Smart Home Blog

UMPCs - Ultra Mobile PCs are coming to our life. They are going to replace PDA and Notebooks in some cases. So, it’d be nice to to know all refinements before starting to buy UMPC. The big and great The Carrypad UMPC Buyers Guide can help potential owners of UMPC to find appropriate model. The author talks about OS choices, disk size, form-factors, screen size and battery life. At the end of the guide the author gives an example of ideal UMPC

• 5-7″ 800×640 Touch Screen

• Detachable Mini Keyboard

• Wifi, BT2.0, SD slot, USB2.0

• 600mhz advanced processor. (powerful enough to run good quality mpeg-4 video)

• 3 hour battery

• Min 10GB storage

• Reduced OS

• Price: $600

I’ll need to buy some UMPC (Origami) in the nearest future to use it as Plutohome Orbiter. So, I’ll follow this guide.

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Mac Mini is one of the best Apple products. Incontestable proof of it is a bunch of interesting installations of Mini. This howto from Engadget explains how to create a home media center on Mac Mini. It describes how to extend a storage using external Firewire driver, setup audio, video (HDTV as well) and DVR. Also, you can find there receipt how to controlling your Mac mini remotelly.

Well, I’m thinkg more and more about Mac mini as a home PC

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It’s a good news for all Plutohome integrators and users. Pluto Wiki is available! Thanks guys! Before it took a lot of time to find some nessesary information in the forum. Also, wiki is a good place to share an experience and store some practical tips.
I already added there my mini howtos: Create a Web Orbiter, CISCO 7079 Orbiter and Setup Generic PC as MD and found a clear explanation of GSD framework and Ruby wrapper. It should help me to implement an interface between ICPDAS, which is used as control panel for non x10 devices, and Plutohome.

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I’ve written my first howto - VDR streamdev on 64bit Fedora Core 4 howto for project ‘Smarthome’. I’m goind to add another howto “How to setup CISCO 7970 in Plutohome” next week.

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A Web Orbiter seems good to use it on the devices which have a web browser with JavaScript support. To use it just do following:

1. Add a new Generic Web Device from Peripherals as a Child device for your Core. The new Generic Proxy Orbiter will be created automatically on this stage.
2. Wait when generation procedure finishes (you should see a message on some active Orbiter or check Orbiter page: Wizard — Devices — Orbiters).
3. Quick reload router.
4. Access to Web Orbiter from URL http://core_ip/pluto-admin/weborbiter.php on the device.

During setup the Web Orbiter I faced with some strange problem. I saw the message on the OnScreen Orbiter about finish of generation of Web Orbiter. Then I reloaded router and tried to access to Web Orbiter. As result I got en error:
"Connect to proxy orbiter failed, please try again"
But I saw the second message about end of generation of the Web Orbiter. After that it started work fine except displaying some buttons (in my case - media buttons).
The Web Orbiter looks good and works fast. So, the next step is to test Cisco7970 as Orbiter.

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