Christmas is upon us once again and inevitably many people will be thinking about what to enjoy on television as they recover from all of that food and drink! So in my last blog post for this year I thought I would experiment with MythStream, a plugin for MythTV which is a multimedia home entertainment system designed for PCs that are connected to your TV and you operate with a remote control rather than the traditional laptop and desktop experience of computing. In my last post the Open University's new podcast website was brought inside Miro, but in this example, information will be extracted from it to integrate it with MythStream and MythTV so you can enjoy the content of the site from your armchair. The OU's podcast site uses a hierarchical navigational structure that made it a bit difficult to import the whole thing into MythStream straight away. Fortunately, MythStream enables you to write your own parsers for external websites, so you can import the same navigational logic, even if it is not supported out of the box.

The OU produces a range of podcasts covering a wide variety of subjects that can be interesting not only to current students but also to people who enjoy more informal learning, or who are maybe just curious about a subject. Up until recently, this treasure trove was sadly locked away in iTunesU and so unavailable to Linux users (as iTunes is not available for Linux). Users of other platforms also had to use iTunesU as well, regardless of how they felt about this software. Fortunately, the OU has put this situation right though the release of a website that makes these podcasts available to all, it can be found at: http://podcasts.open.ac.uk. The website is so new the paint is practically drying on it, but, despite being in beta, it is still capable of delivering a first class experience. It includes a number of ways to easily subscribe to podcasts, including RSS feeds (useful for programs like Amarok), a really great feature though is the sites ability to integrate with Miro, an application which is described as an "internet tv and video player". Miro is free, open source, cross platform and provides the ability to subscribe to, watch and manage video and audio podcast feeds. You can use the OU podcasts site entirely within it, providing a nice integrated experience and leaving you to enjoy the content.

The EEE isn't just for having fun, one of those Es stands for Easy to work. I decided that it was time to go on a road test so I popped the EEE into the glove box of my car and went to meet my good friend Amanda D'Silva. I asked her to have a go on it as she is someone who is very familiar with MS Office(tm) and in her role as a communications manager she often has to put together reports and presentations both in the office and sometimes on the move.