Once again, it's time for Cash Money for you!
We need an enterprizing Neuros hacker to allow ordering pizzas directly from the OSD. You can port Pizza on Demand from our friends over at AwkwardTV, but you don't have to. To claim the prize you simply have to allow ordering a pizza from Domino's or Jimmy John's directly from the OSD using the remote. Use the emerging QT Based firmware. That reminds me, we desperately need an OdNT posting on that. Nero , Crweb can someone post something on that? Anyone? Anything? Please?

If you are looking for detailed rules, regulations and pages of legal boilerplate to wade through etc, well this contest is not for you. If you want some loose and vague idea of what's going on, look here . Best place for questions is probably #neuros on freenode.net or here if you don't have an IRC client handy.

Leave it to our man Darren Olson to come up with a new blog spin on Neuros. It's The Simple Neuros Blog

What can I say about this one? It's pretty nifty and great to have a new hardware hacker aboard! So welcome aboard pEEF!

If you want to learn how to add the glowing HAL Blue LED setup to your OSD, see the HOWTO on the Forum Thread: HOWTO: HAL 'Eye' for your OSD

There's lots of interest in getting streaming going on the OSD, and there have been successful experiments in streaming from the OSD. But OSD hacker dontknowme has decided to actually use a slingbox with the OSD, and he's written it up this forum thread it's an interesting combination of devices, but certainly a neat application, check it out

Those of you that have followed Neuros know about the TiVo Bounties sponsored by DVRupgrade and Neuros. More recently, DVRupgrade posted a four part series of articles on the OSD. The articles are interesting in and of themselves, but they are especially interesting as part of the nascent 'value added reseller' trend that we see in open electronics. Mirroring what happened with PCs decades ago, I think it's interesting to see a class of resellers that make their money on supporting customized "distributions" of embedded software for open devices.

There's a certain amount of speculation in a recent wired story as to why iPods that are only 6 months old or so can't support iTunes rentals. I'm betting with those that suggest its some artifact of DRM incompatibility. It's just yet another example of why unlocked media is just a simple pragmatic consumer benefit. If DRM schemes can't even work within a single companies offerings, how can we realistically expect them to work across platforms? To me, this is the greatest significance of unlocked media, simply that it works better.

As those of you in the US may be aware, the analog signal for TV sets is going black on Feb 19, 2009. The government has a program to subsidize the cost of converter boxes that will allow you to receive the new high def signals for your old TV sets that don't have digital tuners. These set-top converter boxes should make nice input device for the OSD since they output composite, and have access to all the ATSC stations. I say should because they are not yet available, so we haven't been able to test them, but as soon as they are available, we'll do that. In the meantime, there's no harm in reserving your coupons. For more information see www.dtv2009.gov

uber OSD hacker Bagster has done it again. This time, he has enabled the OSD to be remotely controlled from any PC by porting a VNC server. The video shows Jason doing a quick run-through of setup and use. For further instructions, see the forum thread and files. You can also download a free, open-source VNC desktop application to control your OSD called TightVNC.

Here are transcribed instructions. Note that for this to work, your OSD must be connected to your network.
* Download the files onto a USB key, SD card or other media.
* Plug the media into your OSD.
* Download and install the TightVNC client. Free software for non-commercial use!
* Figure out the IP address of your OSD by navigating to Settings > Network on your TV. Usually the IP address begins with "192.168" or "10.".
* Telnet to your OSD. In Windows, you can do this by going to Start > Run and typing "telnet ", where you replace IP address with the IP address. So, in our case, we entered "telnet 192.168.200.72" and pressed enter. Username is root, password is pablod .
* Navigate to your media's folder. As we plugged in a USB key into the OSD, we navigated to it with the commands (without the quotes): "cd /media/USB"
* Run the command indicated in Bagster's README.TXT file (without the quotes): "./x11vnc -rawfb fb0 -pipeinput ./send_ir.sh -forever"
* Run the TightVNC Viewer. Enter the IP address for your OSD. Again, in our case, it is 192.168.200.72. Press Connect, and off you go!

Thanks Bagster!

(p.s. sorry about the refresh lines on the video!)

This Blog Posting from the BBC's Director of Future Media and Technology really illustrates the power of an open device. The Neuros OSD is being considered along with devices from the biggest brands in the world, and effectively leapfrogging a whole host of other global brands, both big and small. I'd love to take credit for this, but the truth is the credit rightly belongs to the free software movement. The BBC is right to consider the OSD because it is an open box. It's just natural that the BBC, all things being equal, would prefer to invest time and effort in integrating with an open solution v a proprietary one. It's also likely that if there are enough entities like the BBC, that the open solution will be likely to gain critical mass and prevail in the marketplace. The "ifs" and "all things being equal" in the previous sentences bear a lot of weight and we know that the big companies have a lot of resources to bring to bear to this, but the mere fact that we're in consideration speaks volumes. The BBC is not the only entity to inquire with Neuros and we certainly hope this is harbinger of more good things to come!

We recently got a call from a writer from the NY Times about the Neuros OSD and the open source hardware movement. She really put in a lot of effort and researched the subject thoroughly including calling Victor Marks and folks from the EFF and others. It's a nice article that will really help to bring attention to the concept of open development and open source hardware and we hope you'll support it, by digging it . The original article is here: subscription required and there's a slashdot discussion too.