If you don't know Nate True, you should. He's one of the most prolific hardware inventors/hackers around, and he's done all kinds of cool stuff.  I'm actively trying to recruit him to the dark side to commercialize some of this stuff, and hopefully he can be corrupted, but he's so far successfully resisted.  Anyway, he's rigged up a 442 with his videocamera which was used for gearlive's coverage of CES, it's a part of their proprietary process that allows them to be the leading video bloggers for gadgets and they did something like 100 interviews at CES, including yours truly doing a demo of the OSD.  Once they post something, I'll link to it.

Meeting on Sat, Aug 26, 10am Chicago time, that's UTC (or GMT/Zulu)-time used: Saturday, August 26, 2006 at 15:00:00. For your local time click <a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=8&day=26&year=2006&hour=10&min=0&sec=0&p1=64" title="reference on here" target="_blank">here</a>

This meeting will be about the status of the 442v2, what resources are available, what the production and software schedule will look like and what the original launched product will look like from a functional standpoint. Let's be prepared to have a candid discussion so that folks know what's going on.

I don't know what it is, or what it does, but in this fast paced world of blogging in which I *so stylishly* reside, I've learned not to ask too many questions. If it has pictures, I post it.

Hey, I figure if woot can sell thousands of self declared "bags of crap," then it's pretty clear that geek web surfers are not the most discriminating lot.

Anyway, take an old VCR case, a 442, a R2 and you've got well a 442 and an R2 in an old VCR case. I'm sure that <a href="http://wiki.neurostechnology.com/index.php/User:Ddpedersen" title="reference on Derek" target="_blank">Derek</a> will reveal it's inner mysteries soon enough though, so stay tuned!

I've been extremely remiss in my updates on the 442v2 and I appoligize for that. I've attached an email with the most recent schedule (from the factory). Given the available resources, this got pushed back a month, meaning developer samples will be in August and Gamma will be in October (assuming two boards spins are required, which was not the case with the OSD, FWIW). I appoligize to all, particuliarly the Gamma 442 purchasors for this delay.

A lot of folks ask why video, particuliarly when our Neuros heritage is portable audio and clearly those are two different markets. An unexpected artifact of portable video that I have a great deal of passion about it sharing home video. I happen to travel to China a lot and meet with a lot of new people from accross the globe, and there's nothing that bridges cultural gaps like portable video. I have video of my Uncle's farm in rural Wisconsin, video of my daughter singing, of our house, of my apartment in China. These are things that I never would share were it not for the 442. I carry it with me most everywhere, not just to watch movies, but to share them. The below picture is a good example, I was at a diner in Shenzhen China showing a couple of the waitresses a video of my daughter. I've had situations where crowds of people gathered around me to watch a video I was showing.

For those of you that have been waiting patiently (unreasonably so) for the developer boards, we have decided to split the developer boards into two paths. Basically instead of one developer board that serves as the platform for both the R3 (which will officially be called the OSD) and the 442v2, we split them into two separate "developer boards" which are really just first spins of each. Those of you that have pending order will have to decide which boards you want. R3 has ethernet and serial on the main board (and will come with a first shot, clear housing) and the 442v2 has 24bit96KHz audio with connectors to an LCD and HDD and Batt, but no on board ethernet, so you'll need a daughterboard.

Thanks to Nerochiaro for introducing us to RasterMan.

He has a windows manager that could be interesting for the R3 and 442, etc.

in his own words,

I'm the lead developer (benevolent dictator for life) of the enlightenment project (http://www.enlightenment.org) - windowmanager for x - but oh so much more under the bonnet these days (which is what is keeping us slow in releasing the next version as it's all a spare time effort). we also have split off all our graphics layers into separate libraries and trimmed them down - for embedded use (limited cpu, memory and disk environments). for interest here is a quick video player i cooked up over a few days to basically stop annoying me with dvd's, regions, physical media etc. here: