Home | News Archive | November 2004

MCE2005 Tranquil T2e Competition
November 29, 2004

It's competition time again, this time a rather splendid new T2e/MCE2005 Tranquil Media Centre Unit. The T2e/MCE2005 measures a mere 375mm (wide) x 345mm (deep) x 66mm (high), with a softly illuminated glass like front panel. Included with the unit is a 160GB hard drive, enough for approximately 100hrs of digital TV, and a DVD drive that can also write your music files back to a CD. A backlit MCE remote control is also supplied, that will provide all of the functions to command Live/pause TV, TV recording playback, Music, Picture viewing, DVD playback, Volume, online services etc. We also provide a wireless keyboard and mouse, so you can use your TV for chatting to all of your MSN buddies. And if you don't win one, you can always buy one..

We'll announce the winner on the 20th December. And you can stop emailing Tranquil for the answer now - what are you all thinking?

Tranquil T2e/MCE2005 Competition

Permalink | mini-link

EPIA MS - First Look
November 26, 2004

We've taken a quick look at VIA's EPIA MS motherboard, a low-profile CLE266 chipset Mini-ITX form-factor board due in early 2005 and aimed squarely at embedded systems manufacturers. Though we fully expect to see them featuring on our projects pages sooner rather than later...

EPIA MS - First Look

Permalink | mini-link

Nano-Ad in Electric Town
November 14, 2004

Moritz Waldemeyer sent us this photo of an EPIA N advert spotted at Akihabara Metro station in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago. Moritz rather impressively did the technical design, assembly, and programming for a rather natty SMS chandelier designed by Ron Arad for Swarovski, and was in Tokyo to set it up for an exhibition. In Japan nobody uses SMS (people email from their mobiles) so he had to build an email version of the chandelier. Moritz used a humble EPIA 5000 from our store driven by a lean version of Suse Linux. It checks an email account and sends the subject line of any incoming mail to the chandelier (does this mean every other message will be for a genuine Rolex replica?).

Here's a picture showing the controller PC with two of the crystal columns that make up the chandelier.

Permalink | mini-link

VIA add VPN Tools to Padlock Suite
November 11, 2004

VIA have added the VIA Padlock VPN Utility to their Padlock Hardware Security Suite, a growing set of tools optimised for use with recent VIA processors fitted with on-board hardware encryption.

The utility is targetted at networking software developers wishing to combine IP security and VPN technology with the hardware cipher accelerator (Advanced Cryptography Engine) in C5P Nehemiah core VIA processors. The VIA PadLock VPN can be incorporated into an embedded VPN gateway or firewall device to implement a secure site to site link between two networks, or as a client/server system to implement secure access between roaming clients and a network.

Boards fitted with C5P Nehemiah core VIA processors include the EPIA MII 12000, and soon the MS8000E and MS12000, followed by the SP8000E and SP13000 next year and eventually the N5000E, N8000E, and N10000E.

The PadLock VPN Utility is designed to be used with Linux based operating systems supporting kernel 2.6 or higher, and is over at viaarena.com.

Permalink | mini-link

* Back to Mini-ITX.com *