was a way to hack it. It might work off of a type of android software, but it could also be some for of raspberry pi. The model number for it is F1G1001
FC11001
Service number is FGM1505A00414
If anyone has anymore information about this, or has worked on this type of thing and has a nice little hack so I can install android apps to it, let me know!
What it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/FZ9aDvg.jpg

Related

[Q] Google Wave App

I just wanted to know if anyone has developed a solid app for Google wave. I use Google wave allot, but there aren't any good ones in the market place.
If someone can give me a good app for Google wave (with notifications, and updates, like the Facebook app) that would be awesome.
If no one made one yet, this is an opportunity, I need a good Google wave app so bad that I would be willing to pay for it, and I am probably not the only one.
DROID_INC said:
I just wanted to know if anyone has developed a solid app for Google wave. I use Google wave allot, but there aren't any good ones in the market place.
If someone can give me a good app for Google wave (with notifications, and updates, like the Facebook app) that would be awesome.
If no one made one yet, this is an opportunity, I need a good Google wave app so bad that I would be willing to pay for it, and I am probably not the only one.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You probably are actually, google wave is very unpopular. I doubt you'll find one if i'm honest !
Good luck anyways!
edit: go to www.googlewave.com in your mobile browser, should be a mobile version? Not sure if that's any help though.
Wave Lives!
I think Wave is popular amongst certain developers (the kind that were let in early) but i'm not sure what it's future is now that Google has announced it's closure towards the end of the year.
On the one hand the whole wave-server is free to download and install on our own machines, but on the other hand, Google hasn't (and probably won't) release much of their native client. The "textual" client that was released was so basic as to not catch on for "syndication", or "federating" as it was called. I got as far as setting it all up on a VPS hosting, but wasn't up to the task of coding my own client, at least, not at the time. (thou i would've joined such a group if had found one, which i didn't)
I still see a future for Wave, or a derivative thereof, but the original Wave client would be hard to replicate if Google choose not to release it. Until we hear what Google intends to do with that "popular" client, it's really anyone's guess.
For myself, i was gearing up to code an Android client for Wave using Adobe Air once they (Adobe) have finalized the feature-set (it's still in pre-release for month or two). I would still like to do this, but getting it to the quality of the current Wave client would be large undertaking. Would prolly have to settle for something that looks and works a bit differently. (ie. more suiting Android screens for example)
As for a central server to run it on (since Google are pulling the plug) it would need to be either another central server, or at least partially shoe-horned to run on Google's App Engine, which i have also done some prep work for. (passing waves thru as a web interface, storing of waves in big-table, etc)
Along with character-by-character communication, and having compatibility with existing robots and gadgets (protocols, and everything) it's quite an involved project. Most likely a team effort, which is what Wave is actually designed for after all. ;O)
The only tricky part is getting paid to even attempt it. So even thou there's definitely some latent demand for Wave to continue, method of sponsorship is what really needs to be sorted out first. See my previous post (here on XDA) about "donation bidding" for example of what is really needed.
This is the one i meant... "Developer Bidding"
Ok, thanks guys.
I have used the mobile version but it just plainly sucks. Since I go to college, I do a lot of group projects and its easier through google wave because your group can comment attach, post, etc..., and your entire group can see and discuss. If google is pulling the plug, is there any alternative I can use for what I am doing?
Again thanks for the help.
A popular one before Wave came along was Etherpad (Etherpad.com) but as Wave was gearing up for public release Google bought the company, shut down Etherpad, and got the Etherpad team to help the Wave team improve Wave's usability.
Initially there was a public backlash, since the two services looked and worked quite differently, and many people preferred Etherpad's simplicity. Perhaps because of the growing backlash, Etherpad was then quickly released as open-source (see Etherpad.org) such that it can be downloaded and setup on your own server.
When Google announced Wave is closing, several sites promptly listed some alternatives.
http://www.techmaish.com/5-popular-google-wave-alternatives/
http://www.worldtech24.com/business/10-great-alternatives-google-wave/
Also worth noting that although Google are closing Wave, they are now planning to integrate some of the Wave's technology (whatever that means) into existing products. Think of; google mail, google buzz, google talk, and google voice, all becoming something "more collaborative" and generally more social.
Personally, i liked Wave the most (robots, gadgets, etc) so hoping to catch the timing between Air for Android releasing, and Wave closing, since my background is mainly Actionscript/Javascript, and have already coded a partial client.
Happy hunting thou!

Google TV

I don't know a whole lot about this about this product but people seem to be saying it's incomplete. Any thoughts?
Incomplete or not play with others?
I bought a 46" Sony Google TV the last weekend of October 2011. There is a small hard drive in the set that runs the device, via Android.
That part works well, and an update to the Android OS is expected soon.
Rest of the TV - picture, sound, etc - middle of the road.
The Google part of this is indeed incomplete - why?
There are few, if any apps at this time for users - remember Android apps largely require a touch-screen - these TV's are not touch screen.
Traditional and some non-traditional networks and websites have blocked their TV 'playable' rich media content from this and similar devices - the old model/old money/old school networks' business model is squarely targeted by this device - they are not going to cede their revenue (advertisements) easily.
Hulu is blocked as well.
All this said, I think the idea is superb, and I daresay ahead of it's time.
Google has somewhat ignored this product since launching it in 2010, they say there will be a renewed focus - we'll see.
If you expect to be able to watch network stuff on this via the browser, forget it - it's not likely to happen.
If you gotta have web-enabled TV, there are cheaper options and means to do that with other TV's on the market.
Plan to keep this until the last possible moment within Best Buy's 30-day return window to see whether Google updates the OS.
If not, back it goes for something else.
EDIT/Update 11/3 Received the update to honeycomb for the Google TV device.
VERY happy with the functions and Android system. You can sideload apps, stream content saved in Amazon cloud, shop the market, etc.
Reminiscent, to me, of my first Android phone almost 2. years ago, just after rooting it - there's TONS more stuff it can do, and I'll dive into it and learn.

Free or cheap cloud storage service?

Is there a website or service that offers cloud storage for games or apps for free? What's the cheapest you know of? I just want to save game progress on the internet in case someone gets a new phone and wants to keep playing my game. Thanks!
Have you tried SkyDrive integration? I do believe our apps can talk to a user's skydrive that's linked to their Live ID and you can use that to store application data.
A quick google search pointed me to this sample: http://blog.mecum.biz/2011/10/windows-phone-7-mango-skydrive-sample/ and there's also http://wp7skydrive.codeplex.com/ which seems to be a simple wrapper around common functions.
If you want something from MS directly: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_...ssenger-and-skydrive-to-your-mobile-apps.aspx or http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlight/SkyDrive-Photo-API-sample-f06778ae would be a good starting point. Personally I'd use the latter since it's the REST API wp7skydrive.codeplex.com was waiting to be out of beta for.
Personally, I find SkyDrive integration much easier than trying to facilitate my own service. What if my service went down or I couldn't make payments? My users would be SOL and if your app *requires* the service it could break certification requirements (not that MS is that strict on something that already passed).
Thanks! I really appreciate it.
Thread moved to general Q&A, not really development related.

Confessions of a Google junkie (or, Privacy? What privacy?)

the original link.....http://www.zdnet.com/blog/google/confessions-of-a-google-junkie-or-privacy-what-privacy/3553
Summary: A lot has been made of Google’s new privacy policy and terms of use. I say bring it on.
There are very few aspects of my life that don’t somehow involve Google. My phone runs on Android, my favorite tablet just got an OTA update to Ice Cream Sandwich (!!!), I use Chrome across all of my computers, I develop AdWords campaigns, I use Analytics to develop metrics for the day job and dive into SEO, I handle many of the CBS Interactive Google webcasts, I use Google Docs almost exclusively for productivity, and my wife doesn’t know where I am half the time until she checks my Google Calendar (which, in fact, aggregate two other Google Calendars).
I’m increasingly turning to Google+ as my source of relevant information and opinions, a function previously reserved for Twitter, and I’ve even dispensed with bookmarks, instead using Google Sites to organize important pages and resources.
I live, eat, breathe, work, and play Google and there aren’t many people more aware of Google’s business model and the amount of data it collects than I. So is it just sheer stupidity and naiveté that has me utterly embracing the Google ecosystem and relatively unconcerned about newly announced privacy policies that have caused so much consternation this week? Before you jump down to the talkbacks to tell me how stupid I really am, read on for another couple paragraphs.
As Larry Dignan pointed out in his post about the new policies last night,
Google noted that it already has all that data, but it’s now integrating that information across products. It’s a change in how Google will use the data not what it collects. In other words, Google already knows more about you than your wife.
From my perspective, though, I can live with Google knowing a lot about me. It knows, for example, that I’ve recently developed an obsession with the electric guitar and have been researching inexpensive models that I might just be able to justify as a birthday present to myself. It doesn’t judge, it just shows me the best deals in display ads on the three models of guitar and 2 models of amps I’ve been reading about the most. My wife isn’t aware of this obsession and her take on it would be judgmental (God love her!): “When will you have time to play guitar? And we’re supposed to be saving money! And what’s wrong with your acoustic guitar?”
Taking this a step further, as Google’s new privacy policies and terms of use do, I should expect to start seeing guitar-related apps in my suggestions in the Google Market and the Chrome Marketplace. Guitarists on Google+ should start appearing in suggested people to add to my circles and Google Reader should offer to download Guitar Player Magazine feeds for me. And, more likely than not, I’ll start seeing more guitar-related ads as well.
Google’s goal, of course, is to sell advertising. That’s about 97% of their revenue. By pulling people like me into their increasingly unified ecosystem, they can demonstrate very high click-through rates to potential advertisers and charge a premium to reach highly targeted and yet incredibly vast audiences.
They need to give me something in return
For me to buy into this, they need to give me something in return. Something to make all things Google really sticky. Like a wide array of free tools from Google Docs to Google Music to Google Voice. And cheap tools that I buy for my business like Google Apps and AdWords. Their new policies are designed to be more transparent, but also to pave the way for these tools to talk to each other better, making them even stickier through a unified experience and more relevant services.
Back to the wife comparison that Larry brought up. My wife knows that every Friday night is pizza night in our house. So does Google, since every Friday around 4:30 I pull out my Android and use Google Voice Search to find the number of whatever pizza joint we decide to patronize that week. Fine. Google, however, can actually do something more useful with that information than my wife can (”Where should I order pizza, sweetheart?” “Wherever, just not that place down the road. Or that other place. And make sure they’re having a deal!”).
Come Friday morning, the ads I see on Gmail or Google search should start being pretty pizza-heavy: Dominos, Papa Johns, and a place or two that has an active Google Offer. As I’m driving home that evening, the GPS on my phone should set off an alert when I drive past a well-reviewed pizza place (assuming I’ve set location-based preferences to alert me to destinations with at least four-star average reviews). And the minute I type a P in my mobile browser, Google Instant should leap into action and display nearby pizza places and a news story about a new place to get pizza in the next town.
We’re not quite there yet, but this is the sort of integration and experience that Google is covering in its new policies and terms of use. I know that my privacy red flags should probably be going off. Google has gigabytes of information about me and is using that information to help its advertisers sell products. That’s bad, right?
Guess what, folks? This is the semantic web
And yet, I don’t think it is. Many of the same techies who cry foul over these new policies have also been pushing for the development of the semantic web to make it easier to find what we actually need in the trillions of web pages floating around the Internet. Guess what, folks? This is the semantic web. When our search engines know what we actually mean, when data on the web automagically becomes information we can use easily and quickly, we’ve arrived.
And the semantic web can’t exist without “the web” (whatever that is) knowing a lot about us. It takes data for a computer to understand our needs and process natural language efficiently. Some of those data will necessarily be fairly personal.
Now, if I start getting spam from pizza places or calls on my Google Voice number from Dominos because Google has sold my contact information and preferences to advertisers, we have a problem and I’ll be waving my privacy flag as high as anyone else. However, when I opt in by opening a Google account and staying logged in as I surf the web, I’m not only consenting to the collection and aggregation of data about me, I’m asking that it be done so that the web and related tools can be more useful to me. This sort of data mining lets me work faster, play easier, and find the best pizza in a 20-mile radius.
For its part, Google needs to remain the trusted broker of these data. No, I don’t like the idea that our government could brand me a terrorist and seize these gigabytes of data under the Patriot Act. The alternative, though, is an ever-growing morass of web sites and tools that I get to dig through manually.
And, by the way, even if I’m not logged in to my Google account as I’m doing it, my ISP knows the sites I’ve visited, too, and could just as easily (if not more so) be compelled to turn over this information to the real Big Brother in all of this.
Far more trust in Google than the Feds
Honestly, I have far more trust in Google than I do in the Feds. Google is motivated by money: they need my trust to keep collecting those data to keep making it easier for me to buy things from Google’s paying advertisers. If that trust is broken by inappropriate sharing of data, then my eyeballs go elsewhere and so do the advertisers who target me via AdWords and AdSense. Our government has no such financial motivation. Money talks.
The fact that the speech recognition on my phone kicks ass because I use Google Voice all the time and it’s learned how I talk might be a little creepy, but it’s far more important that I can do a Google search or send a text while I’m driving without taking my eyes off the road.
Welcome to 2012, folks. The semantic web has arrived. Use it well and let’s keep Google’s new policies in perspective. And Google? Don’t be evil. I have a lot of colleagues who will be pointing, laughing, and saying I told you so if you ever are.
Nice article.
I think the key for Google's continued success is to keep the advertising passive, suggestions when you're searching etc. aren't in your face but they work.
You see a lot of people complaining that they've been searching for something online and then all of the adverts on the websites they visit contain something pertaining to that, and they grumble that it's annoying. Personally, I'd much rather see an advert to something that's relevant to me rather than a cluttered webpage of irrelevant information.
By targeting adverts and increasing their relevance to the individual, they are far more likely to be successful. This means that the revenue per advert is going to improve and websites aren't going to need to cover their website in adverts (at the cost of the user experience) to make it profitable.
Plus given the huge amount of free stuff that google gives you, it's a bit rich for somebody to complain that they're trying to get something back off you.
I too would much rather see things directly targeted towards me then just random ads. And everyone is up in arms about google recording what you do. Well i think of it this way, i'm fine with them getting to know me and my behavior and what i do, as long as they keep providing FREE products for me.
Ahh the good old "If they are going to screw me without consent, I would much rather they knew my name, stroked my hair and whispered sweet nothings into my ear while they did it."
I prefer to treat my online habbits like the strange neighbour a few doors down. Say "hi" in passing, and realise that while they probrobly know more than I would want them to from when I've invited them over for coffee and from peeking in my windows as they walk past, know that I don't actually have to put up with their $#!+ if they become too creepy.
Thats why its important there are alternitives and competition, and that we as consumers don't put our eggs all in one basket and be prepared to protest or move on if they stretch the friendship too far.
I know privacy is impossible in this day and age but that doent mean you have to lie back and take it. "because you know it means well and it does give you nice gifts once in a while"
My suggestion is cut your reliance on any one brand and spread out the load.
hungry81 said:
My suggestion is cut your reliance on any one brand and spread out the load.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I like the author am reliant on Google these days. I'd be happy to look at alternatives. Granted they work on the platforms I needs them to, Android 2.X and 3.2, Linux+chrome, windows XP + chrome, and windows 7 + firefox or chrome. The linux requirement cuts out a lot of things, iTunes/iCloud for example.
Have any suggestions who/where i could go for:
Music
Docs
G+
Gmail
Needs a slick webUI, and the searching ability of gmail
Calendar
I need delegation and the ability for my wife to add me to events and share calendars.
Reader
works on all my devices, and syncs between them
I would very much like my phone to know when I leave work. Now i could do this with some sort of timer, but I end up working somewhat flexible hours, and have a leaving time of anywhere within an hour and a half. I would like it to know that since I now have "buy bread, milk, and eggs" on my to-do list (thanks hun!), that it needs to remind me of that on the way home. Even better if it can just direct me to a store with a deal on one or all of those things.
I like that the first hit in Google I get for cookies is the wikipedia page for http cookies and the second is to pythons cookielib module. Where as I bet my grandmother gets, chocolate chip cookies. The ability for Google search to know that I have a particular artist in my collection, and show me the bind's page near the top of the results without me having to add "band" to my search terms.
Anyways, if and when Google starts selling my data to 3rd parties, I'll export my data and move. Google makes it fairly painless to do that.

Ads on multiple Android Apps

Recently Ive been getting ads for the Ford Motor Company, Nectar (the shopping reward company used by Sainsburys and Android) on BBC News, Poweramp, eBay, Facebook apps and others on my phone
The Ad's are seemingly quite hi quality comprising a 'still' full screen picture (of a car in the case of the Ford one) which can be dismissed via a cross at the right top of the picture.
Although easily dismissed they are a nuisance
I'm wondering if these are some how 'official' ads from Android as they advertise Android /google products as well as Ford etc or are they some sort of virus/Malware
Is it possible to get rid of them? if so could you tell me how, as after a some searching I cant find even a mention of anything like them on the internet.
I would rather not initialise/wipe my Phone
Thanks

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